This Is Not a Game

Title: This Is NOT a Game：Creative Habitat/这不是一个游戏：创意栖息地

Version:1.V2.2

Medium: VR GameArt

Year: April 2022-2024

“This is Not a Game: Creative Habitat” is an interactive VR GameArt installation in which the artist constructs a ritualistic simulation centered on creative generation and the illusion of subjectivity. Audiences are invited to enter a cybernetic jungle from a first-person perspective, scattered with symbolic tools that reference the history of human creation. These tools serve both as echoes of civilization’s milestones and as behavioral triggers induced by the mechanisms of the work. Beneath the guise of “free exploration,” participants are gradually guided to collect these objects into a continuously loading “Inspiration Trigger.” The shape of the trigger is derived from the shell in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, translated in the digital realm into a suspended algorithmic container that carries a pre-scripted narrative for the generation of a “new subject.”

Upon completing the collection, the “ultimate creative” program is activated, and the participant is abruptly “seized” by a mechanical claw, their view rapidly ascending, revealing that the space they inhabit is actually a post-human system-controlled claw machine, with themselves as merely one of the props. Through virtual reality and game language, the artist performs a structural intervention, creating a nested reflexive space to explore the paradoxical position of the “self” within algorithmic power and control systems.

Installation view:

//Images below: This Is Not A Game_1.1.1 VR @ Yuan Art Museum, Chongqing, China, 2023; and This Is NOT a Game：Creative Habitat @ solo exhibition @ Taikang Space, Beijing, China, 2023(click here to read more about the exhibition)