Video games, both culturally and visually, have sparked the imagination of countless artists. Yet, when an artist transforms the medium of gaming into their own virtual canvas, realities start to merge and perspectives warp.
Estelle Flores inhabits a world where humans sport pink hair, set against an environment of lush landscapes and colossal blossoms. However, this isn't IRL; it's the digital realm of The Sims 4. Estelle, a Brazilian contemporary artist whose work spans AI and creative coding, ventured into in-game creation in early 2021, intertwining themes of play with the personal myths born from nostalgia.
Nostalgia often resonates with me when I'm drawn to an artists work. In this instance, memories of a virus-infected family computer overrun with dubious Sims mods. Yet Estelle's work, derived from life-simulation games, didn't immediately evoke those recollections. Unaware of their origins, I found her artwork even more enchanting and left me wanting to discover the who, what, where, and why?!
HYPERRETINA (HR): Your work delves into nostalgia and the creation of 'personal myths' from past memories, how do you think these factors shape a player's approach and experience in life-simulation games?
ESTELLE FLORES (EF): I see this idea of personal myths not relating to the exact past, but to the stories we choose to enact and comprise ourselves within simulation games. Sometimes games don’t leave much room for different or personalized stories to happen, these games are chosen by players already interested in enacting a certain type of behaviour (GTA for example) but this is not the case with The Sims, where the first confrontation between the game and the player is, what do I want to do here?, which is an echo of the essential question of life.
I don’t think the choices we make are so frivolous. Lately, I’ve been relating these things we choose to enact in games to Schechner’s concept of Restored Behaviour, which makes sense with Johan Huizinga’s definition of play, that allows for and even invites an approximation of games with rituals. I think video games go beyond fun and relaxation when helping us to make sense of real life situations. This is something that is a given in every other form of play, yet seems challenging and new when applied to gaming. The Sims is very good at this because it can be seen as theatrical, a performance machine. Its material element of play is restored behaviour.
HR: Are there themes of nostalgia in your artwork that resonate with your personal experiences, particularly with The Sims or video games as a whole?
EF: I think game art acts as a key for a deeper world inside the person seeing the work. For each generation it's a different key, with the visuality permitted by the technology constraints of the time a person started to form their own universe of images. These visuals don’t only hit on who we are now, I think they also hit on who we were. Another thing that adds to this effect is that in movies or in performances an actor is always the other, but with game art the avatar is always me, or you, or whoever is viewing it. We’re used to the idea that the avatar, no matter what it looks like, is most of the time going to be representing you.
HR: Have you experimented with any other video games for creative purposes, or are there any you're considering exploring in the future?
EF: I consider doing this in the future but for now I’m focused on The Sims 4, I certainly plan to experiment with The Sims 1, 2, and 3 one day.
HR: I’m curious to know how involved you are with the Sims 4 gameplay when you create your work, are you simultaneously playing the game, or do you view the game as more of an artistic medium? Perhaps it's a mix of both?
EF: I almost never open the game with the intention of playing, not because I don't want to, but because I have turned this into my work. Most of the time I open the game because I have to work and I usually have plans on how to do it. But I would say, most of the time I end up abandoning my plans within the first 10 minutes, something captures my attention and without realizing I start to play. That’s how I find the most interesting tension points I present in my work. The game has strong weapons of seduction which have proved beneficial to me. I try to manipulate the process but I’m the one to get manipulated by it every time.
HR: In your collection, ‘Contain Real Ingredients’, you’ve discovered your own virtual canvas with in-game objects. When creating in The Sims 4, have there been any other gameplay elements you have distorted to use as an artistic tool?
EF: That’s an interesting question, in many ways yes but I guess in the same significant way, no. I think the character development might have hints of that, by now in my game everybody in the cities has pink hair and even the babies are born that way! I think the biggest artistic tool of this game is how naked it really is of ‘life simulation’ if you don’t put your own input into it.
HR: The game art you create The Sims 4 frequently features natural elements such as lush greenery and blossoming flowers. Where do you draw inspiration from when creating these worlds?
EF: I think a good amount of my personal fantasy, the behaviours I choose to restore, has to do with nature; that’s why it appears so much in my game art work. I think game art has an element of self-representation embedded in it, all game art is actually self portraiture as play has so much to do with the player, especially when it's make-believe. Putting something like play inside the artistic process doesn't come without reverberations in the final works.
