Mo’s Universe
Some of All The Delicate Duplicates’s most widespread screenshots suggest a dark, industrial, possibly even science fictional landscape littered with glittering rivers and text-wrapped objects. This is a world with no hideous alien lifeforms to shoot, no enemy base to infiltrate, no particular mission to accomplish. When the story begins, you are landed here – alone, in the middle of this place, with little instruction or explanation. A gigantic structure on the horizon shrouded by a mysterious red fog draws the eye, but whether you decide to head towards it or divert elsewhere is up to you.
Welcome to Mo’s Universe: an open-ended landscape that manifests as one of the character’s fully-rendered psychological states. This state mirrors Mo’s obsession with the transient nature of reality: a state that will go out of its way to remove you as quickly as possible – back to the familiar safe-state you believe to be the truth.
Text has always formed a visceral part of our collaborative work. The Dead Tower (2012) sees the bright white hope of poetic 3D text – often in motion – bringing much-needed life to a dark virtual landscape riddled with discarded household junk beneath the shadow of a mysterious structure; #CARNIVAST (2013) weaves intricate webs of encoded language into a matrix of touch-responsive code-poetry experiences delivered as an Android app; and #PRISOM throws out text-based moral dilemmas within a bleak futuristic glass city/gameworld endlessly patrolled by all-seeing drones, not dissimilar to the ‘Context Scrubbers’ that roam Mo’s Universe, keen to erase you out of it.
Everywhere you look, click, touch, there is the brightness of text – of language – often mangled and encrypted, as if it were the X-ray bones beneath the illusion of the physical.
Text within All The Delicate Duplicates exists as a form of fabric. Fabrications. Strings, ribbons, loops and splines. Glimpsing, knotted, complex and part-encoded; continuously subject to transformation, mutation. Sponges or pockets of trapped, short-lived, incubated, forgotten/unperceived messages.