“Deep Simulator is a cyberdrama-novel with layers of stories generated through reader interaction. Based on a namesake video game, it is a collaborative experiment between artists aaajiao and the author Ag, which began during the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. The story stems from themes related to player identity, the multiverse and the breaking down of inter-dimensional walls. The exposure of karmic chains, the ideological rupture between various movements, melancholia, death, the final struggle, accelerationism, the inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, all foreshadow an ominous sense of change looming ahead.
Like the virtual meta-game experiment that came before it, this book is hard to define. Ag blends myth, science fiction and multi-media reality into a seemingly unconventional spatio-temporal dimension. Upon opening the book, the reader becomes the player, and in the experience of reading-wandering-selecting, engages in an indeterminate journey of in-betweenness.
Deep Simulator is an organic, living, long-term project, and this publication is one of its reincarnations on its transition through the next dimensional wall – from a whimsical, pie-in-the-sky script to an outlandish indie game, then to a virtual game which was made into a physical book written in two languages with a unique design.”
An experimental novel that invites the reader to take part, edited by Chen Yun and Gigi Chang, design by Yira Ming, translation by Jude Keeler, bilingual edition in English and Chinese.
Soft cover in dust jacket, 16 x 10 cm, 296 pages, London Shanghai 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5272-9632-9
