This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/GameStill3.png media/GameStill5.png 2021-04-23T17:52:04+00:00 Alyssa Tucker 25 Candied Heart image_header 2021-04-29T19:11:46+00:00
  
  Alyssa Tucker 
  
  Candied Heart
  
  
  
  
              Video games and technology are more pervasive in today’s society than ever before in history, becoming more a part of our daily lives as our world becomes more reliant on them.. In the search for a topic that truly resonated with me I kept coming back to the idea of mental health since that has been something I have struggled with throughout my life, very prevalently in the last year especially. Something that has both been helped and hindered by the presence of the internet and technology in my life. Most of my experiences and interactions with other people are filtered through technology one way or another. Even more so in the current state of the world, so ignoring technology when creating a reflection of my inner self is something that would not be genuine to who I am as a person and an artist. When interacting with others over the internet I feel like a much more true and genuine form of myself so in a way the true raw unfiltered version of myself is what exists deep in the recesses of my hard drives. You can pick and choose what you show to the people around you in your life, but your technology gets everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly, for better or for worse. In a comparable way to one's own brain. Everything is stored within it, often with a more clear black and white honesty than someone’s own brain will let them see and remember, especially when mental health comes into the picture. 
  
  
              To illustrate this feeling I wanted to take a reflection of the deepest darkest thoughts that I hide from others and depict it using the medium that understands me the most, technology. When it comes to the style in which I chose to visualize these themes I looked towards the one prevalent style that I have always been drawn to and has inspired a good portion of my artistic practice. It’s an ambiguous concept of taking something generally visually appealing or perceived as stereotypically cute and innocent and using it to convey some of the darkest, realest, and most terrifying concepts in our world. Pulling the viewer in with the unassuming exterior before hitting them with the true horror laying right below the surface. It’s the main aspect of the video art series by the This Is It Collective called Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, it is a video art series  that depicts the horrors of modern mainstream media creation through the facade of colorful children’s entertainment. 
  
  
  For this virtual reality experience I created I am drawing from a wide variety of inspirations from an array of different worlds. Be it the art world and the virtual reality installations of Jacolby Satterwhite and Nancy Baker Cahill, or the world based in the internet and video game culture like the visual novel horror game Doki Doki Literature Club. A game that presents a harsh and dark view of depression, isolation, mania, and neglect in a cutesy brightly colored package. But when the time comes it does not shy away from hitting the player with the reality of every situation this fictional creation has put them in. This feeling is something that has heavily inspired me while I look to create real and honest portrayals of my own inner psyche. Since when I am looking at myself and working on a piece based in self reflection a candy coated horror is exactly how I would describe my psyche. 
  
  
  Taking this literally I wrote a poem detailing my innermost thoughts, using sweet, soft, and candy based metaphors to layer on the complex thoughts that I have struggled with in my darkest moments.  From this jumping off point I constructed a visualization of my words to make them have an even stronger impact. Using virtual reality takes the viewer into my world, going further into my mind as my computer and my own voice narrates my thoughts to them. Gaming is one of the most immersive experiences that a creator can make for a viewer since it firmly places them in an entirely constructed space for them to explore. Giving them the agency of doing what they want how they want it. While immersion was a massive consideration for me, agency was not, if I am showing a fractured off piece of my mind, who is the viewer to have the power to change it just by existing in it. That removal of agency takes out a part of the gaming experience, making it separate from what most would consider a true “game” instead becoming its own installation experience.
  
  
  Going further from there for the ideal play space of this experience, I wanted to reflect the type of imagery that the viewer is about to see when they go into the virtual reality environment. All of this cumulates in the physical manifestation of the namesake of this piece, the candied heart. A real heart that I preserved in resin to make it resemble a candy apple. Bringing in the main metaphor of how I see myself, a soft fragile but frightening heart with thick sweet layers protecting it from the outside world, complete with a pastel pink bow on top. The installation and experience it is paired with is a true embodiment of the horrors of mental health and how non assuming they may seem at a passing glance. I hope that through this piece the viewer will be able to get a full perspective on me as a human with a heart and mind, as well as an artist with the hands to bring her own abstract reality into focus. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

  Link to Video:
  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ERqt3uaXdyPASaYp0S2_g6E2NvS5qIKe/view?usp=sharing

  Link to VR Game to play:

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vC1bt3IfLMBienw3RdA2vlDIumVCcVxC/view?usp=sharing