Please Maintain Your Original Indian Beauty

Free to download and play here: https://divyagadangi.itch.io/pmyoib

An explorable digital environment inspired by text messages sent by my mom. The piece was featured at Lumen Festival 2014 in Staten Island and was made possible by the support the Excellence in the Arts Grant from Staten Island Arts.

This was an ongoing project for some time and took the form as a playable game which explores a labyrinthine gallery-esque space featuring digital sculptures with text from actual text messages sent to me by mom. The player can explore these fragmented messages as well as memories of places my family has lived in and distant music that comes in waves at those locations. It is a space I wouldn't have been able to create in actuality with the means and budget available to me, and a space that is a little off kilter due to the way in which you explore it and due to the nature of the software that allowed complete flexibility and freedom to make anything.

I was interested in exploring my relationship with my mom, the advance of communication and how we choose to communicate with each other as well as the technological rift that was introduced to my mom and I when texting became our mode of conversation.