The Close World - The Building

                                                           
August 2023
solo commission by Daniel Jenatsch for ACMI - Gallery 5, Curated by Isabella Hone-Saunders. 
‘The Building’ is part five of an ongoing series of works, The Close World, generally, is an experiment of fantasy world-building in collaboration with human and non-human actors. Written in collaboration with OpenAI’s GPT-3 trained on key texts of fantasy and philosophy of language, ‘The Building’ is realised in 3D sound and vision by Daniel Jenatsch, performed by artist and philosopher Franziska Aigner and brought to the world by full stack web developer Tim Busuttil.

This is the first time Jenatsch has ever considered making a playable video-based work.


The Close World – The Building is an interactive digital work, optimised for viewing on the user’s device, that echoes earlier iterations while also taking advantage of its digital form. Visually, The Building offers a post-apocalyptic sensibility with a finely balanced array of familiar and abstract visuals in disarray, divided into two discrete scenes.

In The Welcome, singing owls dressed in knights' armour guard a dilapidated tower, teetering on an island drifting across a barren digital sea. Beyond this introduction is The Building, in which Jenatsch extrapolates on his first presentation of the smashed gallery wall, to create a view into a courtyard of the tower where we view the three-headed prophetic owls. While we can get closer to the owls, the shards around the hole stay static in the frame of the digital device, preventing the audience’s capacity to move entirely into The Close World.

The Close World was acquired by ACMI in 2023 and is now in their permanent collection.

Read here, ‘An Opera of Riddles’ a response to The Building written by Miriam Kelly.

Daniel Jenatsch is an Australian composer and artist who combines atmospheric soundscapes, music and video to create multimedia documentaries, installations, radio pieces and performances. Jenatsch’s highly detailed sonic and moving image works examine how knowledge systems and power influence our social and mental ecologies.

Tim Busuttil is a queer developer living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land. They’re interested in programming as a medium for experimentation, poetry and play. Their work explores generative text and interactive narrative as frameworks for multivalent storytelling.

Franziska Aigner works at the intersection of philosophy, performance and music. In 2020 she completed her PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), London on the topic of Kant and Technics. Complementing her philosophical work, she has studied at P.A.R.T.S., the school of choreography and dance in Brussels directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and worked with Anne Imhof on the performances Deal, Rage, Angst and Faust (awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale 2017), as well as for William Forsythe, Mette Ingvartsen, Alexandra Bachzetsis and others. Her own works have been shown at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Die Liste, Basel; Theatre de la Bastille, Paris; The Place, London; brut, Vienna; HAU, Berlin and more.