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“All the signals collapse into noise, a sub-primordial chaos entity will arrive.”

Ccru, Channel Zero

“Hauntology [is] the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing […] how reverberant events in the psyche become revenants […] The second sense of hauntology refers to that which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behavior).”

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life

“We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.”

Werner Herzon, The Minnesota Declaration

ÖK(^)B is the acronym of Operation Kata-tropical (Aural) Bloom, a game with elegiac tones that whispers forgotten stories via haunted an-architectures, an immersive landscape that prototypes art by grafting it within entropic digital frameworks, storing traces of collective life, and allowing artworks manipulations.

ÖK(^)B is a (serious) game, a digital archive, an exhibition, and an artwork. Beginning in the deep future, in the year 26777, the gameplay experience is centred on the forgotten architecture of the historical St. Joseph’s Institution, allowing players to navigate the site as an apparition reclaimed by natural forces. This space also functions as a digital archive of architectural and oral histories, documenting foundational elements of material and immaterial culture. As an exhibition, the virtual space hosts artworks that challenge institutional ownership of these cultural artifacts.

As an artwork in its own right, ÖK(^)B is a para-fictional descent into lost pasts, speculative futures, and alternative realities. Occupied by architectural fragments and immersive sonic events, hallucinated identities and spectral whispers, this meta-artwork engages with historical facts and traumas through possible worlds and digitally decaying objects.

ÖK(^)B is a media project by formAxioms developed for Singapore Art Museum and launched in 2024

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ÖK(^)B tests alternative modes of displaying and manipulating (digital) art. It is neither the replica of an art gallery nor it is completely devoid of connection to one, it moves away from solipsistic fictional constructs emptied of physicality as it embeds at its core St. Joseph Institution’s architectural features, remnants captured and 3D scanned in 2023, utilised as the landscape’s centre of gravity.

ÖK(^)B avoids trivial translations of physical-to-digital, it is a prototype for accessing and experiencing (digital) exhibitions as forms of material creations: by linking in a non-linear manner physical presence and digital assets, by speculatively employing artists’ work making them interactive and allowing them to transform the meta-space in which they are found and played with, by allowing archival functions and personalised inventories, and by deploying a meta-physical (as in almost physical) ever-changing entropic framework. It is a game transforming due several drives unfolding in time(s), due to real-time environmental conditions and by the traces left by the players.

Digital matter is physical matter at ÖK(^)B

ÖK(^)B is a framework for future art-collections to be plugged in, although in-itself if functions as both a framework and an artwork. It is an artwork designed as a meta-level, a place with a para-fictional history, a forest and the remnants of a singular architecture. As an artwork it is an experiential descent, a tropical katabasis into lost past-futures, hallucinated identities, quirky presences and alternative realities, immersive sonic events, spectral whispers and archeological fragments, traces dealing with facts and traumas, the scars of colonial times,  (...) but also a journey through geomancers’ advices for how to deal with ghosts, fragmentary myths, ontological entities such as lemurs and unicorns –possible worlds and subsisting objects, depending on which reality you are in.

ÖK(^)B is an artwork and an archive, a gate that holds at its centre St. Joseph Institution, or what remains of it given that the game begins in the deep future, in the year 26777. It is an artwork holding at its core a spectral presence where different art exhibitions are deployed.

ÖK(^)B keeps changing. Throughout the game witness the presence of real-time and past explorers, be careful with time, as entropy will eat up matter transforming the navigation in an immersive experience of fragmented glittering lights and drone sonic bases… leaving you with nothing but a figureless experience. In such a case, restart the game. The orders of time(s) and the increasing disorder of matter:

-The forest is alive and every time one enters it there’s a different atmosphere, as real time data is translated into parameters affecting the environment.

-Every time the experience starts from the beginning, the forest, but with the additional information left by other users: their past and live movements.

-Every gameplay stores the totems generated by each user, ruins scattered in the forest are discoverable through exploration.

-Every experience has a countdown, from the year 26777 to 2023, after which the experience starts losing consistency –an entropic function builds up to a point of leaving the explorers immersed in drone sounds and glittering lights.

-Space is never the same as certain assets change status once visited. Go back to normal status after the visit ends.

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PLAY

[ * ]

Here, below, briefly outlined are the components-levels of the game and how to go through it:

[ I ]

What is an identity in the Digital? First, create a golem - an abstract gestation of a fictional persona, a data-driven chimaera. Craft the character by choosing 5 values: macro <>micro | particles <> field | empathy | mood | binary <> non-binary | super ego <> ID

Choose how to belong to a process by answering the abstract questionnaire –talk about your-self without having to be specific. Keep in mind: for society to have an identity is a trademark to be someone, but the self always escapes the rules of subject that “thinks and says”. Create an abstract avatar or, if you wish, try to keep being attached to certain anthropomorphic features… simply let go and be a process, or to succumb to the need of being a mask?

