Manifold Garden

Manifold Garden is a video game about impossible architecture in imaginary space. This topic refuses immediate categories of explanation, but theoretical models of space are more easily discussed through the video game lens. The game world adds dense visual pleasure as well as the possibility of understanding through participation; two rewards that artist William Chyr offers at the start of the vexing place he begins the conversation.

The architectural forms in Manifold Garden are simultaneously presented as and obscured by alternative models of space. They visually function as a computationally scaled-up version of M.C. Escher’s defiance of 2D and 3D space, but the laws that govern their navigation relate more to the physical cosmology of mathematicians such as Jeffrey R. Weeks. Chyr’s work resolves a three-torus manifold into a space you can inhabit on-screen. Even though the means for negotiating this world, through play or language, may not be immediately available, the struggle through this moment of disorientation is both a game and a reconsideration of space itself.

This series of prints reveals how the interactive space in Manifold Garden functions as a game and as a drawing machine. The artist has selected particular excerpts of the game to generate indeterminate compositions. On screen these compositions are different every time the program is run. As prints they store individual moments of Manifold Garden for prolonged and close consideration; a different vantage point than the ephemeral experience of interacting with the game itself. The individual images that make up this series have been selected through a conversation between Chyr and VGA.

Options:

• Poster: $35 - 18 x 24 inch unframed matte poster

• White Framed Poster: $85 - 18 x 24 inch white framed matte poster (US shipping only)

• Black Framed Poster: $85 - 18 x 24 inch black framed matte poster (US shipping only)

• Unframed Giclee: $150 - 18 x 36 inch unframed premium giclee