Noclip Player

Ghazal Majidi's MFA Defence
Friday, November 22, 2024 | 10:00 AM
Room 2205 – 149 W. Hastings, St., Vancouver

Noclip Player is a semi-autobiographical experimental video game devised as an elaborate reflection on the artist’s post-migration daydreaming and nostalgia. The player finds themselves in a city turned maze, searching for intimate and surreal dreamscapes. Exploring the oneiric qualities of the liminal space as the uncanny valley of architecture, the city is rendered as a site of daydreaming, predicating heuristic wandering as an activation mechanism. Here the sole mission is to “noclip” out of the status quo reality – to “dream with one’s eyes open”. Exploring liminality and immensity within the poetics of space, the experience recontextualizes the artist’s memories in an interactive lucid dream.

Noclip Player is in dialogue with a second piece – a multi-channel generative video installation titled A Recollection of the Disappeared. The installation highlights the cognitive mechanics of dreaming, thereby exposing its processuality. Here, the unconscious mind recycles the forgotten memories into a generative consolidation network. An EEG device captures the sleeping artist’s brainwaves, using it as the input for the memory network in real time. Bridging the aesthetics of the glitch with the grainy texture of the VHS tape, the system creates a composite of scorching pixels, identifying when dreaming is taking place in the artist’s sleep cycle.

Keywords: 3D animation, avant-garde game, generative video, EEG, liminal space, dream mechanics and aesthetics, nostalgia, wandering