Deep Dive

Digital communication technologies play a significant role in determining the limits and possibilities of contemporary sociality. Increasingly, the social world is shaped according to the interests of monopolistic digital platforms. The experience of life via platforms is asymmetrically skewed according to mechanisms that collect personal data on users, classifying them according to their potential as consumers within the attention economy. With Deep Dive, we reconstitute the surveillant and commodifying mechanisms of platforms so they can be brought into critical focus for our audience.

Deep Dive is an interactive game that explores the operation of algorithmic classification systems in an immersive underwater 3D environment. Deep Dive uses a gaze detection mechanism to determine when a player has looked at a particular object. Eventually, the game environment becomes increasingly populated with related objects, to the extent that everything the player sees is a result of the things they have looked at in the past. This replicates the action of recommendation and classification systems like Facebook’s News Feed, which enclose users inside “filter bubbles” that reproduce users’ own individual interests and tendencies rather than reflecting a neutral public sphere. A LLM-based backend that continuously collects information on what the user has looked at, generating new objects based on the machine learning system’s output. As the player moves through the game, they observe the way that they are being classified according to the things they consume. After moving through an increasingly uncanny algorithmically constructed world, the player is confronted with a representation of their body as a network of collected data, which is destroyed by successfully navigating a labyrinthine series of “dark ux” riddles. The game is playable in-browser on desktop only.

CREDITS:

by Craig Fahner, Mat Lindenberg, Peter Nichols and Matthew Waddell. Voiceover by Michael Couvillon. Additional technical support by Nora Liu.

CONTROLS:

• Look around with mouse.
• Click to swim. Hold mouse button to swim continuously.
• A and D to rotate camera.

Note: Depending on your connection, please allow ~15 seconds for the game to load in browser.