‘The Outlands’ is a virtual reality environment that allows the viewer to explore a series of imaginary landscapes using customized control sticks. Built with the Unreal game engine the work has four levels where viewers are free to take their time to look around and explore without fear of assassination.
Visitors are invited to take control and conduct their own voyage through an immersive digital world of forests, islands, and futuristic interior architecture. Clasping the tree branches that sit atop a console table, the viewer navigates through each zone, encountering portals into the other worlds configured within the work. While appearing to be a video game, what are startlingly absent are weapons, bodies and aggression. The logic of killing and winning that structures gaming no longer exists, and is replaced with the process of moving through each digital environment and at times suddenly being transported into an adjacent world. Exploratory voyaging becomes the subject of ‘The outlands’ and a close attention to the digital environments portrayed within it.