Commissioned by the independent game studio thatgamecompany for Sky: Children of the Light.
Painted in June 1889 from the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, The Starry Night is the most recognized night sky in art. The essay’s frame is the family that carried it: Vincent, who painted and could not sell; Theo, who believed and financed; and Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who outlived them both and spent decades building the reputation the world now takes for granted. For Sky’s Van Gogh expansion, that story reached a new audience inside a game about carrying light.
The essay explores the psychological side of The Starry Night — the painting as a window into a man’s soul. Made for the launch of Sky: Children of the Light’s Van Gogh expansion, it tells the story of Vincent, Theo, and Johanna.
Each essay is an algorithmic essay — a short film and writing in the sequence that constitutes Codex Algorithm, the major conceptual artwork of Matthew Olivier. The work is made in the algorithmic feed itself — the medium the artist claims for the work — and composed for that feed: made for it, not adapted to it. All essays are written by the artist; the narrator’s voice is rendered through synthesis as a deliberate mask.
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