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FUTURE LITERATURE CONTENT

NARRATOR

FUTURE ILLUSION LAB

Principles: Dream, Hallucination, Simulation

ZONE 18

You have entered the Future Illusion Lab.

Here nothing is as it seems; all appearances deceive you, and all emblems play games with meaning. Scrolls, gargoyles, lost files that speak to unfathomable beings. You are assaulted from every angle by chimeras that leave you unsure of whether you actually exist in this place (or anywhere else). Fabrications reign here; those wishing to be real do not last long.

You encounter a woman who writes in puzzles. She stands against the wall in a large black overcoat, and from her eyes emanate the figments of a conjurer. She is the Wise One. She shows no mercy toward authentic structures. She prizes only what causes bewilderment. She troubles the air of seeing, naming, and knowing. She is the master of the unlikely and the disbelieving.

The Wise One gives you the following clue below.

Read and choose your future wisely afterward.

Image: David Spriggs, Ideologies (2014)

FUTURE ILLUSION FRAGMENT

In walking simulators and dungeon games, the map of the world emerges with each step. We can never see the entire map because the world’s cartographic representation is made through walking, its edges unfolding with each chance step. Poets and writers have long written of the ways an ambulatory practice develops ideas, the ways a psychogeographic landscape, unfolding, holds and helps threads of thinking unfold. Each new insight is an anchor, a stake in the landscape, the fertile grounds of the mind...How might we focus more on our own internal map-maker’s colors, their palette? An ambulatory practice, becomes a practice of semantic mapping. The environment forms the drama of the psyche, especially as links between cognitive development and movement in space to create a sense of space and time, are made more evident. Take up each choice of tone, each choice to look away or delve in, each step, each next narrative entry, as the drama of the wandering mind, creating a system of representation. The map blooms at our feet, with each step, each turn, each dip and rise.

Example: Famed walking simulator Dear Esther (2012), in which the protagonist walks all over an island in the Scottish Hebrides.

Post_004: Each Step Creates The Territory

by Nora N. Khan

Image: Screenshot, Dear Esther (2012)

[Designer: The Chinese Room]

CHOOSE FUTURE

You have read the clue of the

Future Illusion Lab.

The Wise One is trapping you in valleys of perplexity. You must escape her art of false chasms or risk dissolving into something beyond even fiction.

She offers you two guides, the first a liar from the ancient world and the second a liar from the forthcoming world.

WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE?

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