Windows (Studies on Breaking Immersion) consists of two photographs printed on transparent adhesive film and applied to the sliding windows of a domestic kitchen. The images come from Studies on Breaking Immersion, an ongoing series made using the photography tools built into various videogames, these two specifically coming from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft Quebec, 2018) and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (Respawn Entertainment, 2023).
Photo modes work by pausing the game’s rendering and running a separate camera simulation on top of it. The two systems don’t always agree so things often mess up. Depth of field behaves chaotically, geometry peeks through flat surfaces which have turned essentially into layer masks, creating visual glitches that you wouldn’t want to see while playing, but that I like to see while photographing :) some of this is called z-fighting, a rendering artifact that occurs when two surfaces occupy the same depth on the z-axis, and the buffer can’t determine which one is in front
The work re-stages the digital glitch in the physical. When slid apart, each image stands on its own, but when brought together they negotiate visibility in overlap, neither of them fully yielding to the other.
