LC 71 NY DZ 13 DW, Doug Wheeler (2013)
Yesterday I was deeply hungover after riffing at bars with my pal Fergus, so I took a 40-minute walk out to Copenhagen Contemporary .
Aftershock, James Turrell (2021)
The exhibits on show at the time were very focussed on space, light, a sense of deep physicality and of being within unnatural spaces (standing in a colour void, trying not to cough and as such ruin the sense of immersion for everyone else present). It was a great wee trip out, but almost as much as the works on show I was drawn so much to the construction of the spaces -between- the works.
I think about these spaces because they are so nakedly constructed as framing devices for the works ahead - to build anticipation and set the stage for what you're about to percieve. They are plaster walls and undecorated floorboards to be built up and torn down, real-world greyboxes with the same strange sense of scale being "wrong" that you'd get in an amateur Source map.
This stairwell mostly just had big Mirror's Edge energy.
I did also pop into the Kunsthal Charlottenborg later, when my phone had died after burning power on Gundam podcasts. It was a much more traditional gallery space, but with sharp divides between blacked-out video rooms and stark white halls. They had a room with NFTs that I couldn't tell was Pro- or Anti-.
Maybe it's the small part of my brain that still wonders where life would have gone if I went full art student back in the day. But while level design conversations often fuss around pacing and introducing mechanics, I strongly also feel like space and light are a part of the designer's toolset, not just environment artists down the line. It's why I struggle to "purely" greybox (or orangebox, as Source so often may be).
Mood is a mechanic. Light is a tool, for setting the tone or guiding a player. A flatly lit set of cubes might get your playtesters accustomed to the raw, mechanical experience of progressing through your space, but games don't exist on a raw, mechanical level. You want your space to stick in their minds. You want your space to make people feel grounded, or awe-struck, or terrified, or oppressed, or.... anything but forgettable? Galleries have been doing this forever, modern art or otherwise, and I've a lot of lessons to take back from CC next time I fire up Hammer.
... that, or I'm just a hungover game designer thinking too much about some pretty lights she saw in a warehouse.
