A while ago, fans of the 3D artist and game developer known as Strangethink felt a disturbance in the Force. Strangethink had stopped tweeting and releasing new games. Worse yet, all of the developer’s released games disappeared from the internet (including the acclaimed Abstract Ritual).
We all breathed a collective sigh of relief when Strangethink recently rematerialized on the scene. All of the dev’s tweets from before the absence have been deleted, and none of the old games are back online (yet), but Strangethink did not return empty-handed.
Mystery Tapes is an audio-visual experience that encourages you to participate in the creation of three-dimensional voidscapes and implores you to find your own meaning in them.
You start out standing in a gray nothingness, with heaps of VHS videocassettes strewn in front of you (640 of them, to be precise). Arranged around them are a trio of VCR-equipped television sets, one at each corner of an imaginary triangle.
You can walk and jump through the piles of tapes, scattering them about and generally making a mess. You can browse the tapes, pick them up and read their labels. Each title appears to be randomly generated, but as with a Rorschach test, you’ll find your brain teasing out some meaning in them.
If a name your fancy, you can go put the tape into one of the TV/VCRs and see what’s on it. Ah, but these are no ordinary devices; they project the tape’s contents in 3D onto the void around you. Abstract patterns and swathes of color coalesce and divide, pulsing to the music that envelops you.
Select another tape and insert it into another VCR. The colors and shapes around you transform as this recording weaves its own optical and aural contributions into the glitchscape you’ve created. Grab a third tape and play it. The new sounds and visions are layered into your world.
Now is your chance to experiment. Eject a tape, stripping its contents from the world, and insert a new one. See how it changes things. Try different combinations. Try a completely new set of 3. Enjoy creating art with Strangethink.
As you look upon your wonders and change your vantage point to see new patterns, you may notice a white sphere somewhere in the folds of color. Approach it and you will see that it contains a humanoid being. It speaks to you in half-intelligible sentences that seem to hold some obscure meaning. As with the names and the abstract contents of the videocassettes, the sphere-being’s words seem to be directed at your subconscious, inspiring emotions and sparking associations that might surprise you.
At first, I tried to find hints of a coherent narrative spread across the tapes and elucidated by the being’s words, but I soon abandoned that folly. I stopped trying to interpret it all and just let the experience engulf me. It began to feel like a new, radical kind of therapy. So, how does it make YOU feel?
You can name your own price for Mystery Tapes, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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