Static Sky: And Yet It █████
About
Rhett Tsai, Allfather Productions (Justin Bortnick) Experimental video game, 2024 “Static Sky: And Yet It █████” (██落在夜空生成以前) is an experimental video game that imagines a future ruled by AI-generated world models, driven by fear and resistance to artificial intelligence. In this future, everything is generated by AI: reality is redefined, homes are reshaped, and symbols are reassigned new meanings. In this world, the protagonist wears an RV (Real Virtuality) headset, a device claimed to reveal “reality” within the AI-generated “virtual.” The work presents the protagonist’s conscious experience at the moment they put on the RV headset. During that instant, the seemingly real traces revealed by the RV headset trigger their mental breakdown and fear of reality. By depicting this collapse of meaning and identity driven by reality itself, “Static Sky: And Yet It █████” explores a possible future of extreme artificial intelligence, where the protagonist’s psychological symptoms are a speculative model for the broader human cognition of the future. This project is supported by the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh.