Chasing Rainbows_Interactive environment / UEFN game prototype_ 2024

Developed within the World Building Fellowship by Epic Games and 3Lateral

Chasing Rainbows is an interactive digital environment developed as an extension of my earlier exhibition and moving-image project of the same title. Initially conceived through animation and painting, the work explored the figure of a digital avatar moving through an abstract, simulated utopia — a space of pursuit, repetition and suspended desire. The video game adaptation transforms this visual world into an experiential environment, allowing the viewer to enter and navigate it directly.

Built within the Unreal Engine / UEFN ecosystem, the project situates the player on an imaginary floating island suspended in the clouds. Amorphic forms derived from my paintings hover, shift and reorganise around the player, forming a fragile micro-world somewhere between landscape, organism and dream. Rather than functioning as a conventional game, the work offers a space of slow exploration, atmospheric perception and introspection.

The island operates as a temporary refuge: a soft, unstable ecosystem separated from the pressures of the external world. Yet this refuge is not entirely peaceful. Its floating condition suggests both freedom and dislocation, while its endless horizon evokes the ambivalence of escapism — the desire to withdraw from reality, but also the impossibility of fully escaping it. In this sense, Chasing Rainbows reflects on digital space as a form of shelter, projection and psychological survival.

The work anticipates concerns that became central in my later projects, including The Dream, The Dream XR and Vestige – The Warm: the construction of speculative environments, the relation between body and landscape, and the emergence of digital worlds as fragile ecologies. Here, immersion is not used to simulate reality, but to create a poetic micro-environment in which movement, colour, atmosphere and perception become the primary materials of experience.

By translating painting into an interactive world, Chasing Rainbows challenges the hierarchy between image and space, observer and participant. The player does not progress toward a fixed goal, but moves through a landscape of suspended forms, where nothing is stable and everything remains in a state of gentle transformation.