Fana, Interactive game,2026
Fana(trailer),semijiang semaiti,Music by RedValentine, 2026
The starting point is a poem by Jalal al-Din Rumi and the Sufi idea of dissolving the self into unity: “I am not me, you are not you.” This vision of self-erasure enters into direct tension with contemporary life, which increasingly revolves around individuality, self-representation, and the constant construction of identity. From this contradiction emerges a central question: where does the self actually exist?
The work takes the form of an open-world game populated by NPCs endlessly orbiting around a central point. Their movements are governed by an algorithmic system—repetitive, stable, and predictable, almost ritualistic. The player is free to move through the environment, but approaching the center activates a virus that interrupts the system’s balance. Once infected, the NPCs lose algorithmic control and begin moving chaotically through the space, driven by panic and uncertainty.
Within this world, the player’s presence does not bring rescue or resolution. On the contrary, approaching the infected characters out of curiosity only intensifies their suffering. In this way, the project questions the act of participation itself: every entry into a system, every attempt to understand it, inevitably transforms it and produces a form of violence.
The work also draws on Hannah Arendt and her reflections on thinking and ethics. The conflict is not resolved through binary oppositions—order and chaos, individual and collective, human and algorithm—but through the critical space of thought itself. Within the game there is no real possibility of repair or redemption; in the end, the only ethical action left is to leave the system.
