Building The Faketrix

I have slowly been developing an immersive world building experience based in the Faketrix Universe, which is the fictional world in which almost all my art work exists.

It started with the Sculpt Factory, a project where I built a factory in my second hand wooden shed at the bottom of my garden, I built the sets, wrote the scripts, the products, costumes and then played every character who worked there.

I had at the time an alter ego who had always been there, pushing at the seems, created as a part of me who could be creative, but it turned out that SoUR SiMON was a villain, a serial procrastinator, I never really had a place for SiMON to exist, but the Sculot Factory seemed a perfect place to host Alter Egos, and so I started calling myself an alter ego artist, creating different egos to explore different parts of my art practice.

I created Instagram profiles for each alter ego and they all interacted with each other in comment sections as well as with fake company profiles from other faketrix businesses. This practice slowly built up the lore around the Faketrix Universe.

But so far I've been playing by myself, and now I'd like to open up the Faketrix universe to a wider participating audience, giving a platform for people to create their own alter egos and create without limits within a creative space.

It will work like a role playing game (RPG) where you create a character and tell stories within a fictional world.

As a central hub, this website will hold host to an interactive base, The Faketrix Town Centre, where you can enter shops, galleries, the daily lost post office and the town hall. Each property with its own stories to uncover and their own reason for existing in the digital space.

Forums will allow 'residents' to talk about their creations with other alter egos and artists and even join the Faketrix town council to help develop the Faketrix and decide on the continued narrative of the wider world, 'The Overall Narrative'.

Ive been slowly designing the Faketrix Town Centre..

At this stage they're mostly just ideas on what it might look like.

Le Cabuzier was an architect and he noticed that Jazz artists can come together without a plan and create something that had never been heard before. Because they mastered the tools of their craft, which allowed them to come together in harmony in such a spontaneous way and create beautiful music, he wondered if architects would ever master their tools that allowed people to come together and create architecture that had never been seen before.

During the first year of my Masters Degree I worked on a collaborative project with other masters students, we were all from different courses, illustration, fine art, product design, vehicle design and me on the moving image pathway, it felt like an incredibly creative and harmonic experience, we created a 15 minute film with a pretty heavy concept, as well as a 3D digital environment ( The Fine Art Bargain Store) filled with fake products that we designed and made into 3D mockups. We created adverts that were dropped into the film and it came together through an outpour of creative collaboration, this felt like something Le Corbusier was talking about, maybe the closest Ive ever felt to what I believe he was talking about.

This is what I hope for the Faketrix Universe, a platform for artists to explore and create in a collaborative nature, in creative harmony.