Dirtscraper  is a computational artwork telling the story of a decaying underground megastructure—a digital portrait of sick architecture. As the Dirtscraper simulation degrades over time, a variety of myths emerge. Through text pop-ups, members of its virtual community tell the tale of their surroundings, relationships, and mental health in an attempt to quell the constant noise of their precarious circumstances. Taken as a whole, the artwork emulates a collective body subjected to the inner workings of a gridded simulation: housing blocks are overrun by industry, residents are displaced, the individual withers. What remains is the story of a constantly kinetic city and the people that persist as its inhabitants.

Originally, this work was built as a 3-channel installation at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond, Virginia, USA. It was subsequently presented as an immersive installation in a variety of formats including a single-channel version. In 2020 a livestream edition was released  to function within the constraints of an online platform. It premiered this way as a week-long zero-player video game livestream at bitforms gallery.

A zero-player video game is a game in which artificial intelligence, rather than a human player, controls it. One cycle of Dirtscraper lasts for the duration of a feature film, comprising 48 cinematic chapters showing close-up details of life inside the structure. Between each chapter, audiences bear witness to the elevation view of the structure, evoking the look of a side-scrolling platformer video game or a late twentieth century simulation game.

The submitted work sample presents a single cycle of this simulation as it was streamed at  https://bitforms.art/stream/ on September 30, 2020. During the actual stream, the piece continued, presenting new stories, architectural arrangements, and perspectives.

Links: http://peterburr.org/dirtscraper.php

Artist: Peter Burr
Text: Porpentine Charity Heartscape
Programming: Mark Fingerhut
Additional programming: Oren Shoham. Music
Sound design: John Also Bennett
Additional graphics: Brandon Blommaert, Eric Carlson, and Brenna Murphy

Peter Burr (US) (b. 1980) is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. A master of computer animation with a gift for creating images and environments that hover on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, Burr has in recent years devoted himself to exploring the concept of an endlessly mutating labyrinth. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship.