Game by Tim Tsang

Music and sound by Patrick Behnke and Tim Tsang

"BITCOIN HERO PLAYS PLATO'S CAVE" is a video non-game which was built to simulate the allegory of Plato's Cave in a 3D playable video game format, where you can control the main character - Bitcoin Hero - who is made of 100% Bitcoin. This video non-game piece, like Plato's Allegory of the Cave - deals with the transition between the 2D to the 3D world, truth, knowledge, reality, social exclusion, silence, loneliness, death, and what is "good" in the world. You might be able to walk through walls :)

*currently under development and may be available on major commercial platforms in the future (Apple store, Steam, Android, Windows...etc)

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Displaced mirror-image, shadows remain intact. Are these bodies human? A black hero, fully branded but without a face, the body is what renders what is visible. Plato regards the sun as what renders all things visible. But what if we were born already seeing, already enlightened, one with the sunlight, and as we climb higher and higher into the cave of blindness we become all the more closer to the pile of bodies above, breathing but ignorant to the human condition?

From the sun onto the fire, and back again. Plato as an abstract god-entity whose existence matters by the Word, not by Plato the Person. If you leave the already-enlightened cave at this point, you fall back onto the mirror-plateau/platform of the Real, lit by the sun. A mirror reflects images of things, but what is a virtual mirror, a digital simulation of a mirror within a simulated world? What is the life of a mirror? is it “less than” which it reflects? Are the images generated inside the virtual mirror a true response of the happenings outside of it? Is it subservient to what is outside, and therefore forever inferior? Is the reflection of the hero less than the hero? Will AI ever have rights?

The mirror image in this simulated world not so much has a life of its own than that it is dyadically bound 2to the hero above in an intensified way, such that it is amplified - faster, stronger, more able, smarter, and exists even a little bit ahead in time, if time was/is indeed linear to begin with.

How we treat nonhumans is as important as how we treat humans, if not more important. If we treated nonhuman entities with the same care that we extend to ourselves in the first place, perhaps it would be illogical or even laughable to treat any fellow human in a “less than” human way, since there is no such thing as “less than human” in the first place. The bacteria inside of our guts is not inferior to us, but we are dyadically bound to each other.

The virtual mirror reminds us that the materiality of the mirror is bound to the materiality of the things in the world, to us, to dead cells, dead bodies, to "inanimate" entities. Another way to speak this is that sentience is not reliant upon the retinal, but what is felt.

The term “entity” is used, so that a “thing” may be a being or organism, but also may be a collection of ideas, a piece of technology, a virtual thing. In this sense, the appearance of Bitcoin (or cryptocurrency at large) technology as a sort of faceless hero arises - namely, some “one”, not necessarily brave or courageous nor of noble character, but who nonetheless fights for a cause, attempting to let money be money, a mere form of exchange between peers and not anything more. If money is truly money, then perhaps humans can also be humans, not more, not less.

The question is less "does it have consciousness", or even "is it capable of feeling?”, but merely “is it capable?” We already know that silence is not neutral, but who knew you could climb nothingness?