Joseph Pleass

So this game is a chat room...

...except you don't get to pick who you're talking to.

You write a message, put it in a bottle, and throw it out to sea.

It washes up for someone else, somewhere else, at some point.

Maybe they write back. Maybe it takes days.

I wanted something online that was slow on purpose,

where talking to a stranger felt like a small event again.

Everyone on it so far seems to be very nice

and very Spanish.

This is an ambient visualiser I made for Oklou...

...it's built out of the album cover for choke enough.

The track loops against the world clock, in real time,

so whenever you open it, you're dropped in wherever the song is right now.

The only thing that reacts to the music is the stereo's LCD panel, which I made from scratch.

If you grew up in the 90s you'll know these panels...

...the mini hi-fi systems with the bouncing graphic EQ bars,

the spinning CD icons, the little flames on BASS BOOST.

They were mostly there to look expensive.

Every one of them had a DEMO mode,

so in the hi-fi shop a whole wall of stereos would sit there with no music playing,

scrolling their own names and flashing features at you.

3D SURROUND. MEGA BASS. HELLO.

It was basically a stereo performing being a stereo.

I wanted the panel here to have that same shop-floor energy,

just with an actual album playing through it for once.

So this is a game I made with Ben West

It's a (not so) idle game about harvesting corn...

...and unlocking tracks from the Peter Talisman album.

It takes about 40mins to complete and you should definitely play it.

It's a lot more interesting than any of these boring websites.

Control the Virus was a year-long online exhibition,

a new artwork was uploaded once a month.

We had to create an exciting space that still had stuff happening...

...even when there was only one out of the twelve artists unlocked.

This is how I ended up with this 3D space that you could fly around.

Bird migration is the regular seasonal movement

often north and south along a flyway

between breeding and wintering grounds

Migration carries high costs in predation and mortality,

including from hunting by humans

and is driven primarily by availability of food

It occurs mainly in the northern hemisphere

where birds are funnelled on to specific routes by natural barriers

such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Caribbean Sea

This is a video game about euthanasia and re-imagining the dying process.

In the game, you're aboard a speculative cruise ship that offers assisted dying...

inside of this idyllic paradisiacal setting.

You're aboard this ship with a loved one who has chosen to end their life,

and you spend their last few days together discussing the process.

I wrote my thesis on this idea

as a way of exploring the political and cultural structures

that shape the way we die.

The game is built around the same bureaucratic process

that a UK national goes through when travelling to Dignitas,

an end of life clinic based in Switzerland.

The dialogue is based on first-hand accounts of this process,

taken from publications by the UK-based pro-assisted dying campaign group Dignity in Dying.

This was a project I did with Alex McCullough for the artist Leif,

for the release of his album Loom Dream.

(Which is great)

Whilst I was working on this site,

I was also working on the video game project I've Been To Paradise,

which, like most video-games, is about leading a user through an experience.

The way that video games can control a user is much more sophisticated than websites,

because there's a set of tools (music, narrative, staging, etc.)

that websites don't (or can't) take advantage of.

One of the issues I've found working with websites is their non-linearity,

sometimes I want an experience that has a beginning and an end.

It makes a lot of sense to bring some of the same methodologies into web design.

This website was designed by Sasha Portis and Maziyar Pahlevan.

The idea was to take this generative pattern branding

and code a way of generating it in the browser.

The beauty of doing these assets in code

is that it allows a flexibility that image files don't.

Because the pattern is a coded element,

we could move it around as you scroll the page.

So Salesforce is a cloud-computing company

that makes Customer Relationship Management software,

and it was one of the first .com companies to go public.

So we (the band) were interested in this culture of appropriation

and how the internet has facilitated this rapid shift

in attitudes towards copyright and ownership,

and we thought it would be nice to pair that with the punk movement that grew out of this,

to create this sort of punk neo-liberal hybrid.

The idea was to appropriate all of Salesforce's intellectual property into this band

and just see what would happen.

In the end, we did a bunch of shows and made an album,

we got some legal threats from Salesforce,

as well as some congratulatory tweets from the CEO of a sister company.

You should check out the Bandcamp.

In 2011 YouTube allowed the submission of ten hour videos for the first time.

The first uploaded was of the meme Nyan Cat,

which spawned this trend of slow ten hour videos.

They're also really useful resources for animated wallpapers,

which is a trope that science fiction films have been using for decades.

I'm using them here because the mixtape is looped,

and its start time was set at the epoch: Thursday, 1 January 1970.

So now the tape keeps looping,

so everyone can listen at the same time when they tune in.

So the primary aim of this design was to build an environment

in which you're encouraged to stay–

which tends to be the goal of most websites.

Here that becomes quite literal: a maze

can trap someone without needing much environmental information.

The audio actually transmits from each corner of the maze,

so as you travel you essentially mix the track.

Then these orbs add an extra layer of narrative to the audio.

There's a game quality to it, but I wouldn't expect anyone to ever finish the 'game'–

it's just the information you need to understand your role in this activity.

If you want to hear the track properly you can go to https://adoptme.bandcamp.com/releases

Or stand in the exact middle of the maze for a true representation.

This was the first website I designed primarily for mobile.

It was actually designed around the most popular phone in Albania at the time,

which was the Samsung Edge.

I built a custom player on the site

to reflect the performance style of the Albanian singing on the record.

It uses this call and response technique between a circle of singers.