“Life is rearrangement” wrote novelist William H. Gass in 1973. He was referring the work of Gertrude Stein, whose recursive prose ties readers into repeating cycles of complex meaning, but what he hit upon was a kind of universal truth that both defines and yet extends beyond language: “it is not the appearance of a word that matters but the manner of its reappearance.”
Asemblance is a game that deals exclusively in reappearance. Strip away the clunky premise of a memory machine governed by a rogue AI and its distinct structure leaves you with 3 uncanny interiors that point toward the every looping crises of modernity. Significantly they represent 3 spaces of daily experience, Work, home and a potentially fictionalised space of escape. The player is left to cycle through these tiny environments in search of triggers, objects or structures that are “out-of-place”. Under this focus everything about these tediously everyday spaces becomes imbued with mystery. Like Stein’s ability to turn everyday words into exotic, impregnable objects through repetition and recursion, Asemblance makes a mystery of the most banal spaces.
“It is not the appearance of a word that matters but the manner of its reappearance”
Nowhere is this more effective than in the protagonist’s apartment. It appears almost like an estate agent’s showroom, its cleanliness, its unremarkable furniture and arrangement, even the overtly purposeful traces—coffee spills unwashed laundry—of life, almost invisible in their banality. We are even, part way through the game, shown a map of this space, two rooms linked by a corridor, the entire space revealed in a single image. What mysteries could hide here? And yet this apartment is made strange by the act of looking. As we enter and re-enter it we find conspiracies in the objects on a shelf, the details of a painting. As Stein puts it in her own recursive way: “To come back to the part that the only thing that is different is what is seen when it seems to be being seen.” So, as we do in our lives, we return to these everyday spaces, again and again looking for the reappearances that might make meaning occur.
“Life is rearrangement” wrote novelist William H. Gass in 1973. He was referring the work of Gertrude Stein, whose recursive prose ties readers into repeating cycles of complex meaning, but what he hit upon was a kind of universal truth that both defines and yet extends beyond language: “it is not the appearance of a word that matters but the manner of its reappearance.”
Asemblance is a game that deals exclusively in reappearance. Strip away the clunky premise of a memory machine governed by a rogue AI and its distinct structure leaves you with 3 uncanny interiors that point toward the every looping crises of modernity. Significantly they represent 3 spaces of daily experience, Work, home and a potentially fictionalised space of escape. The player is left to cycle through these tiny environments in search of triggers, objects or structures that are “out-of-place”. Under this focus everything about these tediously everyday spaces becomes imbued with mystery. Like Stein’s ability to turn everyday words into exotic, impregnable objects through repetition and recursion, Asemblance makes a mystery of the most banal spaces.
Nowhere is this more effective than in the protagonist’s apartment. It appears almost like an estate agent’s showroom, its cleanliness, its unremarkable furniture and arrangement, even the overtly purposeful traces—coffee spills unwashed laundry—of life, almost invisible in their banality. We are even, part way through the game, shown a map of this space, two rooms linked by a corridor, the entire space revealed in a single image. What mysteries could hide here? And yet this apartment is made strange by the act of looking. As we enter and re-enter it we find conspiracies in the objects on a shelf, the details of a painting. As Stein puts it in her own recursive way: “To come back to the part that the only thing that is different is what is seen when it seems to be being seen.” So, as we do in our lives, we return to these everyday spaces, again and again looking for the reappearances that might make meaning occur.
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