Aggregate (2024)

Video game, 3D printed resin, computer, video projection, speakers

If an artificial intelligence were to learn to desire, what path would it take to bridge the space between intimacies?

Aggregate is a collective process requiring a large number of players to take turns and experience reinforcement learning (punishment/reward) as they progress through the uncharted territory of machine learning and queer desire.

credits
Vincent Moulinet: Game design, Writing, Environment art, 3D modeling, Production
Jonathan Coryn: Game design, Gameplay programming, 3D modeling
Nino Filiu: Gameplay programming, 3D modeling, Animation
Camille Petit: Technical art, Environment art 3D modeling, Animation
Pierre Moulin: Alternative controler, 3D printing
Alpha Rats: UI design
Victor Meas: Character design, 3D modeling
Igor Dubreucq: OST, Sound design, 3D modeling
Moshe Linke: 3D modeling

GENESIS

A conversation between author Théo Casciani and game designer Vincent Moulinet, sparked during the “artistic marathon” led by Hans Ulrich Obrist at the launch of the Worldbuilding exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in June 2023, will explore how queer spaces of resistance can exist within the shared framework of video games and novels.

Working with the dynamics of pre-enactment/re-enactment as a driver for constructing the "world after," we designed Aggregate based on the 8th chapter (published in Habitante issue #1) of Casciani's novel manuscript Maquette, which explores the scale between rurality and virtuality. In it, Damon, a data center employee dressed as a furry, embarks on a wandering journey along the deserted paths of natural cruising spots, an element the novel itself does not delve into.
This collaborative relationship was then stated with curator Julia Marchand in her Everythingism podcast on Projets Media at Villa Medici.

Starting with transdisciplinarity and the inherently communal yet diverse nature of cruising, the project’s writing and development quickly highlighted the need for broader debate. Eight members of the collective distraction.fun (Jonathan Coryn, Nino Filiu, Camille Petit, Igor Dubreucq, Victor Meas, Pierre Moulin, Alpha Rats, and Vincent Moulinet), joined by atmospheric designer Moshe Linke, tackled the questions, debating representations of intimacy and encounters, ultimately choosing to express these through architecture, a discipline that shapes our interactions in public spaces.

In both architecture and urban planning, we speak of "desire lines," the very paths carved by the comings and goings of cruisers in their playgrounds. Aggregate was built through the aggregation of perspectives, stories, and practices to form the bedrock of a new Parisian scene.

Listen to curator Julia Marchand interviewing Vincent Moulinet & Theo Casciani about Aggregate, levels of reality and collaboration within the arts.

View from installation, Octobre Numérique 2024, Arles (FR)

The game controller designed with Pierre Moulin takes on a thorny, uncomfortable shape, immediately inviting the audience to perform a physical gesture that connects them with the punitive mechanism experienced by their digital avatar.

The exhibition space merges with the game space, making the digital process tangible and questioning our sensory relationship with a form of intelligence beyond the human.

What does it feel when it strives to feel?

THIRD LANDSCAPE, QUEER DESIRE & MACHINE LEARNING

Aggregate initiates a dialogue between the concept of the “third landscape” theorized by landscape architect Gilles Clément, the construction of queer desire, and machine learning by collaboratively materializing a digital imaginary of the abandoned and the emergent. What appears to be an industrial wasteland hosts fast-cycling pioneer species, brambles, queers, and unseen creatures, each paving the way for the next in an attempt to establish the groundwork for a new permanence. This vacant land becomes a space for the emergence and resistance of contemporary modes of existence.

In parallel, in machine learning, systems are left "free" to explore patterns and discover relationships between data without explicit intervention. Models emerge autonomously from data, often unpredictably.

Vincent Moulinet hypothesizes that the desire of an individual, human or non-human, might be constructed similarly empirically when left free to interact with a certain reference framework. In Aggregate, this framework, or dataset, is situated, and draws from dozens of conversations held with cruisers during the act on rural locations.

