Do The NPCs Hear The Simulated Wind

Year

2026

Country

Thailand

Duration

20 mins

Setup

4PCs, Aluminum profiles structure

Date

4 July 2026

Venue

Virtual Media Lab, 4th Floor, TCDC Bangkok (The Grand Postal Building)

For

STACK

Exhibition

PATCH NOTES THAT REFUSE A SETTLED WORLD

Curatorial Role

Co-curator, as Stack

What happens when games become sites of archaeological listening? As preservation initiatives like Internet Archive work to save digital culture, this investigation addresses the acoustic worlds embedded in games—procedurally generated soundscapes, layered atmospheres, hidden environmental recordings—that risk being lost over time, harder to archive as new techniques like ray-tracing reshape how virtual worlds are rendered.

If we field record to capture the soundscapes of the real world, shouldn't we do the same for digital simulation sites?

This practice treats game worlds as sonic landscapes worth excavating. Not playing. Listening. Revealing the world-building beneath the surface.

Do The NPCs Hear the Simulated Wind: four stations, raw sound to composed music.

Conceptual Framework and Context

Contemporary immersive games have quietly become sophisticated acoustic environments. Beneath their surfaces, procedural systems compose the world in real time, weather that shifts pressure and wind, ecosystems that breathe and call, populations that murmur and move. Much of this sound originates in actual field recordings: captured material from the physical world, re-embedded into the virtual.

The systems that generate these sounds: weather, ecology, population, dialogue, material physics representing a form of invisible compositional architecture. They are designed to be felt but not examined.

This practice inverts the intended relationship with play. Rather than inhabiting these worlds as a participant, we enter them as listeners, moving through engineered environments with the attention of a field recordist, extracting, cataloguing, and re-contextualising the sounds that constitute a game's hidden atmosphere.

Virtual Field Recording

extends the tradition of acoustic ecology (Schafer's soundscape theory) into virtual space. Where field recordists once captured vanishing soundscapes of the physical world, this practice turns to immersive game environments. The practice inverts the act of play into an act of listening. Game environments become field sites treating virtual worlds as archaeological sites.

Organised by STACK and Team Stimulant , in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Thailand , with support from Thai Film Archive , Office of the Prime Minister, Creative Economy Agency (CEA), Virtual Media Lab, immertech, and REAL Bangkok.