Products

Now City

"Very hip, very now." Now City is a transmedia gaming experience of a smart, sustainable city that survives the apocalypse. It is also a real city, now.

Yrevocnu's orientation towards exhaustion on a planetary scale is proactive. It aims to lay the foundation for a new smart and sustainable city, and with it a smart, sustainable culture. A response to temporary Black Rock City of Burning Man, which burns out every year, we envision a distributed city that exists across physical, virtual, and augmented realities.

Our program is one of speculative design through transmedia fictions. By "telling the story" of Yrevocnu in live performance, VR, podcasts, graphics novels, music, and other forms, we provide an immersive environment for participants to imagine and enact the future city, and in particular needs and challenges of its education system.

Psychedelic Glass Bead Game

"Should we be mindful of dreams?" Joseph asked. "Can we interpret them?" The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: "We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything."
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

The Psychedelic Glass Bead Game (PGBG) is based on the game central to the plot of Herman Hesse's final novel, Glass Bead Game. The novel describes a fictional country, Castalia, in which academics live a spartan life of dedicated study. The most popular sport of Castalia is a game called the Glass Bead Game. Originally a musical notation system that used glass beads, the system evolved into a game, and the game evolved for drawing out and inferring previously unknown connections concepts and events. The game was scored on the beauty of the end result along many aesthetic metrics. It became, in essence, a metaphor for the whole of reality.

The object of PGBG is to collaboratively tell a story. However, instead of using beads, we use Tarot cards. Tarot, is a card based divination system in which a single deck provides enough in the way of characters and plot twists to tell any story. Through Tarot, we are able to play the Glass Bead Game, to avoid confusion with the book, we call it PGBG.

The game itself is an evolving system, thus far each round has been an iteration on the last.