Text Textures
In a world overwhelmed by relentless digital streams, Text Textures translates real-time webcam images into ASCII characters, embedding the user’s movements directly into the game environment. This uncanny, reflective interaction evokes simultaneous observation and self-surveillance, highlighting tensions between control and submission. Players actively code elements to progress, confronting their digital identity as fragmented and algorithmically interpreted data, ultimately questioning whether we author our digital selves or exist merely as data points subject to consumption.
About the Project
With Pete Baldes’s guidance, I created a non-objective video game in Godot to explore the text textures that make up the digital world. This game is projected onto found objects through an installation, merging the physical and virtual spaces. The real-life player is translated into ASCII code images that overlook their avatar in the game, blurring the line between human and code, observer and participant.
What is Text Textures?
At the core of every digital image lies code—a sequence of letters and numbers constructing everything we see on-screen. Text Textures embraces this fundamental truth, revealing the digital world’s underlying language by overlaying ASCII text images onto 3D models and decoding that code into audio using Google Translate.
In this process, text becomes texture, while hidden code is made audible, transforming the invisible language of the digital into a visible, audible, and tactile surface.
By merging text, 3D form, and sound, the work dismantles the illusion of digital smoothness. It reminds us that all digital images are ultimately strings of information. Each letter, number, and symbol becomes a building block, shaping both the surface and the meaning of the object. The audible decoding bridges visual and auditory experience, making the digital realm perceptible in multiple dimensions.
How do you play the game?
In this non-objective Godot game, you don’t move the character directly. Instead, you play as a kind of voice-of-god, entering simple text commands that shape the world around the avatar.
The primary codes are:
stairs – creates a staircase the character can climb
platform – generates a floating surface to cross gaps
By typing these words, you literally construct the level in front of the character, guiding them through an otherwise impossible environment.
These minimal commands highlight the core idea of Text Textures: that the digital world is built from language. The code you type becomes the terrain itself—a direct translation of text into 3D form.
This mechanic exposes the raw materials of virtual space—text and code—and invites players to see the game world not as a finished, seamless surface, but as something built letter by letter, command by command, revealing the structures that are usually hidden.
Installation Design
The game is not confined to a screen. Instead, it is projected onto found, real-life objects in the exhibition space, deliberately distorting the physical world’s own textures. The projection wraps around uneven surfaces, merging the ASCII-coded digital imagery with the analog details of the objects it illuminates.
This blending of virtual and physical disrupts the clear boundary between the digital and the real. By letting the game’s text-based landscapes spill onto the material world, the installation challenges the illusion of separation between screen and space.
The result is a hybrid environment where code, text, and real-world textures coexist and collide, inviting viewers to navigate a space where the digital does not replace the physical, but transforms it—making the hidden structures of both worlds visible, layered, and inseparable.
