Written for Among The Machines exhibition catalogue, Zabludowicz Collection, 2022

Episode 1
A trio of jagged rocks line the circular stage set with a sparkling jesmonite surface. Lit from underneath, a circular doughy mattress sits atop another rounded platform reflecting the project in front of it. The bed is the perfect size for a couple of expectant players to feel at home; comfort is paramount to the immersion players' experience in achieving objectivity through subjectivity.

The single tablet is a portal into this metaworld, awaiting a touch to begin transportation. Sliding a finger across the surface creates rippling waves in the computer-generated pool, gridded overlay undulating with the water beneath and mirroring the fluidity and permeability of the real.

The Life Game is formed of three separate game-and-watch chapters following the protagonist ME and their digital twin MI on a journey of discovery through a borderless metaverse. In their eight years of collaborating, Keiken have explored what experience means in the digital realm through a practice that involves world-building as a way to question what reality is. Through interactive films, multi-dimensional games, augmented reality filters and various other CGI creations and experiments with AR, VR, film and performance, Keiken asks us to broaden current approaches to inhabiting the metaverse through more radical gaming environments and with a soft focus on ethereal manifestations of the self and the other. The Life Game encompasses this multi-dimensional technique of game design and game experience: physically set within a platformed arena, Keiken have adopted a holistic practice of building scenarios and experiences to encourage play and intimacy with the work and to subtly transport players into the narrative.

Although the screen does not inherently allow for the translation of our bodies into a virtual environment, Keiken experiment with ways of reaching beyond players’ presence in dual realities, of both the quotidian and the virtual world. Using lighting, seating, props and devices to control the work, players’ bodies can be extended through the use of various/several input devices to allow them to perform through the virtual avatars. These additional physical components are all set within frameworks that foster immersion on a more spiritual level and promote Keiken’s emancipatory practice of world-building. Participating in the work firsthand affords the player access to the principle of conscious life, one that mediates between body and soul.

In episode one, we meet ME and their digital twin MI.

Glass skin matches latex outfit, matches shiny landscape, matches glossy surroundings; everything is illuminated, everything is reflective. This is ME, pronounced ‘me’, who has found themselves in an overbearing routine of information-age bombardment and requests for time and labour. ME is lonely and wants physical connection again, instead of communicating inside their head. They download a screen extension that records their data to help them separate their online and onsite lives.

A cell-like shape morphs from one into two, and from two into one. in the left-hand side of the screen. An upgrade on the extension means that we soon encounter a twin, their digital copy, who is every bit the same but somehow different; shorter in stature and more animated in her gestures. This is MI, pronounced ‘my’, who is now a human-shaped representative of ME’s data trail. Every behaviour, every gesture, every thought, culminated into a digital version. “They just really understand me, I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend like this before”, ME exclaims excitedly.

Thoughtful actions are implicit in the hybridity of the human-centered interaction within the avatarian landscape; this subtle connection to the digital through live interactional moments becomes paramount in understanding the relationship the protagonist has to their digital self, and the dependency they have on their screens and other self-centred technologies. The animistic nature of such becomes clear with player attention and focus on the live experience as it unfolds; the blurring of ME and MI at the beginning is intentional and creates an opening for players to understand how their own reliance on skeuomorphic interfaces reach a shared common language with their digital counterparts. Self-representation in the digital world in this way is alive and animated, bodiless but not dis-embodied entirely.

Episode 2

In episode two we witness ME and MI navigating a new decentralised system in the metaverse; their relationship somewhat fraught, ME and MI traverse separate paths in their quest for clarity and understanding of each other and themselves.

The camera pans around to a solemn face with tired, bulging eyes, and porous skin. Confusion spreads across a furrowed brow, a sense of overwhelm flashes across them. “Hold me I want to feel alive,” she whispers over and over again.
Longing for physical touch, ME and MI try to reach each other. Faces blurring in and out of focus across pop-ups that are waiting to be dragged across the screen. But it’s not enough, ME has become too detached and wants out.

With our collective future in the metaverse comes a proclamation of the way things are - we are longing for safe digital public spaces, equilibrium, organic structures, sensory technology, nuanced communication, shared mixed reality, purpose; but what we have is shame, screen suffering, traumatised cultures, a capitalist lobotomy, reward and punishment, and endless dopamine loops.

