The Facility
2023
Video game, interactive physical installation
The game can be freely downloaded at mathiaswestbrook.itch.io/the-facility
In The Facility, the player is placed in a seemingly man-made complex of connected rooms and hallways that host various abandoned (yet seemingly still functional) technological installations contrasted with fleshy bodily surfaces. The game is primarily centered around the fictional story of a failed tech startup that was set out to revolutionize simulation and management technologies through gamification, but with ultimately vague and uncertain goals. The game itself is set in sort of in media res, the very moment after this corporation ran out of funding, leaving behind a physical locale for the player to explore.
The worldbuilding of The Facility is directly based on a neoliberal inversion of Project Cybersyn (short for "cybernetic synergy”), a real life historical moment from the 1970s socialist Chile, shortly before the coup in ‘73. It was a vision of a worker’s state managed by cybernetic simulation technologies and direct government-to-worker communication, ideas that predate the later conceptions of computers and internet but from a purely socialist perspective.
The project was destroyed by fascism and forgotten by the subsequent neoliberal agenda and was never developed beyond a somewhat scenographic installation of the central Cybersyn Operations Room. Its aesthetics have defined what utopian sci-fi is meant to look like in popular media, to the point of its retrofuturistic designs having an almost generic quality to them. The bodily imagery that can be found encroaching the otherwise hard darkened surfaces of The Facility allude to the interior of a fragmented organism, an invasive element referencing the original Cybersyn’s allegorical models of the cybernetic nature in biological organisms.
The game takes inspiration from the established video game trope of environmental storytelling through its surroundings and interactable objects. Notably, the player is able to find various “data logs” written by former employees of The Facility scattered throughout the main level layout. These function as small fragments of lore, creating the patchwork of a non-linear story. However, the player can discover a contrasting room: a ghostly recreation of the true Cybersyn Opsroom with historical knowledge instead presented as a centralized “wall of text” together with archival imagery.
Cybersyn ultimately represents a lost socialist futurology wherein many of its fragmented innovations “haunt” the neoliberal technological contemporary, yet in twisted and privatized forms - decentralized visions based on individualism, profit and corporate hierarchy. A far call from the egalitarian promise of Project Cybersyn.
Interactive installation:
155 x 97 x 195cm.
Video Game playing on PC connected to UHD TV, sound, metal, plastic, trackball mouse, numpad
The Facility original soundtrack by Marcus Skjold Pedersen: