Digital Kinetic Sculptures

This project, inspired by the YouTube series Car Boys, involved the creation and destruction of kinetic sculptures in the driving game BeamNG.drive (with a few modifications). BeamNG is built to be a vehicle simulator and racing game, allowing its users to customize cars and race and crash them with realistic soft body physics.  It also includes an editor, to allow players to create their own levels and scenarios to race in.  To create this project, I abused the capabilities of the editor to create car-sculptures that often burst into flame immediately or caused the physics engine to severely glitch as soon as the simulation was started.  By exploring conditions in the game that would be considered unlikely for an average user (cars dropped from a great height with 100x gravity, cars existing inside of one another) a space is opened up inside of what is otherwise a relatively standard driving simulator to explore and create new things.  These zones of alternative creative production are extremely important in helping to explore and understand systems.

Click any of the images below to be a taken to a page with screenshots and video of that particular sculpture. Clicking screenshots will open up bigger versions.  The looping videos are muted by default, but I would encourage you to listen to some of them.  Unfortunately these galleries aren't quite working yet on mobile devices.

The Sculptures