For Keiken, entering their Metaverse is an attempt to resist corporate-capital models of the future of the internet, something not too dissimilar from the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace manifested by John Perry Barlow in 1996. The main argument in this short, but powerful statement is that cyberspace is a separate, global place without the physical boundaries that define and give power, and should therefore remain naturally immune to sovereignty. For Barlow, "cyberspace is something that happens independently of the physical world in exactly the same way as the mind and body”[1]; for Keiken, the metaverse is a process of dis-embodying and re-embodying, an internal consciousness transported in a spiritual act not tied to tangibility, but malleable and open to embracing otherness and transformation.

Exiting the cloud and entering ALL - a decentralised reflection technology for nuanced and collective experiences - a pull-shaped therapist-cum-uber transports ME to a self-sovereign world with a glittering, endless sea.

The decentralisation of the self, transactions of exchange, and a new form of currency based on ideas of wisdom, love, and spirituality is a profoundly transcendent approach toward new ways of existing in Keiken’s metaverse. However, it is one that is opposite to Mark Zuckerberg’s propositions for Meta. While Keiken speak of a radical form of currency and exchange of ‘value’ in their metaverse - one based on sharing ancestry knowledge, history and memories to explore multiple consciousnesses and dreams - Zuckerberg places commerce at the heart of his. Keiken’s metaverse is about an internally sustainable form of exchange, while Meta’s is a closed platform that is sustained through, and exists as a continual hollowing out for the purpose of, extraction. Speaking on identity and avatars, he states that now the goal is to integrate all of these disparate spaces (game worlds, social media, chat software) and create technologies that can allow a person to seamlessly go between all of their different online identities in a way that feels natural.[2]

In Meta’s transition of assets between software comes a different kind of economy, one that’s more abstract than buying, selling and owning in the real world, but still, one that is rooted in capitalist culture. Virtual clothing, for example, is an economy that’s becoming bigger the more people invest their time in virtual environments. According to Zuckerberg, there’s a want for the same way to express and dress your avatar as there is to dress your physical body. The issue at the moment stands with allowing these digital assets to cross over to multiple other software. This creative commerce will be a big part of the Meta metaverse, “because if the digital goods you buy aren’t just dedicated to one platform or use-case they end up being more valuable, which in turn means that people are more likely to invest in them, spurring this economy to grow exponentially”.[3] But where does this leave a metaverse that’s decentralized and open for any interpretation and use if it inherently relies on monetary transactions for goods, upgrades, and access to create a hybrid form of human-to-computer existence?

Kaleidoscopic and glittering, this reality is depicted as a series of games - casino-like and addictive, with bright colours whirling around and destabilising perception of time and location. S>>W>>I>>P>>E the portal beckons, so you swipe, pulling the trigger on the same game as ME. Faces pop up on the tablet portal and in ME’s surroundings, a selection of three with a score attached; the player enters a feedback loop, a neverending cycle of play-and-watch-play-and-watch innately tying them to the narrative.

In social media environments today, artificial intelligence bots moderate content and accounts that they might deem to be malicious, harmful, promoting disinformation, or are used to troll, bully, and intimidate users. This effort at sustaining community integrity is criticised by some for being open and penetrable by those who know how to hack the system, or by advertisers who know how to bend the rules via loopholes and dark patterns. Multi-national technology companies that promote communication and connection to their users are increasingly under scrutiny for not providing levels of care that are in favour of their users. In a 2021 interview, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, discussed a now-dissolved Facebook program called Civic Integrity, intended to curb misinformation.[4] Amongst other accusations, Haugen states that Zuckerberg has failed to show he can protect the public from the negative effects of his networks. She saw conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook with the leaked documents showing a “disparity between the company's internal research and its public statements on the societal impact of its products”[5]. Ultimately, company capital gains were assumed more important than the health and wellbeing of their user. Will any attempt at moderation be as viable in the metaverse where there may be an infinite number of spaces and zones for people to inhabit?

Episode 3

Wanting access to memories lost and forgotten, ME transforms into their avatars MA and MX who traverse the ways in which present moments stretch and portals open to an unconsenting mirage of dreams. Vaseline smeared in the viewport. Dream Time Life Simulation is a technology created by MA that allows for access to hidden memories, forgotten and untold pasts.

In episode three we watch as ME transforms into avatars MA and MX who create liberating technologies to use in the metaverse to connect with their ancestral entities. The Ancestor Tool they construct is able to listen to ancestral whispers internally, intimately connecting the avatars to their harbingers of wisdom.

