Game sketch: ‘Walking Simulator’ is a playful insult given to a game which signals to other users that it has, at its core, a particular kind of tedious or autotelic nature—the purpose for moving throughout the virtual environment is for the purpose of movement throughout a virtual environment. Notes on TV Nova, 1989 was made for the same effect, a journal entry in the form of a game-less game, created while researching the speechless elements of both the protests and communist normalization efforts during the months leading up to the 1989 Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic. It is not a complete, discrete piece, but rather a way to work through the problem of remembering historical events and material in virtual environments. Within “Notes on TV Nova, 1989,” a video and its score serve as a the user’s auditory lodestar, looming high above the user in the virtual city’s central square and audible at the farthest reaches of the map. The video was created by mining rips of the Czech TV Nova archive from the months preceding the archive’s missing December tapes, shortly after the Velvet Revolution and national rejection of a state-run campaign of communist normalization. The introductions and credit sequences—the TV program’s equivalent of marginalia—are excised from their context and laid bare in a forever repeating sequence. Within the game, we hear these TV bumpers calling from the town square as navigate the virtual city’s roads, avenues and squares, juxtaposed with pockets of the spatialized archival sounds of demonstrations that took place in and around Wenceslas Square as the TV programs would have been airing.
_Video Demonstration ‘gameplay’ [view]
_Video Demonstration of Environment Scope & Scale [view]
_In-game Screening [view]
_Exhibition one-sheet [view]