I treat my separation from nature with these connections to simulated nature. But a lot comes into this play, as simulated nature can generate real anger and real bitterness through its unnatural state. Yet in its allegorical state (the same state that sometimes inspires anger), where structures are reduced to fit into a representation, it’s also easy to achieve the state of bliss one envisions when you dream of nature. For example, Tortosa beaches in The Sims 4 always deliver a great sunset. Other in-game beaches have more of an English feel, where maybe you can take a melancholic stroll on a gray day. The same can be achieved AFK to some extent but the truth is that nature will most of the time present you with unpredictability. Other games that are more focused on this aspect of the simulation can present more constant unpredictability, but The Sims really delivers controlled nature, that beautiful backdrop state that is desirable to most people. That resort type of nature. I think this is what frustrates me but also hooks me with something that helps me deal with how my life is. From one point of view, I know we are always going to need mechanics that alleviate some of our contradictions. But from another point of view, I wonder if this keeps me from taking actions towards what I really want. I think this resonates with a big question in video games, how much do we escape from life in them versus how much do we use them to bear and deal with real life situations. To engage with that element of the impossible is somewhat necessary, but also, some things are possible, we just choose to keep them in games.
HR: I would also love to know more about your generative art, such as ‘Book of Fortune’ you collaborated on with Goma Rabica! Could you delve deeper into that project and share your experience of collaborating with another artist?
EF: This project is really special to me because it was a first creative collaboration with my boyfriend, he is a collagist and we merged many of our shared interests, which manages to capture both of our aesthetics. Collabs are tricky, sometimes they are 2x as easy or sometimes 2x as hard as an individual project, in this case it was super easy and intuitive. I made the code and textual work and Samuel provided the images.
About my generative work overall, I honestly don’t know where I stand with it right now. I really loved learning how to code and I am happy that I now know the basics, but also there are parts of this practice that are not that full of pleasure for me. ‘Book of Fortune’ was a great example of a fun coding project, same with ‘Real Life Dance Challenge’. This could be because these projects are super simple and never ate my head with bugs, they are a lot more about their ideas. But also, it could be that I’m really bothered by the fact that this realm of the 'market' is not over technique yet. It’s like we are still measuring dicks to see who paints better. I could not care less for this type of stuff, that’s a great part of why I choose to work with The Sims, I prefer to push the ideas to the front by not letting it be bothered by subjects of technique and skill mastery.
HR: Given the emphasis on the significance of playful experimentation throughout our life journeys, in what ways has engaging in a virtual environment influenced your practice?
EF: This practice started during the pandemic times, gaming was all I had and I think the amount of emotion I was putting into it was not very kosher haha! I never had a time in my life where I could identify myself as a gamer. When I was a kid my family didn’t have money for a console and I'd play at my cousins house, later on with boyfriends. I also played a bit of The Sims during college when I had a computer and would rent games from a store in the neighborhood. After installed on the computer the games would run for a few months without asking for the CD, and when it didn’t I'd have to rent the CD again. Games have always been in this auspicious place in my mind, something I have thought of doing more than done it.
Right now, conceptually, my practice is very influenced by the ideas I’ve been developing around simulation gaming ever since I started experimenting artistically with The Sims. Before this I’d enact a certain scene, could be very a fucked up scene, but I’d dismiss the possible meanings behind it as it seemed too hard to untangle. Also, the word 'play' is something very, very misleading, it is sometimes the opposite of something serious, but also, play doesn’t work if there is not a certain degree of commitment, so it’s a mix that leads us to think that play is just play, to dismiss what play actually means. The question of why I feel the need to enact this is sometimes a very hard question to answer. Not that I’m working to actually answer those questions, but this aspect of play really motivates my work, the fact that there are a bunch of things going on under the surface of something apparently very naive.
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ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ᴇꜱᴛᴇʟʟᴇ
Estelle Flores is a Brazilian contemporary artist exploring video game art since early 2021, which was spent mostly in the collection of works Contain Real Ingredients, a practice of painting inside the game The Sims 4. Now, this exploration of ‘play’ continues in the fields of AI, generative art and code in a research on the personal myths and emotional shortcuts we raise from nostalgia. Explore Estelle’s work on Objkt, fxhash and Zora, as well as socials Twitter and Instagram.
ᴡʜᴏ ɪꜱ ʜʏᴘᴇʀʀᴇᴛɪɴᴀ
HYPERRETINA stands as an evolving nexus of post-internet and digital art, rooted firmly within the expansive Web3 ecosystem. With the mission to amplify the artists and creators that are sculpting our new virtual landscape. Don’t hesitate to get in touch on Twitter, Warpcast or Instagram. See the growing HYPERRETINA collection on Objkt, here.