With a major exhibition, two software releases, two keynote presentations, a new prestigious full time job, a flattering award, new 3D printers and musical instruments, and travels to exotic places, 2018 seems like a glamorous spectacle of a year. And yet there was a certain serenity to it, a certain calm, a soberness. Perhaps because all of it happened against a backdrop of a world that insists on destroying itself, or maybe simply because one of us turned 50 and became a cranky old man.
Song of Songs in 2018
an overview by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn
January is the last month of our five month art residency in the Academia Belgica in Rome. We start the new year among the celebrating crowds on the streets of Rome. And we proceed by visiting and revisiting many many lovely churches and museums in that wonderful city. We see the impressive Bernini show at Galleria Borghese. We celebrate our wedding anniversary in Villa Farnesina. And we make a day trip to Napoli to see the amazing antique sculptures in the archaeological museum again. When Michaël's children visit we take them on a 14 km walk through the city that had become so familiar to us.
Michaël has two more viola da gamba lessons with Silvia de Maria and purchases a second hand instrument in Firenze to continue his new passion.
On our last day, which happened to be the anniversary of us meeting 19 years earlier, in cyberspace, we revisit the marvelous Capitolini museums. Then we pack our computers, VR equipment, 3D printer, guitars and all our stuff back into our tiny Fiat Panda, taking special care of lavishly wrapping the sensitive viola da gamba which would have to travel north on top of the car since it is too big to fit inside.
Our stay in Rome has made a lasting impression and has filled us with inspiration and creative desire for many years to come.
When we arrive home, Michaël is sick as a dog. But he survives the unexpected cold of Belgium. So did the viola da gamba. He finds a teacher in Ghent in Dirk Moelants and continues studying.
It is time for Auriea to prepare her new full time job at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel. But first she gives a presentation to her former students at Parson's Paris. We also give an online presentation to the Game Play class of Snow Yunxue Fu at the Art Institute of Chicago .
Our work is shown at A Decade of Game Design in the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
And we start the recovery of The Endless Forest data from old and broken file servers in order to continue the remake of our first release in Unreal Engine.
As Michaël continues his study of the viola da gamba and rents a smaller scale viol for his painful fingers, Auriea's second 3D printer arrives, the Prusa I3MK3 with which she will spend many happy hours printing and exasperatedly tinkering.
Michaël meets with architecture student Joris van Arkel who unwittingly, indirectly introduces him to Object Oriented Ontology. Auriea stops off in Frankfurt on her way back from a meeting in Kassel and catches the big Rubens exhibition on her first visit to the Städel Museum. And she is compltely enchanted by the sculptures of Medardo Rosso at the MSK in Ghent. She begins a series of works of her own.
We rearrange our work area for the big VR project that will become Cricoterie.
Half of April is spent in Kassel, where we AirBNB an apartment as Auriea starts her new job and the new department of Games at the Kunsthochschule. We want to try out how it would feel to live in Kassel in case we decide to move there permanently. Michaël even finds a viol teacher there in Laura Frey. But the city does not appeal to us and at the end of our stay we more or less decide to move to Rome. At some point.
Through the school, Auriea gets a Surface laptop which turns out to be a great machine.
We prepare our journey to Asia and Australia with vaccinations and a meeting with the parents of a friend who were so kind to let us stay in their Melbourne apartment.
Sunset is featured in the International Festival of Animated Film in Stuttgart and Bientôt l'été in 101 in Saint-Petersburg.
Auriea travels to Kassel alone for the week but comes back home over the weekend anyway. It's a five hour drive! In the car pictured above, on the Autobahn. She decides commuting isn't as difficult as staying in Kassel.
Michaël works on a game for an exhibition in the Museum of Sex in New York.
Auriea gives Michaël a new iPad and Pencil for his upcoming 50th birthday.
Michaël cuts his hair short after months of trying to have long hair.
