Yomeci Hole (2022)

By Uyen Nguyen, Max Piantoni, Matthew Riley (as Yomeci Play) and Tien Tran. Sound design by Fynn Michlin.

Commissioned by the City of Port Phillip and Future Play Lab.

In Yomeci Hole the player stands above a virtual hole in the ground. The player uses their feet to activate ground buttons (pressing, jumping, tapping etc), encountering various playful objects, creatures and entities as they go down. Resembling a grassy hill growing up from the footpath and fitted with lights and colourful foot-buttons, the design and infrastructure of Yomeci Hole invites people into a park-like recreational world.

In 2011 I developed concepts for a project that was to be set in a hole. Each time the story progressed, the reader would move one layer deeper into the earth. It was an attempt to evoke a sense of joyful connectedness to the stuff that makes up our world. I wanted the whole thing to be set within a circle. But I could never figure out how to resolve it, so I moved on.

In 2022, Uyen Nguyen, Matthew Riley and I were commissioned to make a new interactive work. So I dug up the concept of the hole, and we set about reimagining it as an interactive musical toy. Working together we drew on themes we had explored in our earlier commissions You Me Things and You Me Sings.

Uyen Nguyen did the heavy lifting: leading the development of the cabinet, providing the visuals and characters, directing the sonic interaction design, and catalysing the live events. Fynn Michlin provided the sound, a standout feature of the project, breathing tremendous life and humour into our oddball musical toy. I handled the software development and interaction design for the project, along with providing the notion of a hole played from above.