N’CHI: Visions of a New World

Jakob Dwight’s new art role playing game, titled N’CHI

It should be said that N’CHI is an art experience and as such it is meant to be reflective — in an artistic and anthropological light — as much as anything, designed to question what “world domination” actually is, and what culture truly is.

N’Chi: Visions of a New World will be a collective art experience and social conversation that will consist of an online strategy game component and a real-world art-making component that will have an overall and ultimate aim of inspiring anthropological reflection, social awareness and enacting international outreach. Online, participants and their nations will respond to a continuum of challenges thrown at them by this hostile new world and fight for their nation’s survival through the strategic management of an energy-based currency.  From there, users will take their avatars offline and into artspace where they will exchange and explore the fictitious cultural forms of their nations – cultural capital – in a series of exhibitions, performances and installations.

Through this kind of innovative gameplay, the N’Chi Projekt as a whole seeks to affect real-world change through the raising of awareness, funds and material support for populations in need of international relief from the ravages of war, famine and natural disasters. In this way, N’Chi as a gesture of social sculpture is an attempt to establish an active flow and conversation between aesthetics and art-making, anthropological reflection, and social outreach.