Nina Kock

Major Project: Something that has nothing to do with nature

My project has been a way of testing out the possibility of a hyperstition as a writing practice. In brief, a hyperstition is a combination of theory and fiction — a fiction that makes itself real, or a theory that appears fictional, a world that appears normal but is suffused with fictional currents: hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, intuitions, time travels. However, it is not just a mixture of theory and fiction — the key is the transformation and the process: signs, changes, an intensifying blurring of reality and fiction.

From the outset, I knew that I wanted my project to be about the desert and its unreal qualities, but I wasn’t sure how. Besides the desert, I was also interested in computer-generation and cyberworlds and it seemed obvious to link these two things and read, or render, the desert as an artificial, computer-like surface.

My project is an attempt to convey the computer game world to the ‘desert world’: to render and to try to understand the desert surface by means of computer game language and 3D animation — and also, by means of the hyperstitional method, to convey its mystical, unreal quality.

In 3D animation, everything springs from the same layer, which is not really a layer, but rather a shadow-like coloration wrapped around empty space. There is no actual matter, just a large, animated void, showing itself through different modalities or behaviours. This is my sensation of the desert: a ‘full void’, a transparency infused with a volume — a strange mix of immanence and transcendence, something withdrawn and inaccessible but insistent and present as well. The idea is not to use the computer game landscape as an allegory for the desert, but to evoke a fictional merging of the landscapes. 

My project is based on a field trip to the Mojave Desert in January 2015, where I visited a desert research facility belonging to the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles.