All Dungeons Will Fall

In the digital object All Dungeons Will Fall, Aleksei Taruts explores how technologies of immediate communication affect the production of different types of knowledge, from the scientific to the irrational. The starting point for the project was the news of the discovery of Noah's Ark in Russia in 2017. Analyzing numerous videos uploaded to YouTube by enthusiasts, we can trace how these recordings shape viewers' confidence that a certain mountain plateau is indeed Noah's fossilized Ark or a crypt holding his remains.

The artist distances himself from the medium of the video game while formally preserving its properties. The interactive narrative is constructed in an intuitively familiar virtual environment, but it undergoes a multitude of changes through unfamiliar controls, the failing logic of the player's interaction with the environment, and the variable length of time. The story's fantastical protagonist, a three‑dimensional model of a wyvern dragon, travels to the Chechen Republic to “identify” Noah's Ark, experiencing the strange effects of distributed presence.

The motif of displacement in time and space becomes the basis of the artwork, including a reference to the deportation of the population from the territory of the Chechen‑Ingush ASSR in 1944. The same motif is supported by the viewer's shifting attention to the materiality of their own presence at the computer. They find themselves in several environments at once. In this way, the boundary of the interface of the digital object is broken and the user appears to be included in it. The file All Dungeons Will Fall can only be played once, after which a countdown timer starts, activating the geological time of the distant future.