Choose Your Own Adventure solo exhibition at the artLab, Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI). May-July 2015.
“Beware and Warning! This book is different from other books. You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story."
So begins every issue of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” game-book series, popular during the 1980’s and a source of inspiration for this installation. The CYOA series used the conventions of text-based video games of the time...games like Zork, Oregon Trail, and Mystery Mansion. Written in the second person, readers were directly inserted into the narrative and asked to make decisions that altered the story as well as the final outcome. As a fan of this series, I could occupy different roles in a variety of adventures---sleuth, mountain climber, world traveler, spy. Flipping back and forth through the book, I made critical decisions that radically altered my reading experience into something physical and non-linear (“If you pick up the phone and take Mr. Hata’s message first, turn to page 79. If you hide in the bathroom and wait for Mr. Hata to return, turn to page 83.”). The book became a kind of low tech game controller.
Choose Your Own Adventure at the artLab space (Krasl Art Center) featured three interactive components. A video projection most directly referenced the CYOA book series. Participants occupied the role of Kryzzik, a Goblin Mage who lives on the Emerald Dream server of the MMOG World of Warcraft. By pushing the buttons on each of the “power gem” controllers, players sent Kryzzik on different adventures in the game….some epic, some perplexing (fishing?), some funny.
The human-scale Kryzzik sculpture, digitally “ripped” (or extracted) from World of Warcraft, is a polygon-by-polygon recreation of the digital version of the character into physical space (albeit a low resolution version). The extracted 3D model was flattened into a paper-folding pattern (using Pepakura Designer), built from paper, filled with expanding foam, and covered in an epoxy putty. Much like the flipping back-and-forth action in the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Kryzzik asserts her physicality in both real and virtual space.
Finally, the piece “This Is A Wondrous Item” turns a comforting, everyday, functional object--a quilt--into something otherworldly and magical. Wondrous Items in the RPG (role playing game) Dungeons & Dragons game environment are a miscellaneous category of objects that gives the player special powers and protections. I imagine the quilt as a type of shield, giving the user +1 spirit, +1 stamina, +1 strength.
