Digital Culture – 12 projects selected

Offworld Odyssey – Geert Nellen

Offworld Odyssey is a game set in 2128. Earth is almost uninhabitable. The player plays as 16-year-old Zeb or 52-year-old Maja who are assigned to each other to embark on a space mission to find a new habitable planet. The player is given options for potential planets, all of which have unique properties: they are hot, cold, have plenty of iron or water, have a limited lifespan, time goes faster or slower, there is a lot of wind or instead a lot of sun. By means of spatial portals, the player can combine the specific properties of planets with each other, which will help in putting together a new planet. Along the way, the player runs into exciting situations and will have to be smart about the opportunities that arise. The idea for the game was born from the desire to develop an adventurous and narrative game with its own identity, rich in innovative gameplay and surprising interactions. Game designer Geert Nellen wants Offworld Odyssey to offer players an exhilarating experience that encourages reflection on social problems and inspires them to do the right thing. Nellen is working on a ‘vertical slice’ with the subsidy from the Digital Culture grant scheme. This playable demo shows a representative piece of the final game experience, which he intends to use to approach and convince publishers to fund further development.

Prosodia - Nicoline van Harskamp
With the project Prosodia, Nicoline van Harskamp is building on an earlier research project, Voix Blanche, to study the prosody (intonation, pitch, rhythm, etc.) of AI-generated speech. Prosodia is a theatre production in which disembodied characters, generated live by text-to-speech devices, together with human characters (three actresses) reflect on the technologies behind their abilities. Their speech evolves into musical forms, supported by a traditional string instrumentalist. The use of relatively simple technologies – three different synthetic speech-generating systems each connected to a loudspeaker – makes performance possible in both smaller and larger contexts. So far, performances are planned in Amsterdam, Athens and Berlin. Besides being a scripted performative work that can be staged in the theatre or shown as video in an exhibition, Prosodia is a tool that will appear on a dedicated website. The tool introduces users to old prosodic forms. These are sound and rhythm patterns that were used in poetry or spoken language to give structure and musicality, and remain largely unnoticed today in both human and synthetic speech.

Love you long time - Dries Verhoeven
Love you long time is a video installation that questions the moral, emotional and colonial dimensions of cybersex. Through a visual and substantive exploration of the phenomenon, Dries Verhoeven examines the handling of intimacy in techno-capitalism, both from the perspective of the user and that of the online sex workers, with whom he is collaborating. The work manifests itself as an old-fashioned porn cinema, where visitors sit in booths and ‘pay per view’. The project compares how adult content was distributed in the 1970s and 1980s with today’s world of cybersex. Verhoeven is working with two Colombian cybersex workers. They are coming to the Netherlands to sing about the shift from analogue (skin-to-skin) to digital contact in a temporary porn cinema. Presentation will take place in Amsterdam and Utrecht, and in each city the cinema will be open eight hours a day for a month. The aim is to encourage viewers to think about sexual experience and intimacy now, and in the near future. The work is being realised in collaboration with IMPAKT Festival Utrecht and IDFA Amsterdam. For ticket sales, there is a collaboration with Frascati Amsterdam and Stadsschouwburg Utrecht.