1,000 Heads Among the Trees

Visit a quiet town in the Peruvian desert at night searching for spirits and taking photos, then sharing these pictures with locals who free-associate based on them. This game is based on time I spent with a brujo in the desert suburb of Cachiche, a town that was founded by witches during the Peruvian Inquisition. Here descendants of witches still live and continue to practice traditional healing and fortune-telling.

"What works here is that uncertainty space... In a number of places you'll see shadows that don't have a body. And you'll also see people discussing secrets in dark rooms or running past you hurriedly from behind fences. But this only adds to the underlying feeling of something sinister and ominous present, watching you, following you wherever you go..."
Kill Screen

"It's all pleasantly dizzying, like a fever dream."
Baltimore City Paper

FEATURES

• Explore a 3D world with ambient sounds, voices and textures from the Peruvian desert, a living environment at night.
• Use your photography as a means of conversing with non-player characters, revealing what they see as well as what they imagine.
• See yourself as an outsider, lurking in alleys, eavesdropping on conversations, going where you're not supposed to go.
• Watch the forces of tourism at work and the conflicts rumbling beneath the surface of a small town.
• Discover that your camera is not just a passive recorder, but that its act of observation can change the environment.
• Complete progressively more abstract quests and delusional journal entries.
• Export and share your photos.

Selected for the International Indie Den Showcase at Game Happens! in Genova Cornigliano, Italy. Exhibited at Synthetic Zero Event at BronxArtSpace, New York (2015) and the Maryland Artist Registry Juried Exhibition at Maryland Art Place, Baltimore (2016). Also exhibited at solo and 3-person shows in Rockville, MD:  Procedural Experience at VisArts (2017), and In Play, Flow, and Ritual at King Street Gallery (2018), respectively.