Exploring The Life Game as a player, it becomes clear that narrative is at the basis of Keiken’s metaverse. With two human-shaped characters, the protagonist and the other actors navigate real-world-situated messages of energy, conflict, reality and dreams, and simulations. Within this test-drive of the potential for an alternative metaverse comes the gamification of life, but also the lifification of gaming. Players follow and invest in avatars that perhaps live parallel lives to themselves in chapter one, and advance through the metaworld to find inner sanctuary through their multiple consciousnesses and links to their ancestral wisdom - they return ‘home’. What does this blurring of life and gamification do to the way we live our lives online and offline?

This way of performing to rethink is reminiscent of Cassie Thornton’s Hologram, a feminist centred project that promotes a viral, peer-to-peer health network. Drawing on radical models developed in the Greek solidarity clinics during a decade of crisis, the premise of the hologram initiates regular meetups between a ‘triangle’ of participants. The triangle focus on the physical, mental and social health of a fourth - the 'hologram'. In turn, The Hologram teaches the caregivers how to both offer and accept care; “each member of their triangle becomes a hologram for another, different triangle, and so the system expands”.6 This expansion of the self via other, elected members, is similar to the way in which the player of The Life Game helps to uncover the hidden but within reach others of ME. Like The Hologram, The Life Game relies on parafiction, or fiction presented as fact to the players. It exists both as a rumour about the possibility of a new metaworld, as well as a device for introspection on the multifaceted nature of the human/avatar condition.

Floating in the bluest water, a glass-like womb that extends from MA contains multiple consciousnesses of ME. A familiar face from the slot machine appears in the corner and guides MX through an understanding that their body holds many perspectives and experiences, this reality unfolding when they have the knowledge and want to unlock it. This new reality in the metaverse pierces the membrane of everything we know.

The Life Game is one of many outcomes of Keiken’s practice that expand their creation of a metaworld. Everything in it can be linked back to previous works - memories, relic heads, and frameworks borrowed from other Keiken works - expanding the idea of their Metaverse and their worldbuilding approach. Each of the different protagonists in the three chapters, ME, MI, MA and MX, form a network akin to P2P.

Unlike more corporatised client/server models of information sharing across computers, a pure peer-to-peer network is inherently decentralised by the nature of the way it operates. All people, or ‘nodes’, within the group act as equal as a result of there being no dedicated server for information to pass through before reaching them; each node within the network, therefore, serves as both a client and a server, making use of the resources while simultaneously providing resources to others. Using P2P network architecture as a tool to rethink how memories, experiences, and understanding are both coagulated and disbanded in the metaverse could expand Keiken’s method for embracing otherness and transformation where “nothing is fixed.” Within this framework, notions of labour, care, shared goals, and accountability are also forefronted through the partitioning of tasks, workloads and accountabilities between nodes. Here, nodes are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application.7 Viewing the transfer of the self in the metaverse as a horizontal structure, where information is stacked circularly and outside of a centralised model, the environment for consent is one that is governed by setting sharing permissions on individuals. The metaverse may offer us many possibilities in discovering and projecting our being, material or immaterial existence, but it is something that needs care, optimism and openness to the speculative nature of future thinking, as well as a shared vision of development outside of a monetised corporate model of capitalism. The movement of individual mental and physical attributes towards a digitised space needs collective intention.

References:
[1] A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. [online] Electronic Frontier Foundation. Available at: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. [Accessed 28 Feb. 2022].
[2] Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse, (2022). 26 Feb. Available at: https://lexfridman.com/mark-zuckerberg/ [Accessed 28 Feb. 2022].
[3] Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse, (2022). 26 Feb. Available at: https://lexfridman.com/mark-zuckerberg/ [Accessed 28 Feb. 2022].
[4] Pelley, Scott (October 4, 2021). "Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation". CBS News. Retrieved March 10, 2022.
[5]Albergotti, Reed (October 26, 2021) “Frances Haugen took thousands of Facebook documents: This is how she did it”. The Washington Post. Retrieved March 10, 2022.
[6] Thornton, C. (2020). The hologram : feminist, peer-to-peer health for a post-pandemic future. London: Pluto Press.7 Cope, James (2002-04-08). "What's a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Network?". Computerworld. Retrieved 13 March 2022.


All images: Keiken, The Life Game, still from episode one Viral Energy, 2021