“Software works,” separate from video work categories, are an increasingly important category of exploration when considering queer work and world-building. Gevurah, a multiplayer VR piece, is a machine for exploring Xenogender consciousness;
it’s a mirror.
In Gevurah each player is assigned a fleet of ten swarming robots. The player can call the swarm to them, push the swarm away, and change the characteristics of the swarm's movement. It's similar to being a diver encountering a torus of fish in the deep ocean; users have a limited ability to influence the torus by the diver's movements towards and away from the school.
Architect robots (the long red columns) infinitely construct and destruct the landscape. One column builds lakes. One column builds mountain ranges. One column builds “apartment blocks.” Three of the columns “erase” the work of the other robots. There is no predetermined plan for this city. The robots infinitely build it, and tear it apart; it evolves forever.
In Gevurah, you and your robots form a larger organism, a distributed organism, somewhat similarly to how, at moments, an octopus experiences a more unitary consciousness, and at other moments, the nervous system in its limbs acts more on
its own.
Our identities are entangled and mutually interpenetrative with the beings and objects around us. Our genders, fundamental to our identities, are also similarly entangled. Isn't this what it means to be Xenogender? Aren't we all, to greater or lesser degrees, Xenogender?
In addition to being a multiplayer VR robotics simulator, Gevurah is also a cybernetics poem. Players can log in and interact with complex swarms of virtual robots while hunting for lore (texts) about the virtual world. Gevurah brings together various fields of emerging technology, as well as many poetic ideas about the future of humanity’s relationship to data, algorithms, and robots.
Gevurah contains three poems. The first poem can be found before the player loads into VR in the bottom right hand corner. This text is about about “swarms” in daily life in Oakland California during 2020, e.g. swarms of crows, Covid-19, political gatherings, etc. It was written over the course of a year during the pandemic, as a kind of cybernetics diary.
The second poem and its flashing text can be found on the architecture robots. Periodically, the architecture robots will pause, allowing the player to see the texts. These texts are about robot consciousness and were written out of experiences with interviewing some of the world’s most prominent multi-agent systems scientists.The final text is buried throughout the landscape on the black monuments (boxes). To see it, the player must hunt for the text with their robot swarm; when the swarm turns blue, it means they have sensed the text and they can direct the player to its location. These hidden texts are about the transformation of human consciousness through its engagement with algorithms, and the resulting construction of “a city of information.”Together, these three texts form the “lore” (or literary backbone) of the Gevurah experience.