A love for reality

A very important aspect of my work for me has nothing to do with games, or stories or any sort of meaning. It’s actually an attempt at expressing a love for reality. Reality how I find it, how I observe it. Not reality as in truth, or How Things Really Are. But the much more modest every day wonders of existence on this planet.

A fleck of dust that flies up when I pass by, the way our hallway smells of wood, the light playing with the leaves of the trees in the park, rain drops sinking into warm stone tiles, a blackbird perched on the highest chimney in the street singing its strangely random tune, the sound of church bells on Sunday morning.

And it’s not even because of the beauty of these things. It’s much more basic. It’s a sort of love, with a touch of grattitude perhaps. That’s what motivates most of my work: to pay homage to reality as it exists, to existence itself, freed from meaning, from purpose. And yes, in my work, I think the love I feel for reality is translated in the attempt to create beauty. But beauty was not the driving force, merely an expression of love.

This is probably why I like realtime 3D so much. It’s the technology that is best equipped to create reality in. Not just how things look, but the events in their entirety, what they feel like, and how things respond to my presence. One of my greatest joys in Bientôt l’été, for instance is to run towards the seagulls standing at the shoreline and make them fly away. It’s such a real thing, such an understandable thing. We know this to be a manifestation of life on earth. If the gulls would not fly away, it would feel weird -or if we would not feel inclined to run towards them, equally so, perhaps.

There’s no message here, no meaning. Just a love for reality.