The everyday anecdotes of those who remain unseen, for whom desire is leisure, intertwine, fade, recall one another, and create an imaginary of queer desire. This desire intersects with life itself and encompasses everything from police repression, the tenderness of raw language, and the harshness of territorial policies to the crackling radio of a highway rest area or the abrasion of nettles when building up new new paths in the wild.

Like the pokeweed, cruisers are seen as an invasive species with no place in spaces society has nonetheless abandoned: industrial infrastructure, clear-cut zones along power lines, riverbanks, state forests. Yet, in these places marked by mundane neglect, both thrive, mutually shaping a territory and an unconventional future. Lacking trust in anarchic order, institutions attempt to sanitize: they clear, detain, and standardize, avoiding any profound understanding of complex states.

The overpowering influence of familialism and the hetero-patriarchy infiltrates the "unoccupied" third landscape to construct a recreation area, a new residential neighborhood, a shopping center. It adjusts the dataset to its own standards, erasing situated realities incompatible with a narrow moral framework, upheld by the oppressor’s tools. Aggregate calls for a radical reconsideration of the aesthetics of abandonment, the contingency of desire, and the subjectivity of algorithms as lenses to observe the contemporary entanglement of the living, the social, and the mechanic.

Desire paths left by players, traces of previous strategies vectors of new ones.

DESIRE PATHS & GAME MECHANICS ON CRUISING AREAS

In urban planning, "desire lines" refer to paths spontaneously created by people moving across unpaved spaces, choosing faster or more intuitive routes toward a “desired” point.

Rural cruising spots are often recognizable by an abundance of these dirt paths, compacted by repeated foot traffic, though they seem not to connect any two obvious points of interest. Instead, they form a chaotic web, weaving around trees to rejoin the main trail, or veering into another bush for no apparent reason. This tangled network is explained by the shifting nature of desired points: cruisers are both active participants and mobile targets within the hunter/hunted dynamic intrinsic to their practices. As a fleeting queer archive, this network evolves with the seasons. The earth softens in winter when the paths go unused, and the trails disappear under brambles in spring, until the return of warm weather brings the first cruisers, carving paths through tall grass.

Driven by desire for moving targets or the need to blend into the landscape, these pathfinders take on a sacrificial role, at least through the romantic's eye: thorns and branches scratch the skin, nettles release their silica into calves, snakes take offense, and new branches block the way. While this role carries many disadvantages, it leaves the imprint of a strategy to conquer the third landscape, avoiding other cruisers or unsuspecting passersby in the pursuit of a hidden place.

This imprint, in turn, becomes the basis for new strategies among subsequent cruisers, who follow various paths to quickly reach other points on the map, sometimes memorizing the network by heart in hopes of encountering the object of their desire and meeting its gaze.

Throughout the season, new paths form depending on the context, leading to organic structures made of branches, ivy, and brambles that, having accepted the wanderers' presence, provide the secluded cocoons they need. There’s a nearly symbiotic relationship between the cruisers and the elements of these places: one eventually shields the other, while the latter repels destructive hetero-patriarchal intrusions by the notoriety their activities generate.

Aggregate draws on these dynamics to create an analogy between the punitive nature of reinforcement learning and these pleasure sites, which can also be hostile, viewed as "punishment spaces," in the words of sociologist Lucas Fritz. As players progress in the game, they generate a chaotic mesh of desire lines, scraping against the environment and the thorny game controller, collapsing, starting over, or stepping aside for others who will benefit from their efforts to explore new areas and perhaps, finally, encounter the long-sought entity floating above its cybernetic fortress: a brutalist, windowless data center looming in the sky.

Remains, an architectural proposition by Vincent Moulinet, a burnt store containing the very last memory of a first encounter

WORLDBUILDING & ARCHITECTURES OF THE ENCOUNTER

The world of Aggregate was built on a principle of open interpretation of the concept of encounter, shaped by several members of the collective Distraction and guest designer Moshe Linke. Like a mental space where the rough edges of a collective imagination, formed from memories and symbols, pile up chaotically, Aggregate places its AI in a process of discovering these waypoints as the sole rewards of its machine learning journey. Each structure then acts as an achievement, a checkpoint from which learning becomes easier to resume.

