Joaquina Salgado
SDLE
(Simulacion de lo esencial)
INSTALLATION/ VIDEO GAME
2021
Simulación de lo esencial is a digital dream of nature. A video game installation where an aquatic being hatches from an egg and explores a synthetic world—a place that gestures toward nature but can never fully become it.
Borrowing visual and emotional cues from dreamcore, vapor aesthetics, and internet nostalgia, SDLE builds an ambient lore. Not a story with plot, but a feeling that something happened—or could have. Water becomes interface. Nature, a beautiful façade. You are inside a curated fiction of the natural world, too harmonious to be real.
Like a YouTube compilation of liminal pools or AI-generated gardens, this simulation reflects a collective desire for “essential” experiences in a hyper-mediated environment. It raises a question:
What does nature look like once filtered through decades of screens?
The game invites you to press play on SimulacionDeLoEsencial.exe. To swim through empty yet lush virtual spaces, to experience beauty designed for emotional effect—clean, slow, peaceful. But always too smooth. Too sterile.
Like a memory that was never yours.
This is not a critique of technology—it’s a feeling of entanglement. The player becomes part of the dream machine. A ghost swimming through lush renders, seeking something real in the artificial, and maybe never finding it.
From the time we have inhabited the watery environment until now, nature consists in mutating, but we still represent the nature by a romantic idea of peace and durability. This installative videogame brings us closer to the idea of representation and interaction of nature from a superficial and aestheticized place.
"I felt the vertigo of technology changing my soul. I am like a ghost in a dream machine. I just want to go back to my water roots." — SimulacionDeLoEsencial.Intro
From the time we have inhabited the watery environment until now, nature consists in mutating, but we still represent the nature by a romantic idea of peace and durability. This installative videogame brings us closer to the idea of representation and interaction of nature from a superficial and aestheticized place.
Exhibition “No existe tierra más allá ”
Chela. Buenos Aires Argentina.
From abstraction to an aquatic world, this installation invites us to think about classic dichotomies that continue to fill everyday life with contradictions, despite being widely discussed in different spheres.
The idea that we have about the artificial is disarmed when we try to define it, just as the natural environment is totally raversed by cybernetics, yet we continue to exalt a romantic and modern idea of a romantic and modern idea of a nature that we never live with,but which we turn into a symbol.
Our environment presents itself as a hybrid for the artificial concept, but in truth it is our human nature that is at play between the manipulation of the environment and the body's adaptation to it. From the time we have inhabited the watery environment until now, nature consists in mutating.
The installation proposes a place to play, a specific place to immerse oneself in an abstract and virtual world.
At the same time, to play in order to think, in the constant exercise of exploiting contradictions and disarming them.
Text: Merlina Rañi
The idea that we have about the artificial is disarmed when we try to define it, just as the natural environment is totally raversed by cybernetics, yet we continue to exalt a romantic and modern idea of a romantic and modern idea of a nature that we never live with,but which we turn into a symbol.
Our environment presents itself as a hybrid for the artificial concept, but in truth it is our human nature that is at play between the manipulation of the environment and the body's adaptation to it. From the time we have inhabited the watery environment until now, nature consists in mutating.
The installation proposes a place to play, a specific place to immerse oneself in an abstract and virtual world.
At the same time, to play in order to think, in the constant exercise of exploiting contradictions and disarming them.
Text: Merlina Rañi