레이어스 오브 리얼리티: 더 캣 Layers of Reality: The Cat
September – October 2024
ART PLAYS GAMES exhibition
FACT Liverpool
*This work was commissioned by FACT.
Loopntale presents Layers of Reality: The Cat, originally developed in 2018 and now presented as a new version, commissioned by FACT. Interested in the curious ways that human and non-human life forms coexist within urban spaces, this game explores the lives of those living on the fringes of society as they attempt to navigate a city-wide evacuation. Players are invited to play as six characters while escaping from the area. Each character offers new insights and perspectives into the events, helping you piece together what has happened and gain insight into the multiple layers of truth. While each character strives to achieve their own goals, their success or failure is interconnected. Players need to be mindful that the actions of one character will affect their companion species. Loopntale’s multi-level narrative sheds a playful light on the interconnectedness of marginalized beings that exist alongside humans in all urban environments.
*installation image from FACT
CREDITS
Music: Seoyoung Joo
Game design & development: Loopntale (Youngju Kim, Hoyoun Cho)
From 5 September 2024 – 27 April 2025, we’re transforming our first-floor gallery into a space for games created by digital artists and independent video game developers.
Fun, playful and suitable for gamers and non-gamers of all ages, Art Plays Games looks at how artists are increasingly using games as a way to challenge conventional forms of storytelling and offer us new ways to make sense of the world today. Over the exhibition’s run, the artworks and games on display will rotate, introducing something different to discover each time you visit!
The free exhibition opens with works by artists Rachel Maclean, Sahej Rahal, Angela Washko, and Loopntale, alongside iPad and Nintendo Switch console games from independent developers Broken Rules and The Voxel Agents.
Each collection of games invites you to play with some of the most pressing questions we face today: how might game worlds offer us new ways of thinking about whose stories are told and how they are represented? Can we see the world through non-human perspectives or think about the issues of climate change and ecology differently? How will our understanding of being human change as artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies become more dominant?