51 Personae: Deep Simulator

The horizon has disappeared. Nothing is certain. Locations, characters, relationships – alluncertain. Sudden dialogues, unidentified objects, fleeting companions, elusive clues, hidden passages, along with numerous fractures, doubts, jests, and unverifiable legends... In this alternate space, interwoven are the memories and dilemmas of different dreamers, seemingly all leading us to the same question...

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.

The sleeve wrapped around this volume is a deep abyss of colorful noise generated by code, together with the multihued laser holographic display, it foreshadows the complex qualities of “in-betweeness”. The ivory paper and the bitmap font recall the 90s when the printing industry went through digital transformation, another intermediate state.

Size: 110 × 160 mm

Pages: 296

Language: Chinese & English

Binding: thread-sewn soft cover

Co-published by Tabular Rasa Gallery (London) and 51 personae (Shanghai)

ISBN: 978-1-5272-9632-9

Author: Ag

Editor: Chen Yun

English Translator: Jude Keeler

English Proofreader: Cathy Keeler

English Editor: Gigi Chang

Book design: Mira Ying

Display typeface: Dinkie Bitmap, designed by Willie Liu

Price: 26 USD