[ II ]

Begin a journey through layers of textures, landing in a forest where whispering voices welcome with fragments of buried stories. Explore the deep-future of year 26777, a future where sounds and esoteric symbols carry forward the past of different times, a future strangely connected to the present of Singapore as physical past and real time factors are read and affect the landscape in real-time.

[ III ]

Get ghost-blooms and aural whispers guiding the exploration, enjoy the forest or catch the guiding light, hear the spirit sound to be guided to the core, to find SAM and initiate a journey through history and through art. Walk in the magical realism of a forest conceptualised through hyperstition, hauntology and xenosonics, where an alien order of time produces appearances that are out of the ordinary; mixing general folklore, ghosts, and a sacred lemur, appearing and blurring the boundary between myth, (pre-)colonial facts and alluring superstitions, where the idea-of-nature is far deeper than the idealised and uniform one presented by the Books of History.

[ IV ]

You are free to get lost in the forest, but by following the guiding light, SAM building’s remnants from a distant past are visible. Upon finding SAM, wander around freely to discover the collectibles (fragments of the past, sounds, etc.) and store them in a personal inventory (downloadable from the website with your ID and the generated passcode).

[ V ]

Nature<>Culture: within SAM, each navigation remove layers of forest in order to discover the artwork –weird…to discover culture one must remove nature. Check the marker to see the amount of deforestation. Are you hungry for culture hun? Well you’ll have to pay for it and trade carefully as your moves will be recorded.

[ VI ]

Explorers could decide to go and see the artwork unmediated, get lost in the level’s exploration, or alternatively perform an archeological survey. In total there are 3 modes: 2 are explorative (Deep Time and Linear Time) and one is archival-archaeological (Outside Time).

[ VII ]

Try finding the artworks by switching between the 2 modes of exploration, Linear-Time and Deep-Time. Understand the artists’ artworks in Linear mode or switch to Deep mode to use the artworks to generate level’s mutations. The exhibition component of the game at this stage [Chapter Zero], includes 2 artists’ work, which are contained and scattered within SAM. Explore the premises and you may discover work by: Hings Lim and Juan Covelli. With future iterations different sets of artists will be featured.

DECAY AND MUTATION: “In history and in nature, decay is the laboratory of life”Marx. In Deep-Time mode fragments are found by wandering around. When one is discovered, the user can decide to initialise level mutation. Level’s genetic mutation takes the artist's works (one or all assets) and transforms the base level adding to it or modifying it.

[ VIII ]

Look around and see past explorers and live ones. Look at the excitement of yourself as your spherical presence deforms pointing to the closest artwork. Remember that you can switch between 3rd and 1st perspective, and that you can enter Meditation-Mode (which removes UI).

[ IX ]

Activate Outside-Time (archeological mode) to be guided through 9 nodes, each of them presenting the history and architecture of the building. The archeological journey begins by a simple storyline that shows SAM’s transformation, different moments from 1867 to today. After the first journey the explorer is brought to experience a series of specific events that reveal the traces and traumas of the past. Archeological fragments are placed in self-standing environments, each a temporal wormhole: travel through time by moving from block to block. In the last node you are brought (directly) to a secret space that exists in a different temporal dimension: this mode is the fastest way to reach the Meta-Room (also accessible through hidden passages in Linear-Time and Deep-Time modes).

[ X ]

Thus, keep in mind that 3 modes of navigation are possible and at all times exchangeable. All three lead directly or indirectly to the same ending: to complete the game one must find a metaphysical room, a fictional addition to Singapore Art Museum’s architecture where one is able to craft, after solving a riddle, a unique and enigmatic object.

[ XI ]

Use the game or be used by it, be guided by the desire to learn or simply get lost as a wandering soul haunted by a multiplicity of pasts. Find the metaphysical room before leaving-quitting the game –or exit as you please knowing that each return generates a new identity of yourself, another present… and several futures.

[ XII ]

Find the METAPHYSICAL ROOM for TOTEMIC HYPERSTITION [MAKING HISTORY].  Before entropy takes over, “solve and coagula” (solve the riddle first and cast a spell) to craft a unique totem made of architectural colonial samples, a totem that will be stored in the game as a ruin, leaving a permanent mark to the digital place. All ruins will accumulate in the forest to indicate the existence of past players to newcomers, and all of them are unique objects downloadable and printable.

