An Artful Rearrangement of Darkness

A post yesterday over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun described a new game called "Kieru," in which monochromatic ninjas lost in a monochromatic landscape alternately blend in with and radically stand out from their architectural surroundings.



As Rock, Paper, Shotgun explains, the design of the game is such that "you’ll be trained to react to colour and shadow—two things that are traditionally irrelevant for most games—in completely new ways."

This statement combined with the aesthetic of the game itself also brought to mind an undergraduate thesis project that we looked at last week, by Anthony Morey at SCI-Arc, where a rotating, monochromatic exploration of architectural space plays havoc with your sense of volume, shadow, and massing.

[Images: These are just slightly larger versions of some images already seen here, by Anthony Morey at SCI-Arc, produced under the guidance of Dwayne Oyler and Thom Mayne].

Is it a neoclassical temple casting shadows in all directions at once, or some other explosion of architectural representation to suggest new ways of drawing space?

One of many things I like about this project is how it suggests architecture is, in a sense, the art of interrupting shadows, not playing with light but an artful rearrangement of darkness.