About the Game
(c)Kristine Eudey, 2019, micha cárdenas, “Sin Sol, Prototype” as part of “Arch”, Leslie-Lohman Museum.
Created by the UCSC Critical Realities Studio Sin Sol / No Sun is an augmented reality game that allows users to experience the feelings of a climate change event, in order to deeply consider how climate change disproportionately effects immigrants, trans people and disabled people. Players can find, see and hear a story told through poetry about living through climate change induced wildfires, from an AI hologram, Aura.
Set fifty years in the future, Aura tells the story of environmental collapse from the past, which is our present in 2018. Part environmental archiving project, the environments in the game include actual 3-D scans of present day forests from the Pacific Northwest. With the goal of multispecies survival and solidarity in mind, Aura’s dog, Roja, leads players on a journey to escape the wildfires and find oxygen capsules which contain poetry, telling more of the story as they progress through the game.
Find out more in this campus news article:
New art game explores intersection of personal trauma and climate induced wildfires
Sin Sol is available on the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad.
Content Note: Sin Sol contains descriptions of sexual violence.
Watch the trailer on YouTube.
Game design, Writing and Direction by SJRC affiliate micha cárdenas (UCSC assistant professor of Art & Design: Games and Playable Media). micha directs the Critical Realities Studio and is writing a new algorithm for gender, race and technology. Her book Poetic Operations, forthcoming from Duke University Press, proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. She is a first generation Colombian American. Her articles have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, AI & Society, Scholar & Feminist Online, the Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, among others.
3-D modeling by Marcelo Viana Neto, Adrian Phillips and Kara Stone
Environments by Abraham Avnisan
Soundtrack by Wynne Greenwood and micha cárdenas
Character Design by Morgan Thomas
Produced by SJTP Fellow Dorothy Santos (Film and Digital Media)