aidan strong

Layers Upon Layers is a multiplayer sand simulator exploring the contradictions of persistent memory. Taking place across a wide landscape, it draws upon swarm dynamics and the legacy of destructible terrain within game worlds to explore group agency at scale. Inspired by the Sorites Paradox—the impossibility of processing geologic time through human memory and language systems—Layers Upon Layers unfurls through the repeated aggregation and deformation of pixels into mountains.

Portaling in through their phones, players interact with Layers Upon Layers by clearing out sections of multicolored sand. By repeatedly digging, tapping, and swiping, they fold into a flow state: preserving, eroding and contributing to the historical topology of the world. The noisy pixel terrain aggregates individual agency into collective behavior, players merging into players merging into landscape.

Pixelated figures fall from the sky, sand grains slide sideways, time gets lo-res, crunchy and striated, a system starts to erode. This is how time and language progress. Worlds defined by objects that have forgotten their own names.

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Photos are from an installation in the lower pit of the Experimental Digital Arts space at University of California, Los Angeles.

Music by Dzidzor Amorin