Alice Bucknell Explores Interspecies Perspectives in The Alluvials Video Game
Artist Alice Bucknell has expanded her 2023 video work into a multilevel game titled The Alluvials, which reimagines Los Angeles as a desert landscape dominated by sand and silt. As Designboom reports, the interactive project challenges traditional gameplay by placing players in the roles of non-human entities like moths and wolves to explore ecological consequences.
Context from Industry Pulse
The Alluvials situates itself within a growing creative discourse regarding post-humanism and ecological speculation. By utilizing game engines to visualize the predictions of climate scientists and corporate leaders, Alice Bucknell transforms abstract data into immersive parables. The shift from a passive video work in 2023 to an interactive game in 2024 reflects a design trend toward embodied storytelling, where agency is shifted away from humans toward the natural world. This approach uses the aesthetics of speculative fiction to critique modern infrastructure and water management, particularly in the context of the Greater Los Angeles Basin's specific geographic and indigenous history.
The project represents an evolution of Bucknell's speculative fiction work that first debuted as a video piece in 2023. According to Designboom, the 2024 game version allows for deeper exploration of a future Los Angeles where skyscrapers and highways have been overtaken by dunes. The setting imagines a city where the sky is permanently locked in a golden hour and the landscape is defined by perpetual fires and the presence of a water desalination corporation known as Qwench.
Gameplay mechanics in The Alluvials deviate from standard industry tropes by focusing on what Bucknell describes as ecological and queer dynamics. Rather than controlling a human protagonist, players navigate the environment from the perspectives of non-playable characters. Designboom notes that these perspectives include a mountain lion, a wolf, a yucca plant, and even drifting moths. One specific level, Extinction Burst, forces a choice between the viewpoint of a moth or a tree within a basin filled with white particles.
Visual elements of the game utilize high-contrast aesthetics, including fuchsia paths and bright red forests, to highlight the uncanny nature of a climate-altered reality. The narrative also touches on the history of the Tongva people within the Los Angeles Basin while projecting a future that has moved beyond anthropocentric thinking. By piloting an airboat through the Los Angeles River or roaming a barren urban desert, players encounter the fallout of environmental shifts in an embodied format.
The work has been displayed globally, with installations adapting to their physical surroundings. Designboom highlights an exhibition at LUMINEX in Los Angeles where the film was presented as a four-channel work, while a Basel exhibition at HEK Other Intelligences 2025 featured a two-channel setup with pink camo beanbags. These presentations aim to prompt reflection on current climate trajectories and the potential for rerouting human action through natural world logic.
The Industry Pulse Bottom Line
Bucknell’s work demonstrates how creative professionals are using interactive game mechanics to move beyond human-centric design, offering a digital sandbox for testing the consequences of climate change through the lenses of interspecies architecture and regenerative logic.