Embedded Files
custom arcade cabinet, virtual environment created in Unreal Engine 5, 73”x32”x32”
Beach House is a culmination of years of ruminating on a solution to dealing with existential ennui. This project stems from a question posed by the protagonist of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Mostly Harmless. When he asks the seer for advice on how to spend his life, the seer answers, telling him to find a beach house, and goes on further to say:
A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind... A beach house does not have to be on the beach, though the best ones are. We all like to congregate at boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side and look at the other.1
This answer is given in the context of the author treating it as a tongue-in-cheek version of advice that appears superficially profound but might just be real estate advice. However, the seer provides the protagonist with an opportunity for introspection. As per this definition, a beach house is a place on the precipice that gives you the ability to stand at the threshold of different worlds. I have taken this advice and rather than finding a beach house I built Beach House. Beach House is an exploration of our ever-bifurcated selves, where the digital and the actual coalesce, and we are confronted with the question of what to do. Beach House is an immersive interactive object taking the form of an arcade game, but not quite qualifying as a videogame because of its lack of a win-state.
Beach House is a liminal space. I made production decisions to explore the boundary conditions of each element. The key liminal relationships of this work are the object/player/viewer, sculpture/audience, virtual/actual space, digital/analog, and Artist/AI.
This work disrupts the traditional relationship between the Art object and the viewer. When a viewer decides to become a player or engage in the play of others, the sculpture expands to encompass those people. They become a participant, and they become part of the work.
The use of Artificial Intelligence in this project is employed to explore the role of AI in my work and increase uncanniness. The design of the island map, the architectural plans of the beach house, and the arcade cabinet itself all have elements that I arrived at using AI. For this project, I primarily used Stable Diffusion automatic1111. This is an image-generation AI that can be run locally. This AI tool added to the project because it gives results that feel both alien and familiar. The island map has the formation of actual volcanic islands without being any particular island. The house architecture uses the language of a house, but the pieces are not put together properly. The main space of the house is open to the outside without a door, some rooms are inaccessible, and some have doors facing outside and away from the main space. After analyzing multiple images produced by Stable Diffusion, I used these as blueprints for the components of Beach House.
Beach House is an expansion of the idea provided by Douglas Adams. It is a space to contemplate and experience boundaries without the threat of winning or losing.
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Adams, Douglas. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 05 : Mostly Harmless. Ballantine Books, 1992. (pg 88)
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