Sorn-Lai

Sorn-Lai is a public interactive game experience that tasks participants with exploring the First Forest. Audience members can use their phones to scan NFC data tags attached to the scape’s characters and dioramas - uncovering details about the world and impacts of technology along the way.

Most of the models in the exhibition were modeled digitally / brought to physical space via 3D printing. The work shown here is the digitally created promo material made with the character + prop models in Unreal Engine 5.

The interactive exhibition features a series of 7 large tabletop dioramas showcasing different environments around the first forest and over 50 character inhabitants of Sorn-Lai, all interwoven in an intricate web of narrative and ecology.

Stories unfolded around the tables (which serve as the game's environment) are sets of speculative/ cautionary tales regarding contemporary generative, manufacturing, and integrated technologies; the very technologies the installation is made with while the settings themselves are metaphors for societal trends and attitudes. The work is rooted in contemporary trends of ecology and technological accelerationism and serves as a gathering point of provocation around pressing issues concerning our own world.

Sorn-Lai is the sequel event to the Saturophage installation.