the Fold: episode I

"the Fold: episode I & II" is a non-linear interactive film and virtual reality-based art game involving rooms with doors containing a concept folding into other rooms with doors. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' short story 'The Garden of Forking Paths', this VR-based 'escape the room' project highlights the similarities and differences of technics as it relates to Western (episode I) and Eastern (episode II) philosophy including structuralist & surrealist literature, sentient bodies, metaphysics, mathematics, the virtual object, Buddhism, Zen principles, Qi (氣), and problematizes the affirmation of technics, its outputs and technologies as anthropologically universal within the frame of VR, AI, 3D animation, and video games. To date, the project involves an array of these rooms: episode I: the Doors, the Fold, the Grid, the Meridies, the Cave episode II: the Great Buddha, the Rock Garden (T-shape), the Pocket Mazes, the Rock Garden (Infinite Marc+grittes), the Islands of Smoke & MIrrors, the Shrine of Balancers, the Temple of Ascension liminal spaces: Agent άλφα, Agent Qi/氣 bosses: Neolibus: late-capitalist monster, Zhongli Butterflies