This work combines found footage (a YouTube screen grab from the game Minecraft), with found voice (narration from the film Alone in the Wilderness). Both sources are in their own ways inauthentic constructions.

Alone in the Wilderness is a 2004 documentary based on film reels and journals made by the naturalist Dick Proenneke, who spent his last three decades living alone in the Alaska wilderness. The voice one hears narrating the film is like the proverbial wise uncle or grandfather, dispensing hard-won wisdom with wry and wistful asides. It is natural to imagine Proenneke himself at the mic. However, Proenneke’s ‘voice’ in the film is a construction, in the sense that his journals were edited into a script by the film makers, and that the script is narrated by an actor. Proenneke himself died shortly before the film was made.

Minecraft is a hugely successful video game in which players build worlds for themselves in a graphically simple, highly stylised virtual environment. One could imagine a player spending decades within the game, building virtual log cabins and roaming a world which, unlike Alaska, is unbounded.

In combination, these two inauthentic sources produce a weird sort of alternate authenticity, which is both liberating and disturbing. We are freer than ever to imagine worlds for ourselves. Yet data, facts and the voice itself are increasingly questionable, due to often deliberate obfuscation for political ends, but also because of the underlying, alienating effects of techno-capitalism.