Bad Trip: artist videos a year of his life, embeds memories in bleak, weird art game

Hong Kong-based artist Alan Kwan has spent the better part of the last year recording his every waking moment via a camera mounted on his glasses. He’s then taken these recordings and scattered them through a grim looking virtual world, called Bad Trip, which also contains crude but defiantly odd dioramas which he purports to be recreations of his dreams: giant floating red babies; people with trees for heads in cages. You know, the usual.
“Using a custom virtual reality software, I design a virtual mindscape where people could navigate and experience my memories and dreams,” says Kwan. “The mindscape grows continually as fresh memories and dreams come in.”
The videos themselves are turned into semi-translucent cubes, each surface playing a fragment of footage, which Kwan then stacks together and houses in elaborate structures of his own design. A cute twist is that he puts his more private memories in hard-to-reach places; you might only get close enough to eavesdrop. It’s all a little bit Inception, no?
Have a look at the video below and decide for yourself whether this is an intriguing use of games to describe the architecture of the mind or a load of fruity digi-toss masquerading as deep thought.
Spotted on Kotaku. Thanks, Kotaku!
Bad Trip: Navigate My Mind from KwanAlan on Vimeo.