TEXT TEXTURES
With Pete Baldes’s guidance, I created Text Textures—an experimental video game and installation built in Godot, designed to question the invisible codes shaping our digital worlds.
Projected onto found objects in the gallery space, the game merges physical and virtual environments, forcing the viewer to confront their role as both observer and participant. The player’s real-life presence is translated into ASCII code images that overlook the in-game avatar, blurring the line between human and code, watcher and watched.
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 underlying language of the digital by overlaying ASCII text images onto 3D models and even decoding that code into audio using Google Translate.
Text becomes texture.
Code becomes sound.
The hidden becomes visible, audible, and tactile.
This process dismantles the illusion of smooth, seamless virtual space. It reminds us that the digital realm is always built from raw instructions, letters, and numbers—materials with their own politics and histories of control. Each letter and symbol becomes a building block that doesn’t just shape surfaces, but meaning, power, and authorship.
How Do You Play?
Unlike conventional games, Text Textures does not allow direct control over the avatar. Instead, you play as a kind of voice-of-god, entering text commands that shape the world around them.
The primary codes are:
stairs – creates a staircase the character can climb
platform – generates a floating surface to cross gaps
Each word you type becomes literal terrain. Language becomes level design. The game makes visible what is usually hidden: the translation of text into 3D form.
By limiting the player to these minimal commands, Text Textures foregrounds its central question: Is this control, or is this authorship? Is the player truly free, or just another writer bound by the rules of code?
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.
