Open World Firewall responds to and utilise the hyperspeed reality of digital communication where information is shared, reposted, collaged, cut, rearranged through lossy and leaky processes that create fissures in which new semi-fictitious narratives seep through. Through the artist’s transformation and interpretation of the information fed to them from external public collaborators they will create a new virtual space, a distorted mirror image of a world they cannot see.

Open World Firewall is a project by Samuel Capps and Diane Edwards from Gossamer Fog(UK) that will be developed over an intensive 10 day quarantine period in Bergen prior to the Piksel Festival.

For this Q10 project the artists will collaborate with the public to develop a speculative virtual world – using open source tools – which will be displayed via video capture on window display screens and online platforms, growing and transforming each day of the residency. At the end of the quarantine period the project will be finalised and packaged so that Piksel Festival visitors and online audiences can explore the world in a more conventional WSAD controlled computer game.

This amalgamated virtual world and poetic script will be influenced by information gathered from a diverse range of local people and online audiences. The artists ask the public to connect with them and share stories and descriptors – via webform, email, audio recording or handwritten mail posted to the quarantine house – which depict outside wild spaces, objects, lifeforms, landscapes, events, weird and wonderful encounters and experiences with the natural world, where they have positive memories, or spaces they would like to be. These stories should not name the place or object, but rather give a more visual, textural, material, and emotional description. In this way the work would mutate and grow as a form of mediated translation of these shared fragments, enmeshing non-linear narratives and descriptors to arrive at a traversable virtual imaginary of a space we are unable to access and experience.

Contribute to the project via webform here: https://bit.ly/openWorldFirewall
Or email your stories, descriptors, audio files to: openworldfirewall@gmail.com

Open World Firewall will both respond to and utilise the hyperspeed reality of digital communication where information is shared, reposted, collaged, cut, rearranged through lossy and leaky processes that create fissures in which new semi-fictitious narratives seep through. Through the artists own transformation and interpretation of the information fed to them from external public collaborators they will create a new virtual space, a distorted mirror image of a world they cannot see.

Samuel Capps and Diane Edwards have worked collectively and collaboratively on a number of artistic and curatorial projects and exhibitions whilst also co-founding Gossamer Fog in 2016, an organisation that operates as a hybrid artist run gallery and experimental studio in London.

http://www.samuelcapps.com/

https://dianerkedwards.com/

https://www.gossamerfog.com/