Lisa and Matt Bethancourt of Mouse and the Billionaire

Pando

The 3rd annual Whaaat!? Festival for experimental games and interactive art will take place in the fall of 2020 at the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder. The festival is open to the public for a "pay what you want" donation. In 2018, its inaugural year, it drew members of the local community, as well as artists and game developers in the region, looking to explore boundary pushing games and their potential as a medium for artistic interaction. The 2019 keynote speaker is video game artist, Jason Rohrer, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

If we have limited awareness of the distant past, how can we possibly imagine the remote future? How can we understand our choices, harmful or helpful, that ripple out beyond the edges of our lives? We need a bridge to connect us to what came before so that we may have some agency and over what comes next. 

Fortunately, this bridge exists. It is less than a day's drive from Denver, Colorado and it is alive. The bridge we suggest is an aspen clone called Pando, one of the largest and oldest living organisms on earth. This forest thrived for many thousands of years and hopefully, depending on our collective decisions, it will endure longer than any of us. 

This piece presents the relatively short lifespans of humans adjacent to Pando's chronology, inferring that we are one part of a long and intertwined story. Two participants, seated in modified rocking chairs, control their journey through a visual narrative of the past 10,000 years of Pando's life, bearing witness to the passage of comets, volcanoes, the extinction of large mammals, and the impact of humans. This piece is an invitation to reflect on time beyond the span of our lives.