Luis Hernandez Galván is an artist currently living in Tijuana where he and Anne-Marie Schleiner are working together on a new collaborative project of interest. Luis Hernandez studied architecture in Mexico City and has a varied artistic practice ranging from work in architecture, installation, writing, videogame interventions as well as public art programming.

Luis Hernandez's latest work Oversaturation is a downloadable videogame commissioned by Rhizome.org and served as a convergent point for an extended email interview conducted throughout the month of March 2005. Oversaturation is a game that can be downloaded from www.ungravity.org. It has two separate systems with different patterns-- the first is a matrix, or the 'players game space' and the second, a set of five random spatial saturating patterns that work as targets to be destroyed. The user passing through these patterns, structures (the target), and can prevent the targets from occupying the whole space, upon which when completed the game ends. Oversaturation copes with the complexities of a structured framework building new platforms for user interaction. Our interview follows Luis Hernandez's interests and ideas on the formal aspects of Oversaturation; his collaboration with Gabriel Acevedo to create the music for this videogame; and the relationship between time and space within the videogame's platform.

While Oversaturation, a game of complex architectural like gridding seems to reflect Luis Hernandez' experience of living in Mexico city; the artist states it is a mere coincidence referencing how spaces, experiences and realities tend to overlap to create new forms of interaction in a similar way that 23 million people's lives interact, merge and collapse everyday.

By producing Oversaturation as a downloadable videogame, Luis Hernandez explores the opportunities of likeness, and interconnectedness between varied experiences of reality and his computer interface. Luis Hernandez comments that his work is "basically driven by what might be a generational issue...: exploring the interactions, parallelisms and divergences between the so called real and virtual worlds, experiences and sets of realities..." Luis Hernandez explains how this platform is explored by choosing videogames for this very reason: "I tried to draw a parallelism between oversaturated realities, in the form of a videogame, a medium I find to be the next step for the interaction between mixed realities..." Luis Hernandez comments his interest in Gltron by using its code source to develop Oversaturation. Also, the artist emphasizes the difference between the user's roles in Oversaturation from the 'classical sense' of first person shooters.

Furthermore, Hernandez adds on the formal elements of Oversaturation are intended "...to be a personal experience and it lacks the part of networked performance on purpose, since, although I find interesting as subject, I feel a there has been current abuse towards it as a concept. Still, I don't discard working on that on a near future." The player in 'Oversaturation' is an active participant who goes through structures to prevent overgrowth. Luis Hernandez states that his choice of interaction in the game was meant to be "mostly ludic, … need[ing] to be intuitive regarding the interaction with the computer." In this way, playfulness in play/gaming is emphasized within a structured frame (videogame, with specific coding) where the user experiences, 'converses', and engages with the medium presented.

The music for Oversaturation was written and executed by Gabriel Acevedo, a person which Luis Hernandez knows, and as a result this relationship enhanced the 'mediated' communication between the game and its corresponding audio tracks, composed as original works. The tracks titled Happy Saturation, Suffocated Mind, an Attack of Structures are "computer-mediated" works composed by Luis Hernandez while in Spain and the U.S.A. Gabriel Acevedo added his artistic talent to these works with his "binary version". The relationship between Hernandez and Acevedo was simple wherein Hernandez asked his colleague to produce: 'a song to mimic your feelings like if you were being swallowed by a horrible system, giving you a kind of slow death, while its exterior form is so cozy and aesthetic, you don't realize what is really happening (happy saturation)…" This image of suffocation was qualified by Luis who adds "… I think [of a] suffocated mind was born on eje central, in Mexico city, trying to make your way to el restaurant de comida corrida, while the street vendors of DVDs piratas and the ones de los periodicos, y de los tacos de canasta, y de los progamas para pe ce y los taxistas y los camiones y los claxons y las bicis, el chiflido del machin avisando que viene la policia y todo eso."1

Footnotes:
1 Restaurant de Comida Corrida: A restaurant that serves a full meal at lunch time.
DVD piratas: Pirated DVD's
Periodicos: Newsstands, Newspaper stands.
Tacos de canasta: Tacos sold on the street in a woven basket where they are kept warm.
Programas para Pe Ce: Programs for PC's
Taxistas: Taxi Drivers
Camiones: Buses
Claxons: Horns
Bicis: bicycles
El chiflado del machin avisando que viene la policia y todo eso: the spoiled macho guy telling others that the police are coming and all that.