.Compost Cooperative (Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton)
(Portland, OR)
The Alembic Hotel
Access: PICA's Resource Room is on the first floor of the building and accessible to those with mobility aids. ADA Wheelchair accessible bathrooms are on site. Learn more about access at TBA:26 here.
DESCRIPTION
The Alembic Hotel is a first-person adventure game about information overload, radicalization, and trying to find a semblance of spirituality in the ruins of the internet. In it, you explore a lo-fi recreation of architect John C. Portman’s Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel, an iconic 80s Brutalist Atrium Hotel, wherein you meet a range of denizens vying for information supremacy to invent a language to speak to god. Part virtual/spatial/linguistic poem, part love note to inscrutable game design of a bygone era, The Alembic Hotel grapples with the specter of artificial general intelligence and damage to the social fabric wrought by social media.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
.Compost Cooperative takes the tossed-out leftovers from digital culture and breaks them down to grow a more lush, virtual landscape. In the ease of mass consumption and the gold rush for the supposedly infinite space provided by the internet, much of our digital infrastructure and the tools used to make it go disconcertingly unexamined. We believe that through cultivating a biome of thoughtful appropriation, re-design, humor, and the surreal, we can begin to glimpse a microcosm of new possibilities and the recipe to get there. Together we make websites, video games, educational materials, and a range of other media that playfully percolate on our ever-decaying/blossoming digital world.
.Compost Cooperative is Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zan Kerrigan, and Carly Barton. Our work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Design in Portland, ME, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, OR, and the Utkal University of Culture in Odisha, India.