[ISEA2023] Artist Talk: Vincent Thornhill, Guillemette Legrand & Isaac Clarke — Spectral Plain: a case study for exploring the world-building potential of co-creative systems that combine text generation models with game mechanics

Artist Statement

Theme Immersion(s) Subtheme Symbiotic Imaginaries

A presentation of the game installation Spectral Plain; an interactive artwork that intersects algorithmic, sensing, and gaming technologies to explore new forms of generative and co-creative world-building processes that seek to simulate multiscalar and pluralistic imaginations of the planet.

  • Vincent Thornhill is a designer; artistic researcher at KU Leuven / LUCA School of Arts, Belgium; and educator at the Design Academy Eindhoven, NL. Their practice questions humanistic readings of digital image infrastructure, with a focus on image processing algorithms.
  • Guillemette Legrand is an artist and designer affiliated with the research group Reflective Interaction of the EnsadLab (École des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France). Their practice engages with machine-fictioning and worlding techniques to simulate other possible imaginations of computational logic and the visual culture that emerge from it.
  • Isaac Clarke is a fictional character in the survival horror media franchise Dead Space, owned and published by Electronic Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Clarke