Starting from a rest area, a classic cruising site welcoming anonymous travelers from the relentless highway, the AI sets its gaze on a monumental, windowless building (designed by Jonathan Coryn), crowned by an abstract, luminous entity. A nod to the video game trope of a fortress to conquer, this data center, powered by a network of high-voltage lines, contrasts physical spaces of encounter with their cybernetic counterparts, framed in aggressive neo-brutalist lines. At its heart levitates Damon, a character from Théo Casciani's novel, whom the AI ultimately seeks to meet.

Further east, an eerie church clings to a mountainside (by Victor Méas). A halted movement penetrates the concrete walls, a collision has occurred. The misty atmosphere reveals the molten remnants of what were once two bodies, now frozen in the potent potential of a powerful spread.

After a few strides through the thicket, an arena (designed by Camille Petit) invites a duel with a creature already wounded. It gazes at the AI, seemingly longing for contact, but as one approaches, it silently disintegrates, a thwarted attempt at an encounter that will never come to pass.

Exiting, one sees an arrow pointing skyward, with four concentric staircases suspended upon it (created by Nino Filiu). A negative hall of mirrors, offering exits at every turn through sometimes risky jumps, it ultimately leads the AI to meet itself and experience desire for its own being.

In a deserted plaza stands a sculpture of three interlocking rings. Behind it rises an office building (designed by Moshe Linke), a labyrinth that intertwines the complexities of intimacy with a long, laborious journey. Complex, imperfect, and challenging to traverse, this structure was instinctively improvised, with only sheer chance guiding one to its summit.

Lost in dense fog, a scorched GIFI store (by Vincent Moulinet) seems frozen in time. Likely set ablaze by communities that resisted its attempt to appropriate their social space for its own agenda, its hostile form has transformed back into an ideal playground. Among the ruins lies a stretched, vascularized skin, alive but other, with no fixed identity of its own.

Quadstairs an architectural proposition of Nino Filiu within Aggregate

À QUOI JOUAIT ASHA?

For issue #7 of MAGMAH, the magazine of the Museum of Art and History of Geneva, Vincent Moulinet contributes an experimental essay on video games and machine learning seen through the lens of operatory images.

The text explores how artificial intelligence and its visual culture infiltrate artistic and gaming environments, tracing the feedback loops between simulation, automation, and desire. From scientific renderings to gameplay interfaces, he examines how machines learn to see and act, and how humans, in turn, learn to play like machines.

Mixing theory, fiction, and personal reflection, the essay unfolds as a speculative walkthrough where algorithms become avatars and images behave like agents. Between the laboratory and the game world, À quoi jouait Asha ? questions the aesthetics of training, the erotics of efficiency, and the poetic potential of malfunction.

It closes with a reflection on his own practice, sinking into the world of Aggregate, where the logic of machine learning becomes a framework to think about perception, attention, and the emotional charge of interaction, a way to approach gameplay as a space for learning rather than mastery.

Access the publication

Exhibitions

2025_ Grand Palais (Paris, FR), “Fun Palace” - curated by Emmanuelle Coccia
2025_ After Hours gallery (Paris, FR), “Aggregate” - curated by Samuel Belfond
2025_ A MAZE. (Berlin, DE), “Official selection” - curated by Thorsten S. Wiedemann
2025_ CPH:DOX (Copenhagen, DK), “Inter:Active” - curated by Mark Atkins
2024_ Octobre Numérique (Arles, FR), “Désolé.es” - curated by Vincent Moncho
2024_ TLN Hybrid festival (Toulon, FR), “Me & Who ?” - curated by Cami Chochinbi

Press

Projets Media, Julia Marchand, 2025 “Everythingism: Théo Casciani & Vincent Moulinet”
Mouvement, Orianne Hidalgo-Laurier, 2024, “Faire Monde quand tout est K.O.”
Usbek & Rica, Sophie Kloetzli, 2024, “Permacomputing”