Ellinger, TX (2018);

Ellinger, TX is a durational generative video artwork, based on a real small town that is situated on the intersection of two major interstate highways between Austin and Houston, TX. Although once a farming community, Ellinger now makes the majority of its income in the town’s two gas stations when travelers stop to refuel.

This version of Ellinger has been cut off from its highway routes, as well as the rest of the world- the characters that live in this town are in a micro-landscape, bordered in much the same way that many games-spaces are surrounded by invisible walls. Narratively non-explicit, it is unclear whether Ellinger has been cut from the world via a catastrophic event, or if it simply exists in a singular system of its own logic where there is no more outside. The content of this town is also built of digital creative-commons 3d models, pointing towards tropes of recycling and reuse in narratives of survival outside of commerce and larger connective societal systems.

Ellinger, TX, is a piece of software that runs itself- a simulation of a town removed from the world. As the simulation is run, the ‘characters’ of the town develop habits, preferences, and friendships. Ellinger, TX, used to stream on twitch.tv.