On 16 May we leave for what will become the most significant journey of the year. Not so much because of its destination, Melbourne, but because of the stops in between: Bangkok and Singapore. It will be Michaël's first time in Asia and the Southern Hemisphere, and Auriea's too since the visit to Japan in her teenage years. In the sweltering cities Bangkok and Singapore we are especially enamoured with the temples (Buddhist in the former, Hindu, Muslim and different flavors of Buddhist in the latter) and traditional art in general. The culture and also the life style make a deep impression to a large extent because they feel so familiar, dispelling any vague notions we might have had about culture clashes.
In Melbourne, Fall had started. And Michaël gets sick during a panel in the ACMI building. Luckily he recovers for the keynote presentation at the Freeplay conference where we talk about how we came to videogames, how we left, how we feel about tech corporations ruling the world and how we deal with that in Virtual Reality.
Auriea enjoys the concert of H.E.R. at the gorgeous Forum Theater. (and hopes she wins all the Grammys she's nominated for!)
Ever the eager student, Michaël travels slightly outside of the city for a viola da gamba lesson with Laura Vaughan.
Luxuria Superbia is shown in Dizzy Spell in Denver and Bodies in Pittsburgh.
Right after we arrive back home, we meet up with Jarryd Huntley and with old net.friend Neil Jenkins in our home town.
Then Auriea leaves again to go work in Kassel. She is finding things challenging building up her class from nothing. She begins the class Instagram.
On 4 June the NEoN Festival people complete the funding of the Second Decade of The Endless Forest. Which motivates us tremendously.
Michaël has his father's old violin repaired for his 75th birthday and practices playing Happy Birthday on the instrument.
We research 360 degree video for a trailer for Cricoterie.
We do a rare Abiognesis performance in The Endless Forest for a show in the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.
At the begining of the year, Michaël had made the New Year's resolution to put a sincere effort into appreciating contemporary art. So mid June we travel to Basel to see the famous contemporary art fair. After this Michaël's admits his defeat and puts an early end to the resolution.
After another stay in Kassel, Auriea takes Michaël to Paris for his 50th birthday on 28 June. We just hang out in the Louvre all the time. Almost.
Another birthday present awaits: maestro Karel Dedain has finished the guitar Michaël had ordered a year before. Weighing less than 900 grams, the beautiful copy of a 1885 Vicente Arias made with spruce and cypress is the lightest guitar the luthier ever built. But what a sound!
We rearrange our workspace again to create the maximum space for roomscale VR.
We finish a preview of Cricoterie and send it to our coproducers in Poland. Later this month Antoni Burzynski visits us in Ghent with a video crew to interview us for culture.pl.
It's the end of the semester and the Kunsthochschule in Kassel gets extra busy for Auriea with the socalled Rundgang, a sort of party where students show their work to the world.
We give a guest lecture at the Cologne Gamelab about why we stopped making games and what we are doing now.
Auriea models a head for a new viola da gamba that Michaël had ordered from Matthew Farley, who was willing to experiment with a concept of a 3D printed ornament on the peg box of the instrument that could be replaced.
We add the floor of Phase One to The Endless Forest.
Belgian Summer gets very hot and we install two extra ventilators.
August is mostly dedicated to an intensive course Italian at the university in town. For three weeks we go to school every day in preparation for our move to Rome some day.
We work on a realtime logo for Cricoterie that combines the importance of failure in the piece with the attraction of Virtual Reality as a technology spectacle.
Gerry De Mol composes music for Cricoterie.
September is a super-month with two major events.
On 5 September the ambitious Videogames exhibitions opens in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London with a prominent presentation of our 2008 release The Graveyard. We are present at the opening and at the press event. And we also use the occasion to visit the sublime Wallace Collection and the National Gallery.
Back home we finish a build of Cricoterie that will be part of a limited edition for the occasion of the premiere. But before we leave for Poland, we have a small gathering in our home to present the project to friends and family (and secretly playtest it).
On the 19th we go to Krakow first, to pick up the custom-made viol at Matthew Farley's studio, and then we travel to our destination Warsaw. In Warsaw we give a bunch of radio interviews on the eve of the grand premiere. On 22 September, Cricoterie is presented to the public in Teatr Studio in the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. It's a small theater with three VR installations for the audience and a giant projection screen. There's talks, panels, snacks and music. We couldn't be more pleased! Shortly after the premiere we participate in the Digital Cultures conference.
