Interactive digital experience, 3-channel video game installation

Promised Land allows the visitor to take a wander through hypnotic and immersive landscapes meticulously designed and drawn by Imran Channa, inspired by films that were made in the former Dutch East Indies and found in the EYE Film Museum collection. The artist investigates the intersections between the 3D fabricated environment created in video games and the idealistic images of landscapes that were filmed in the former Dutch East Indies as instruments of dominance. Promised Land is a video game which acts as a film. Without a specific task or storyline, the film is developed when the player interacts with it, creating its narrative through navigation, opening doors that lead somewhere but often also lead nowhere. With this work, Channa tests the limits and different imaginations produced by the archive. He is concerned with the possibility of creating future conditions for archival material, especially within the time and discourse of the “digital dark age”.

His approach to this project is to create a continuous super-utopian land based on the limited information from the archival material: a landscape that acts as a metaphor for various ideological purposes, which is both beautiful and alienating. The artist has structured the narrative of the game across three levels: Savage State, Pastoral State, and Desolation State. The three states emphasise the ways in which landscapes were used and abused during colonial times while also anchoring toward futuristic societies. The project creates a tension between historical ruins and technological utopianism where any human presence is missing, erased, or deleted from the landscape.

The installation was developed during Channa’s tenure as EYE Artist-in-Residence 2021/2022.
Festival presentation realised with kind support of skill computer

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: Trembling Time