Crawl MULTI LEVEL[484,319]

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Travess Smalley

2024

NFT/Digital

Description

Expressing how code generates complex meaning through simple operations, Travess Smalley’s Crawl (Multilevel) uses unusual interactivity and immersion to involve its audience in the Python-coded work’s process of formation.

Crawl (Multilevel) functions as an assemblage of smaller Crawl pieces, collectively resembling the maps of Atari-era video games. Yet the work can never be seen in its entirety. From a top-down perspective, we navigate a flashing square—our avatar—across a vast gray field using WASD or arrow-key commands. As we move, the gray gradually clears to reveal blue warp zones, yellow doors, mauve rivers, turquoise symbols, and other abstract elements whose meanings remain uncertain. Smalley’s world is a topographical map of something ultimately unknowable.

There is no defined goal to the exploration beyond movement itself. The act of navigation becomes absorbing, as if our participation completes the work—Smalley its designer, we its unfolding process. While Crawl (Multilevel) adopts the visual language of a video game, it withholds any clear objective, leaving us to invent purpose through our own engagement.