Right after our stay in Poland, Cricoterie is shown at the Vienna Design Week, sadly without us.
Michaël continues his weekly guitar lessons with Luciano Massa at the Ghent Academy after an interruption of a year due to our stay in Rome.
We take our hobbies seriously! In October, after many months of indecision, Auriea's third 3D printer arrives: the FormLabs Form 2.
And we take our jobs seriously too: as the new school semester begins, Auriea signs a contract for a permanent apartment in Kassel. And she starts tasking German lessons.
Cricoterie is published as a free download on Itch.io.
We add Emotions and Activities to the remake of The Endless Forest.
On the 19th we travel to Paris for Indiecade. On the 20th we give a keynote presentation about the problem with problems and the difficulty of not making a game with computers. In the evening of that day, we are awarded with the Trailblazer Award given to us by Pietro Righi Riva after a heart warming speech about our contribution to video games.
In the wake of her new job, Auriea closes her Patreon, referring her followers to her unemployed husband's Patreon for further intimate access to the goings-on at Tale of Tales/Song of Songs.
We add most trees and plants of Phase One to the remake of The Endless Forest.
On the 8th we travel to Dundee, Scotland, where the current version of The Endless Forest is featured in the Lifespans exhibition of the NEoN Digital Art Festival. The next day we participate in a mini-symposium at the Dundee V&A where we talk about the making and remaking of the game. On our way back, we get stranded in Edinburgh airport due to overbooking and when we arrive the next day, Auriea immediately hops into the car to drive to her job in Kassel.
In Kassel, the first ever exhibition of Auriea's 3D prints happens at the Dokfest festival. She also gives a well attended performance lecture, playing some of Tale of Tales games on a giant screen at Bali Cinema Hauptbahnhof
Auriea meets up with Carolien Nevejan in Amsterdam on the occasion of her new post in city planning, and discusses The Endless Forest in the context of creating peaceful communities.
Back home our hallway floods because of a broken pipe.
More details are added to make make Phase One of the Endless Forest almost complete in Unreal Engine and just before Christmas we release a pre-alpha build that connects to a dedicated server so players can see each other. The game is still quite buggy and far from complete. But this is a major milestone because this type of multiplayer is uncharacteristically tedious to set up in Unreal Engine.
Auriea decorates her little apartment room in Kassel real nice and teaches the last classes of the year at the Kunsthochschule.
Michaël publishes a book that consists of all the things he didn't tweet this year.
Auriea's job at the Kunsthochschule will continue in 2019. So will our devotion to our passions for digital sculpting and analog music. But we are also planning another exhibition of Cricoterie, hope to finish the remake of The Endless Forest, finally release something related to Cathedral-in-the-Clouds. And if all goes well, move to Rome. Please follow our adventures on Instagram, Tumblr and the good old World Wide Web.
2018 was the year in which Michaël's son Marcel graduated as a Master of Science in Computer Science Engineering, promptly got himself a job and moved into his own apartment with his girlfriend, and in which his daughter Martha turned 21, returned from studying in Oslo and travelled to Abu Dhabi and Tokyo with her boyfriend during her Master year in art college.
The movie about our life in 2018 would be utterly boring because it would just be one high after another. But at the end of it all we are left with a hunger that is difficult to pin down, let alone represent in film. A hunger for it all to mean something in a larger context. A desire for such a context. Everything is falling apart. Culture seems to be slipping through our fingers and yet we've never visited such great exhibitions and attended such wonderful concerts. But an evil force is on the rise while an economic model is spinning out of control and we can't seem to change our ways even though we know it will cause our environment to collapse. We're speeding towards a cataclysmic disaster and the only question that remains is whether nature will hit us before war does.
And yet we are calm. Happy even. Perhaps because it is out of our hands now. Perhaps because there is so much beauty in the world, so many beautiful people, beautiful culture, so much creative potential. We have so many ideas for beautiful art works and we are so busy with exciting projects. We might be getting older, and slowing down as hobbies become more important than professions. But we're filled with passion, and desire, and hunger. Eyes burning and palms itching. 2019? Bring it on!
—Michaël & Auriea, 31 December 2018.