Fotograf Magazine

Baby Island Simulator is a little game for encounters with a baby. To play this game you need a human baby who cannot yet walk, placed on a large isolated surface like a bed or a kitchen island. You also need the presence of sympathetic adults. Now you do nothing. The game is painful at first because Baby instinctively expects an adult gaze and your adultness must fight the instinct to give attention back to Baby. After a few seconds, Baby looks worried, fidgets around, reaches for something, fails, looks at you hopelessly, and inevitably begins to cry. You must remain indifferent. From Baby’s perspective, everything breaks down. The game everyone agreed to play since birth is suddenly without the right players or behaviors. But don’t worry, Baby isn’t a mechanism that risks repeating a single behavior to death. Baby is a complex organism. The crying eventually stops. Faced with an openended game called living, Baby begins to play with what its got. Sometimes Baby even invents new ways of getting attention, or turns objects into adults. Where did that come from? You can barely hide your delight. But you must keep silent, emit no love, and let the game continue to evolve. You observe how the mismatch between habituated ability and novel situation produces ridiculous, pathetic, undignified, creative behaviors, all of which are irreducible to any one aspect of the game. You can’t explain it, but what has happened here has emerged truthfully.