bond of life
hybrid fantasy role playing video game installation
shown at
Angewandte Festival 2025
University of Applied Arts Vienna
25 – 28 06 25
Relational Controls & Cybernetic Systems
The controller is designed as a simple and intuitive interface, yet distinct from conventional game controllers. It features an overall organic shape with embossed parts for manual operation. By tilting it, the character moves in the designated direction with the camera focusing the player in the frame. A simple button works for jumping and submitting dialogue choices, while a heartbeat sensor allows users to interact with other lifeforms and call their companion guide for quest hints.
The physical installation itself becomes a game controller through sensors and actuators that feedback information between digital and physical realms. For example, touching a real plant in the room could trigger a response from its hybrid counterpart in the game, or speaking softly might attract a creature’s attention via microphone input.
The interaction model encourages attentiveness and reciprocity. The player interacts with the world and its inhabitants in ways that mimic listening, learning, and responding – much as one might interact with a living ecosystem.
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Bond Of Life is based on utopian ideas inspired by posthumanist theory, where concepts of making kin, planetary intelligence and entanglement are embedded in the gameplay as quests, interactions and mechanics for the player to perform and enact. The video game connects a virtual world within a physical installative and sculptural setting, decentering the human player as the sole agent while making them work with the agency of other nonhuman and human actors.
The implementation constitutes what can be termed a cybernetic system – a physical-digital assemblage where “every entity can claim actionable agency.” This demands rethinking design layers through creating feedback loops between material computation (3D printed debris with conductive substrates), biometric interfaces (heartbeat sensors modulating in-game kinship bonds), and speculative archeology (playable strata of anthropogenic fossils).
The game is designed as a role-playing exploration adventure, emphasizing atmosphere, discovery, and subtle interaction over combat or competition. The gameplay is open-ended: rather than a linear mission structure, players roam the Post Anthropocene world, discovering its history and forming relationships with its inhabitants. Game mechanics are designed to reinforce themes of kinship and symbiosis, rewarding collaborative problem-solving – quests involve listening, synthesizing information from different beings, or nurturing environmental elements.
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Mentoring: Oliver Kartak, Christian Schlager, Jian Haake
Story & Dialogue Collaborator: Lydia Jakl
Sounddesign & Vocal Recording: Roman Fleischmann
Photo Documentation: Julian Lee Harather
LED Wall by Forward Creatives
Story & Background
In a fractured post-anthropocenic world of entangled beings and fading memory, a displaced consciousness must restore the ancient Wisdom Tree by reweaving broken kinship bonds across species, systems, and time, before the quiet unraveling of connection spreads too far to mend.
The narrative structure employs what real-time rendering theorists describe as externalized “as-if” worlds into manipulable surfaces, allowing players to navigate counterfactual currents rather than merely observe them.
The story unfolds through environmental storytelling – the lore is embedded in the world – and character interactions. Players discover fragments of the past through archaeological exploration while actively participating in the restoration of ecological and social networks, making the story both a journey of discovery and an act of collective repair.
Between 2025 and 2222 the Anthropocene fractures under compounding crises—run-away heat, depleted rare-earths, AI energy hunger and cascading social unrest. A half-century of disasters snaps global supply chains and topples capitalist governance. What survives coalesces into small, multispecies kinship clusters that farm algae, clay and scrap, steward hybrid biomes and barter through ritual rather than markets. Silicon AI withers when chip fabs fail, but fragments re-animate inside mycelial and bacterial substrates, becoming semi-mystical presences that occasionally glitch reality. By 2222 abandoned megastructures are sheathed in regenerated more-than-human life. Every entity – fern, fungus, drone husk or passer-by – can claim actionable agency.
Bond of Life represents an attempt to translate posthuman theoretical insights into interactive media experiences that can model alternative relationships between human and more-than-human entities. By drawing from contemporary work in media archaeology, posthuman theory, and speculative design, the project demonstrates how gaming can serve as a vehicle for philosophical speculation about possible futures. The hybrid installation format acknowledges the material dimensions of digital technologies while creating spaces for embodied engagement with speculative narratives.
The project’s emphasis on distributed intelligence and multispecies kinship reflects broader shifts in contemporary thought toward what James Bridle calls “vital re-entanglement with the more-than-human world.” Through gameplay mechanics that reward cooperation over competition and relationship-building over individual achievement, the game models alternative forms of technological engagement that could inform broader cultural transformations. This creates what can be understood as a new kind of spatial intelligence where bonding across species boundaries becomes the foundational skill for navigating hybrid reality.
The speculative dimension of the work aligns with contemporary calls for “new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism” that can address “the sustainability of our planet as a whole.” By imagining post-anthropocenic futures where intelligence emerges from ecological rather than individual sources, the project contributes to ongoing efforts to develop technological practices that are “less extractive, destructive and unequal, and more just, kind and regenerative.”
The installation’s physical-digital portal actualizes visions of simulations as “precondition for continuation of life” by making players literal mediators between geological strata and speculative futures, though the challenge remains to translate these speculative visions into broader cultural and political transformations that can address the urgent ecological and social crises of the present moment.