IRL
Emotional Futures

May 2023

Online Experience

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Emotional Futures is a web-based game that invites players to invest in their emotional future through interactions with friends. After each exchange, players evaluate their emotional output, turning them into liquid currencies: Blood, Sweat and Tears. These feed each player's unique Emoxy — an alchemicalAlchemy Alchemy is an ancient practice of transmutation wherein the state of a person or object is altered. It is often associated with natural philosophy and early chemistry, as well as religion and medicine. By mixing different materials and liquids, alchemists created substances designed to cure diseases, produce new materials or improve existing ones, and were even said to have the power to make humans immortal. virtual creature that evolves with every level. The Emoxy accompanies players on their journey, inviting them to continue investing in their own growth while at the same time questioning the game’s logic. This situates the game in critical proximity to self-improvement apps (like mindfulness or wellbeing applications) that measure and gamify personal development. The more players interact with Emotional Futures, the more they are encouraged to reflect on the ways in which technologies are used to manipulate and monetise their emotions.

Emotional Futures was conceived during The Communes, a hackathonHackathonHackathons are events that bring together people with different skill sets to work on a collective engineering or computer programming project. These projects are usually done in small groups to either create new software or improve an existing one. organised in 2021 by Black Swan, an artist-led DAODAOAn acronym for 'decentralised autonomous organisation,’ DAOs are organisations that distribute decision-making power and ownership to their community using blockchain technology. The idea here is to make businesses or organisations more democratic by reducing the power that one person has over the entity’s direction or funds. DAOs largely remain speculative at present, particularly in terms of how they use smart contracts to facilitate automated processes that remove the need for human intervention.. The event modelled creative ways of using and distributing limited resources pledged by cultural partners including LAS. IRL came together as an artist collective during the event, and was supported by LAS in the realisation of Emotional Futures, their first artwork.