Artists Statement

OPEN SOURCE AND SOFTWARE AS CULTURE

fluID is a multi-user computer game about identities. You can discover your identity, change it, steal or borrow another person’s identity, destroy identities or create new ones from scratch.

What is an identity? It is the idea that single parts of yourself belong together. It is the idea that your past, your present and your future all belong to one single owner, called: YOU.

Do cities have identities as well? Mathias Fuchs and Sylvia Eckermann, developers of fluID believe that cities have fluid identities. They relocate Gilles Deleuze’s question “what is the identity of a particular city, a person, a face?” into an artistic context, which is a gaming context as well. As users, participants are able to explore the changing identities of Tallinn, Helsinki and other cities, through a virtual cityscape.

The fluid game puts you into a terrain of identities where you start as a perfect nobody. You have no face, no name, no clothes, no sex, not a single thing to differentiate you from other players.

So now ‘s your chance! Try to be someone!

• Mathias Fuchs (AT/UK) & Sylvia Eckermann (AT) have been working in the field of creative games since 1998. Their other games include femCity, a game for girls; EXPOSITUR, produced for Kiasma, Helsinki; and PLAN-IT!, a multisensory environment created for the Millennium Dome, London.

Full document (PDF) p. 46