Games Like Utility for the Soul

About Utility for the Soul

A proposal for enlightened corporations with a concern for the social implications resulting from prolonged neglect of human needs in our mechanized society.

- Lithuanian-American environment artist Aleksandra Kasuba, 1970

A corporation is to build and maintain a Retreat House to provide its people with relief from everyday demands and pressures of the office. The Retreat house is to be used by all corporation employees on a rotational basis, on the corporation’s time and at its expense.

The visitor will spend most of his time in the Galleries, where the elemental displays take place. The Galleries are designed to feel enormous, seemingly without walls, and to sound like echo chambers. Here the visitor will encounter the Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

Given time unregimented, confronted with Elemental occurances, and free from a constant rush of information which stifles natural reactions, the visitor would be able to experience the self in an environment not by the dictates of a particular society, but be forced to respond to himself alone. The experience could reveal one’s true self, and hopefully stir it enough to pursue its substance.

Aleksandra Kasuba (1923 – 2019) - a Lithuanian-American environment artist. In 1970 she authored Utility for the Soul, a competition entry in a short book format for Projects Outside Art launched by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization developing collaborations between artists and engineers. Utility for the Soul would eventually become Kasuba’s manifesto, implementing the utopian goal at the core of her research, the search for a harmonious world and a peaceful dialogue between humankind, nature and technology.

FEATURES

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Original utopian narrative - based upon a short story by artist Aleksandra Kasuba

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Puzzle infused gameplay - 11 rooms to explore, each with a unique elemental puzzle

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Ambient soundscape - meditative, soothing atmosphere

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Minimalist graphics - hand animated black and white visuals

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Multiple languages - Playable in English, French and Lithuanian

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Miniature experience - 15 to 30 min. of gameplay

REVIEWS

A space in which we can ponder the dual nature of what it means to encounter a critique of a data-driven busy society on a device which facilitates exactly what the art piece sets out to critique in the first place.

- IndieCade 2021 Jury