dmstfctn

profile artist gaming gamification computer vision language LLMs AI interface policy cognition

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dmstfctn is a London-based artist duo exploring complex systems through immersive performances, video installations and video games. Since 2018, dmstfctn have performed and exhibited internationally including at Serpentine, Berghain, HKW, Rhizome, Unsound, CTM and transmediale. Their audiovisual work has been released by Mille Plateaux and Krisis Publishing, and included in Hyperdub's Ø book (Flatlines). Their work around Al folklore and anomalies has led them to collaborate with institutions such as the Leonardo Supercomputer and The Alan Turing Institute. dmstfctn have won a STAR+T+S Prize nomination in 2024 for their video game Godmode Epochs, and the Edigma Semibreve awards in 2023, for their work God Mode ep. 1 (2022). 




entries

Fango 1000 &
Large Lore Models
dmstfctn, Alasdair Milne, Eva Jäger


publication artwork game

Fango 1000 is a multiplayer onchain text game where players compete for narrative control. The game is set in the fictional medieval village of Fango, where a trove containing a thousand chronicles has suddenly appeared inside a monastery, each describing the training of a mysterious 'machine intelligence' from the future.

Players join either Monks, Scholars or Fools - factions with conflicting worldviews - and compete to tell stories about what secret the machine may hold. Some writing will persist by player consensus, other writing will be lost.

The game tasks players with interpreting AI from a mediaeval point of view. Yet the ‘soft’ stories written by a community of players must comply with the ‘hard’ facts inscribed in the chronicles - which contain data generated by players of dmstfctn’s AI training game Godmode Epochs (2023), data now inscribed onto a blockchain, and discoverable in the world of Fango 1000.

The game implements a protocol for onchain narrative building that explicitly links player’s actions to their (contestable) stories. The protocol was originally proposed in ‘Large Lore Models’ (Autonomous Worlds N1, 2023), an essay by dmstfctn, Eva Jäger and Alasdair Milne describing the problem of narrative capture in onchain worlds...(more)