BrainRot
Open Call for Collaborative Games Jam
Gossamer Fog is inviting submissions to participate in BrainRot, an online collaborative games jam. A selected team of artists will work with lead artist/Gossamer Fog Director, Samuel Capps to build an experimental interactive artwork within a games format built in Unreal Engine, critically responding to the theme below.
Reeling from a feed of conceptual incoherence; a viral stream of nonsensical knowledge slop, pumped directly into your brain. You exist in an unpleasant haze suffering from chronic chaos edits, addicted to quick dopamine hits in a spiralling compulsion loop of shallow engagement, constantly overstimulated through ‘breakdown aesthetics’. A cyberpsychosis triggered by artificially regurgitated copypasta content, fears and anxieties of our fractured realities reflected back at us, as we’re sucked deeper into a virtual black hole of meaningless brain rot internet dis-content. Despotic platforms min-maxing their builds to hegemonize your engagement and farming your attention through an eerie mesmeric void of rapidly changing frames, captivated by flashing, flickering time poachers.
❤ PROMPTING YOU TO ENGAGE
A cursed content overload of weird pointless junk saturates your cerebrum in a game of hyper-distraction, corrupting consciousness with rotating cats and satisfying slime ASMR. Overthrown by the rise of a Dead Internet and artificial realism, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and unintelligible automatically generated Captcha Content - I am not a robot, I’m just terminally online, and I do not want to consume random pages ripped from the AI generated Library of Babel. Nothing is real, we bathe in a slurry of time stealing bull-shit content, an algorithmic curated culture for the uncultured, fame for the unfamous, our doom scrolls written by illiterate influence.
❤ CONTENT INCONTINENCE
Cultural and societal collapse of conspiracy theories, born from shitposting memelords. A utopian dream turned to a nightmare future where rage baiting content manipulates emotions and dank memes have bigger audiences and reach than any artwork ever shared on social media. The internet constantly exposes the extraordinary, so everything IRL seems boring, enhanced images destroy self confidence just in time for you to subscribe to a new online guru’s self help seminar. Are we going to look back on our time in this age and wonder why we wasted our lives away? Once we surfed the waves of the web in awe of the information to be found, now the water is so badly polluted with sewage that we become sick once we fall in.
❤ YOUR BRAIN IS COOKED
Process
The games jam will be held remotely rather than in person, allowing participants who are not based in London to take part. This will take place over the course of two weeks from the 29th November - 13th December 2024
Each selected artist will receive £150 for taking part in the BrainRot Games Jam.
Artists will be invited to create or contribute to aspects of the game remotely, these assets/elements will then be brought together within an overall virtual games environment. While we welcome artists to create new things towards the project, we are also open to artists contributing relevant work that is already in progress, completed or adapting pre-existing work.
10 artists will be selected to take part in the games jam.
Roles
We are looking for artists who can contribute to one or more of the following roles:
- Writer
- Unreal Engine Practitioner
- 3D Artist
- Visual Artist
- Video Artist
- Sound Artist / Musician
- Performers / Voice Acting
- Animator
- AI Artist
The work will be developed within brain rot mechanics, through copypasta, remix, chaos edits and regurgitation workflows. Artists will be free to use whichever creative digital tools appropriate to make their contributions, but we encourage artists to experiment with AI tools commonly used in garbage content creation, to fit within the concept. These may be tools such as Rodin 3D, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Suno AI, Donna AI, ChatGPT and many of the other products and services they are continually coming to market. Artists can work independently but are welcome to collaborate with other participants in the games jam.
During the BrainRot Games Jam the selected artists will be required to:
- Attend an introduction online session to meet the selected team and discuss the brief
- Dedicate a minimum of 1 day working on a contribution to the project
- Join Gossamer Fog’s BrainRot telegram group for discussion and sharing resources, research and ideas
Outcome
The BrainRot game will be hosted within Antechamber, the digital extension of Gossamer Fog featuring web based and downloadable projects. Where audiences will be able to download and play the game at home.
There will also be a live public presentation over a weekend at our virtual production studio Alt_R on the 14th and 15th December 2024, where the game can be played by visitors on our large LED wall. The game will also be live streamed on our Twitch channel.
All artist’s names will appear as credits on an in-game monument and listed in the project description on the Antechamber webpage.
Location: Remote / online
Key Dates
- Deadline to apply Saturday 23rd November 2024 23:59pm GMT
- Applicants will be notified of the outcome of the open call EOD Monday 25th November
- BrainRot Games Jam period: 29th November - 13th December 2024
Submission
To apply please fill out this short Application Form
If you have any questions regarding your application please email: info@gossamerfog.com
Funded by Arts Council England
