Possession

Abstract

University of WashingtonAbstract Possession Umut Gunduz Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Afroditi Psarra Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) Possession is a large-scale two-room mechatronic installation constituting the doctoral dissertation and general examination work of a PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington (2026). The work theorizes grief, intergenerational transmission, and the labor of memory through the structural logic of play. The installation’s central formal proposition is the unplayable game as the nervous architecture for mechatronic systems: a framework in which the suspension of a game engine becomes the generative condition of physical action rather than its failure. The game runs without a player. The visitor’s body inhabits the space the game describes rather than navigating through a screen. This formal inversion — from the walking simulator of an earlier work to the visitor standing inside the game world itself — tracks the phenomenological shift from grief as navigable experience to grief as atmosphere and condition. The work makes four contributions to the field of digital and experimental media arts. First, the autonomous game engine as physical controller: Godot managing a distributed network of Arduino hardware, coin mechanisms, stepper motors, and projection systems without human intervention. Second, the gamified space without the game aesthetic: installation logic derived from game engines applied to physical space alongside the visual grammar of games, connecting the work to the lineage of fairground, ghost train, and penny arcade practice. Third, the diagrammatic narrative: the correspondence table as an anterior formal structure the reader descends through rather than a sequential argument they follow. Fourth, the immigrant worlding as formal condition: the lore-carrying body entering the institutional enclosure and running its own cosmology indifferently within it. The research emerges from the perspective of a child born of immigrant parents fleeing war, finding in game engines, mechatronics, and digital fabrication the tools to build a luminous arcade of grievances that the practice has always, it seems, been reaching toward. What remains legible after relapse into an archive and the resultant revisiting, recycling, and processing of the uncovered material is the installation's final form – a diagrammatic garden; a cartography of grief.