Jessamine
A downloadable game for Windows
My mom’s sister Jessamine Toste passed away in 2012. She left behind her aggressively colorful oil paintings and a portfolio website. Like all living material, though, her digital website has also run its course and can only be found through searching internet archives. Her online obituary has also been lost. In an attempt to preserve her legacy I made this game: a tombstone, museum, and fragmented memory.
Through navigating the living and dead web I am thinking of my own online footprint’s temporality. But more broadly, loss: image degradation, earliest memories, and past lives. This game uses unearthed old photos and ripped 3D models as well as creations, scripts, and textures of my own. Although the story is open-ended, the player's goal is to collect all eight ashtrays.
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Touching and engaging take on digital preservation. Thank you so much for sharing her work with us!
<3
playing this game is making me quite a bit emotional right now... the whole thing about... her passing away in as long ago as 2012.. almost an entire decade... and to know there was literally any trace of her artwork left behind on the internet to cherish and keep rlly adds onto it.... im gunna be thinking about this all day.. i luv yr art and everything you make, especially this, and yr website too.
Tysm! I'm always very flattered when anyone plays any of my games. :,) I wonder how many undiscovered artist websites there are left to be seen. Like sure, my aunt had a Twitter but only posted a singular Tweet that advertised her website lol. Without services like the internet archive who knows how much more we'd be missing out on...
Shit I've been meaning to comment here for a while but I wanted to do it when I finally got around to playing the game... (haven't been on computer for a while)
I love this environment, the gaudy frames and tiered spinning floors... all the floating descriptions... IDK if it's just the ashtrays or wha but it definitely feels somewhat somber to me... like I imagine picking up after her, helping her clean up. Helping preserve the space. It's also funny to have a person w a gun shooting at stuff, in a ways its like doing that FPS thing will make the game more appealing or give it a better chance at being interacted with... or preserved... if that makes sense. I'm just speculating/brainvomiting ofc!! not at all trying to assume your intentions behind anything. Those r just my feelies.
On a different note, the day you posted this it made me think to try and find my dad's old website. I had tried before using internet archive and I could never find it. But I looked it up again and somehow it was there, and I was so surprised. He died back in 2002 so it was wild to be able to find it!!
Anyway I hope to spend more time w this, it's cool! Sorry for the huge block of text!!!
Wow I'm glad this motivated you to find your dad's site, that's super cool! Thru the ashtrays and FPS mechanics I was thinking of morbid/somber ways to depict my memory of her death, how family love is complicated and bittersweet, etc. It's funny to me how some people feel bad for shooting at these paintings, even though all the bullets do is disappear and reveal the paintings' titles. My aunt and grandma (who collected her paintings) were/are religious so I was also considering the history of desecrating art.
I am interested in art-preservation (especially in the digital age) so this project serves as a cheeky exploration of that lol...but also as a cute thing to keep for myself + my family. At first I was worried my grandparents would be offended but they actually really liked the game. My grandma even gave me a picture book of paintings my aunt has never shown or sold, so I will add some of those to this game!