Catalogue > At random

The project deals with one of the first text-based adventure games in computer game history. Colossal Cave Adventure was developed by Will Crowther in 1976 and is based on the spatial presence of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Crowther’s game completely avoids a visual representation of the cave – instead, text input and text response shape the cave in the player’s individual perception. The AI-based animated film is approximately 55 minutes long. The camera constantly moves downwards, digging through geological layers and exposing new cave spaces again and again. Every eight seconds, the AI system receives a new textual description. These descriptions are taken from Crowther’s source code from Colossal Cave Adventure in 1976, which contains a total of 379 inputs ranging from narrative descriptions of nature, to jargon from the vocabulary of speleologists, to single words meaning an object, a compass direction, or an exclamation.

Thomas Hawranke and Lasse Scherffig are two interdisciplinary artists collaborating at the fringes of art, technology, and science. Rooted in media archeology, animation, and computational art, their most recent work employs generative AI systems to question their aesthetic and epistemic foundations. They have previously collaborated within the artist group Paidia Institute and have exhibited and published internationally.