Out of Bounds is a hybrid audiovisual composition built as an ever-expanding archive of non-human spaces. These environments are generated in complicity with AI-based image synthesis and paired with aural designs inspired partially by the aesthetic of broken transmission. The work exists in multiple forms: as a solo audiovisual performance, as a video installation, and as a modular component within larger collaborative settings, most recently while developing a project together with ensemble hand werk in Cologne. Out of Bounds behaves as a growing system—an ongoing accumulation of liminal virtual spaces.

The title refers to a term used in the gaming community by some adventurous and tech-savvy investigative gamers. “Out-of-bounds” relates to such special areas of a digital map that lie beyond the intended field of players actions. These zones function during development as storage sites or testing grounds, for example. When accessed, they expose the scaffolding of the virtual world and offer an surreal vantage point: a view from outside the game’s designed reality. These are spaces without purpose from the in-game perspective, and it is precisely this purposelessness that makes them alluring. In my view the Out-of-bounds places parallel the contemporary fixation on liminal spaces—locations that are (virtually) present but not meant to be occupied.

Liminality, in this context, is not a threshold leading elsewhere but a suspension without resolution. As Valentina Tanni observes (in her book “Exit Reality”), virtual environments entice us while simultaneously denying the possibility of presence. One can look at them, navigate through them, even generate them, but never inhabit them. This produces a distinct affective state in which the virtual becomes inseparable from anxiety—not as pathology, but as a mode of impossible dwelling. In Out of Bounds, the work traces this condition: environments that exist, but cannot be entered; spaces that can only be approached in perpetual transition; an architecture of transition without arrival.