I have added a new interactive project to my ongoing collection of web-based experiments and prototypes at oerum.org. The latest piece is The Marginalist, a browser-based simulation of trying to sustain an art practice in Denmark.
You begin at 28, just out of art school, with six mediums, limited bandwidth, no savings, and a community that will support you exactly as long as you support it. You apply for grants that take months to reject you. You attend openings where it is not always clear whether people are being sincere. You make work that nobody buys and store it in a room that costs more than your food budget. The government cuts arts funding. Your studio floods. A design agency offers you three days a week at more than your annual income. You say yes or no and live with the consequences, which arrive later than you expect.
The game looks like a paper form — ruled lines, monospaced type, square corners; the aesthetic of ledgers, index cards, and grant applications filled out by hand. Sixteen randomised starting backgrounds shape where you begin: whether you grew up in an art family or a working-class household, whether you studied at the Royal Academy or taught yourself over fourteen years of evenings, whether you arrived from abroad with no network, graduated into debt your parents took on, or are raising a child alone with the nursery closing at four.
There is no win condition. There are six ways to end and forty-seven possible conclusions. Some are bleak. Some are quietly successful in ways that are also quietly unsettling. Some are transformations — the carpenter, the plumber, the politician, the community organiser — where artistic training continues in other forms. Not all of these are recognised as art.
Some consequences are delayed. Some messages are ambiguous. Some numbers move without explanation. There is one invisible stat.
Go to oerum.org
