Bardo Videogame

“Do you think I'll be all right, after death, based on how I'm playing this?” I asked Doug.

We were playing with a videogame installation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales called The Outlands by Joyce Hinterding and David Haines. I had been wandering lonely as a cloud, floating over the rocks and trees, avoiding the strange shale-like pile of death emanating grinding, roaring sounds. But if you travel into it (the joysticks are like dowsing rods, they're made of twigs), you shoot into a space instantly recognizable as the after-death space I've seen in lucid dreams based on sleep apnea, when my brain used to decide I was dead. On a regular basis.



A scintillating space of surging patterns, superimposed layers of light. Electrifying, compelling. Not unlike Yukultji Napangati...