In the 1971 experimental landscape film, La Région Centrale, atop a remote mountain in North Quebec, artist Michael Snow shot his footage with a camera attached to a robotic arm programmed to never rotate the same way twice. The result of the camera’s programatic movement oscillates between moments of representation and abstraction, overwhelming the viewer’s everyday sense of landscape with a cosmic and non-human perspective of space and time.

La Région Decentralized is an infinite, self-playing video game remix of Snow’s seminal film by new media artist Rick Silva. In this piece, Silva digitally recreates the setting of the original film within a virtual game environment. Unlike the original film which runs only 180 minutes, the video game never reaches a conclusion. Silva’s use of new media technology not only builds upon Snow’s ideas by removing the everyday sense of fixed horizons, and movement through space and time, but also subverts the playability of video games.