404: Reality Not Found – Gameplay

Enter the game 🎮 https://tan-tan.art/404 This piece seeks to highlight narrative structures as a transformative substitute for conventional “conceptual” foundations in contemporary fine art settings. The text-based RPG allows participants to delve into the artist’s body of work, encouraging personal interpretation and engagement with each piece. The shift from observer to player heightens the sense of personal autonomy, increasing the intimacy of the artistic encounter. Placed within the context of historic architecture and artwork, this piece draws inspiration from a longstanding artistic tradition. The idea of transposing the audience into an enclosed, illusionary visual space was not born with the invention of the computer. Instead, it is grounded in a solid art historical tradition whose core idea reaches back to antiquity. It’s this tradition that has been revived and expanded in the immersive digital art of the current age, that “this kind of immersive reality excludes the sensation of being alienated by the image and surrounds the observer in an illusory setting where time and space are one.” The ultimate effect of this piece is to bring out a sense of emotional presence or mood intended to elicit a dimension of human experience that would have been referred to as ‘religious’ for a long period of human history during which the aim of the artists and architects striving for such a union of arts would have been precisely the evocation of such a response. However, it diverges from this religious context, venturing into something new, something we might call “transcendental secularism,” where the sacred is replaced with the profound, offering a novel, immersive and personal experience. Three-dimensionally embodied, online virtual worlds offer considerable scope for narratives, including fully-fledged practices of “gesamtkunstwerk” or “total work of art”. The aim of this work is to create a unity of effect within a (albeit virtually) physical environment that invites the participation of the viewer as a consolidated whole.