SOLVE: Understand the riddle to enter the room. Or walk back to the forest.

What is the 2938th prime number, or alternatively, what is the initial date stated at the beginning of this game?

COAGULA: After solving the riddle the door unlocks, a crypt is revealed for you to cast a spell to craft a unique totem - a blend of colonial architectural assets. Special spells forge special totems, design the text, find one of the 11 magic words to achieve elegiac levels, remember:

“To call up a demon you must learn [...or perform] its name.”  

Gibson, Neuromancer

[ XIII ]

Upon generation such an object is placed in the primary forest, the character instead realises that the room is paradoxically in fact the whole game… a spatio-temporal motion that brings the character to shrink, to be embedded once again in the forest, however not the original one but a similar yet parallel space-time, one in which SAM never existed. In such reality, only alternative archeological assets are deployed, with unicorns and fictional biological entities populating the space – opposite to the forest of the beginning, where only lemurs existed. The loop is closed, a torsion is performed so for the character to be liberated from the linear sense of security of history, Remember:

“Man goes round in circles because the structure, the structure of man, is toric”...“The world is toric”

Jaques Lacan, Seminar XXIV, 14th December 1976

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SHARE A STORY

ÖK(^)B IS A SERIOUS GAME THAT ATTEMPTS AT MAKING A COLLECTIVE ARCHIVE.

Any player could upload a text, a story, a trace. Such data is stored online but not associated with the player and not made available/accessible to other players immediately. Such fragments are stored in a separated folder, revised by the curatorial team and embedded in the game at later stages.

Do share with us rumours and stories about ghosts, traces and traumas of Singapore’s past.

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COLLECT ITEMS - CREATE AN INVENTORY

Whilst exploring each user collects and generates fragments which become part of a downloadable inventory. Look at your inventory and note down your ID and PASSCODE generated at the beginning of the game.

1-BASE ASSETS COLLECTED BY DEFAULT

_SAM drone scan

_LIbretto

_Character’s skin

_Logo ÖK(^)B

2-ASSETS COLLECTIBLES IF ENCOUNTERED

_Spectral Sounds as Texts

_Textures

_Artists’ Assets

_Mini Lidar Scans

_Lemur Snapshot + Text

3-SPECIAL UNIQUE ASSET, COLLECTED WHEN GENERATED (after solving the riddle and casting the spell)

_Totem + Texture

4-SPECIAL ASSETS UNIQUE GENERATED UPON QUITTING

_Deforestation Map

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ÖK(^)B is a media project by formAxioms

ÖK(^)B is an artwork, a (serious) game and a digital archive developed for

Singapore Art Museum and launched in 2024

ÖK(^)B [Chapter Zero] includes artworks by: Hings Lim, Juan Covelli

CREDITS:

Creative Director (conceptual framework and choreography): Federico Ruberto

Writer: Federico Ruberto

Producer: SAM - Singapore Art Museum

Executive Producer: Duncan Bass

Director of Photography: Eva Castro

Backend Engineer and Game Infrastructure: Chen Shihang Jacob

Game Logics Developers: Song Youngbin, Corentin Derbré

Artworks Creative Manipulation: Daryl Ho, Nicholas Lim

Visual Effects Supervisors: Chen Shihang Jacob, Federico Ruberto and Eva Castro

Visual Effects Developers: Song Youngbin, Corentin Derbré, Daryl Ho, Nicholas Lim

Editors: Heong Kheng Boon, Wang Liang En

Special 3D Assets: William Sklog

ML texture generation: Heong Kheng Boon

Soundscapes Composer: William Sklog

Spectral Fragments: collected, edited and curated by Joshua Comaroff

Spectral Fragments audio translations and editing: Heong Kheng Boon

Voice Actors for Spectral Fragments : Phua Kai Jie, Valent Tan, Ian Chung, Peter David, Khystelle Yeo, Mridula Thekkedath, Sarah Tuke, Heong Kheng Boon

Graphic Design (logo and UI): Currency Design

Locations: St. Joseph Institution was 3D scanned at location with Faro Technologies

Artists’ work included in [Chapter Zero]: Hings Lim, Juan Covelli

Special text associated to Lemur discovery: “The poverty of Experience” by Rodrigo Gonsalves

ÖK(^)B is a project developed in Unreal Engine 5

Scripted, produced and developed in Singapore in 2023, by formAxioms at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Conceptualised at HotHouse.

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