‍Sara Bezovšek & Dorijan Šiško: What’s Your Truth

Sara Bezovšek (IG) (Twitter)
Dorijan Šiško (IG)

---

The video game What’s Your Truth (WYT) is a long-term project by Sara Bezovšek and Dorijan Šiško in which the artists explore the ideas of contemporary post-internet society and “truths”.

WYT questions the practical effects of postmodern relativism while flirting with the consequences of the fragmentation of social consensus and the proliferation of “truths” that characterise society and politics in the age of the internet, algorithmic profiling and social media. 

Through the virtual world the players embark on an information oriented ideological path where he or she reveals his or her unique personality profile by visiting thematic locations and choosing the so called “truths”.

The design is divided into two segments: Light Mode, takes place on the surface, and Dark Mode, takes place underwater; this is also where all the darkest “truths” can be found. The players follow the so-called “Yellow Brick Road”, and embark on a virtual path from the tip of the iceberg into the depths of various ideologies and confront them primarily visually. Throughout the path, players are accompanied by memes which serve as a sort of road signs while at the same time further contextualising locations and “truths”. 

The informational-ideological path of this gaming mission and at the same time personality test leads to several possible conclusions – different mutually exclusive truths – which the player with his/her choices not only determines but also co-shapes, reinforces, and further disseminates.

The project flirts with the philosophical implications of the existence of various “truths” in the media-social landscape of a post-virtual, post-internet society. Metaphysical relativism, diagnosed by French poststructuralists in the second half of the 20th century, is now established in the practical sphere. But the project in question does not merely toy with this situation, but rather problematizes it: when the players move between individual “truths” and select/accumulate them, he or she also participates in their formation, preservation and dissemination and is thus part of a different, mutually exclusive reality. In Hegel’s sense, the concept of each of the offered ideologies as a federal assumption, paired with other “truths”, is thus “abolished”.

The video game has been shown three times, each time with an extensive upgrade.

In the most recent version, titled Tipping Point, the WYT gaming experience is updated with elements that responded to the then current socio-political situations, and the space of the video game spilled over into the space of the exhibition. The gallery and its “reality” were just another (non-privileged) piece of the iceberg, one part of this world of “many truths” in which everyone choosed/revealed their own.