Fantasy Slime Net Café
2021–22
Video games, texts, essay, 3D hologram fan with video and found footage, installation with video, fake flowers and vines, gaming memorabilia, and toys
“The viscous appears as a liquid seen in a nightmare, all of whose properties might rise up as a sort of life and turn against me... In the apprehension of the viscous—a sticky, compromising, and unbalanced substance—there is something like the haunting memory of a metamorphosis. [...] The horror of the viscous is the horror that time will become viscous, that facticity will progress continuously and imperceptibly...”
— Jean-Paul Sartre¹
An overgrown internet café for short games with bad graphics. Two games are available for play: a hypertext fiction and a world exploration game, both created on simple engines. Alongside are propositions for game studies texts, from the tenuous to the immediately relevant, spanning books and essays on postcolonial histories of sport, interceptive game-making, and ecological history. Fantasy Slime Net Café is an ideal space for meditations on slime and its properties—as an abberant fluid and a common monster in the bestiaries of video games. In the Southeast Asian server of the South Korean online game, MapleStory, in-universe towns directly based on Singapore and Malaysia are inexplicably overrun by creatures composed of black slime. One wonders about the petrohorrors and myths emulsified within their squishy bodies...
Outside the net café, a makeshift arcade set-up glows.
Fantasy Slime Net Café assembles a bundle of works for Present Realms at the Singapore Art Museum, a group presentation of ongoing projects to mark the conclusion of the pilot SAM Residency programme. Also produced was an essay threading through ideas explored during the residency.
Additional 3D graphics by Krystal Y.
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 698–703. Translation by Jean Marie Todd, as quoted in Georges Didi-Huberman, “Viscosities and Survivals: Art History Put to the Test by the Material”.