“I want worlds that feel like Tarkovsky, not Call of Duty.”

A new media artist specialised in animation and installation, he uses tools rooted in game creation to build his universes. Peter Burr is, above all — like good screenwriters and filmmakers — a worldbuilder. He created the Aria Engine, a zone, a living experience with a touch of Tarkovsky’s melancholy or maybe a Cronenberg-style dystopia, set to premiere in mid-2026 as a room-sized video game. An immersive universe in 80s fluo colours, from which Infinite Refill unfolds: images that sell order to bodies inside a failing system. The drop is presented by objkt.one this Thursday, 20 November, at 6 PM CET, and it was also shown in Berlin during Art on Tezos from November 6 to 9.

But what does that mean? “For Infinite Refill, I’m taking the commercial strips of this world. Ads became billboards through recursive AI image generation, which I then processed and built into 3D kiosks for the video game,” Peter told me in this brief conversation we had around his release. Among the many layers that machine collaboration can take — in this endless blur between human and tool — the author slips through: also acting as editor, co-director, and writer, but not in the strict sense, trying not to fall into the trap of the speed of ‘creativity’ that AI offers. “If I'm not vigilant, the weird stuff smooths out so fast. I’m scared of being a middle-manager.”

Peter’s world steps outside the ordinary, offering his audience something beyond pure spectacle. Infinite Refill is one piece of it, ready to be collected. Our conversation follows below.

Raquel Gaudard - Peter, to understand the drop you’re releasing on objkt.one, Infinite Refill, people might need to know what came before: Aria Engine. Could you explain a bit about this world you created and how this new series grows out of it?

Peter Burr: Aria Engine is a simulation of a decaying underground smart-building whose systems are collapsing under their own logic. I first imagined it as a piece of architecture that regulates itself through manipulations of both physical infrastructure and social connection, treating buildings and flesh as operationally equivalent systems. But these systems aren’t equivalent, so they're collapsing and regenerating with more problems than they solve. In Aria Engine, the characters that inhabit this world are constantly trying to make meaning from the ensuing noise accumulating around them, creating drama that we get to watch as an endless flow of micronarratives. This work will premiere in mid-2026 as a room-sized video game in which audiences generate their own avatars with a character-creator slot machine who wander into this world and try to make a home of it.

For Infinite Refill, I’m showcasing the commercial strips of this world. Ads became billboards through recursive AI image generation, which I then processed and built into 3D kiosks for the video game. I did similar work with the characters themselves, AI-generated figures that I hand-crafted into the avatars you see making marks in these spaces.

So the series is a snapshot of life in an underground mall. These vessels are surrounded by automated slop, responding the only way they can: making more marks, more content, more output. It's a cycle. The world generates itself recursively and the inhabitants mirror that process inside a space already overstuffed with machine-generated noise.

RG - In your essay Fancy Worldbuilding you mention that you began Aria before AI entered your workflow. What’s the difference now in building characters, structures, or narrative threads compared to then? Does AI feel like a real collaborator?

PB - Before AI, worldbuilding meant making decisions with narrative permanence. If I committed to a character trait or spatial logic, I lived with it because changing course meant reworking everything downstream. That constraint forced me to think harder before committing. I'd test ideas against the world's internal logic and keep what resonated. The characters and structures that survived were the ones that withstood focused initial scrutiny.

With AI in the workflow, that permanence has dissolved. I can generate ten versions of an energy drink and it doesn’t matter which one I use. Nothing has weight anymore. I'll build an entire character system, realize it doesn't serve the work, and regenerate something new in an hour. AI produces options without attachment, which means Aria Engine is stuffed with options without attachment. It is a world of provisional gestures. Probiotic fuel for those who dwell in this world may start out as bottled SLIME™, then become SLYME™, then FLIDE™. It's an aesthetic of decay rendered in RGB and it's all for sale.

Does it feel like a collaborator? It feels like working with someone who has no investment in what we're making. It responds, it generates, it produces material that's often useful. But it has no stake in whether the world holds together or falls apart. That's still my job. So I'm not collaborating, I'm managing. The work shifts from building something with intention to sorting through what the tool produces and deciding what survives.

RG - You’ve spoken about the importance of immersion in Aria Engine. Early games already absorbed us through a simple screen long before VR headsets. For you, is immersion more about lore and storytelling than physical installations built for “experience”?

PB - Immersion for me isn't about tricking people into forgetting they're experiencing fiction. Full immersion in that sense is a delusion. Full distance, on the other hand, is an equally unsavory disengagement. Good immersion lives in the space between, a double exposure of both the fictional world and the actual world at once. Early games understood this. You stared at a CRT screen with blocky pixels and somehow you were still in the dungeon. The immersion happened because your mind completed what wasn't there.

The physical installation matters, but not as a spectacle. It's about creating conditions where the audience constructs the world alongside the work with their own imagination. In Aria Engine, they generate their avatar, wander into this failing infrastructure, and try to make a home of it. The world exists only through that collaborative act of dwelling inside it imaginatively alongside their digital counterpart.

So for me, it's not lore versus installation. It's about designing ways of inviting participation. What I'm after is atmospheric density with emotional resonance. I want people to feel the instability of the systems, to sense the collapse without needing it fully explained. The installation provides a frame for that, but the immersion happens in the space the audience fills themselves.

RG - You’ve described Aria Engine as a “Zone,” echoing Tarkovsky’s Stalker. What resonates with you in that idea, and how does it shape Aria Engine?

PB - The Zone is a space that refuses to behave. In Stalker, it's cordoned off from the rest of the world, impossible to map but possible to experience. In the Zone, characters operate in heightened emotional states because the ground itself is unstable. It asks them to see differently because the rules they typically rely on don't work anymore.

Looking at this through an academic lens (bear with me briefly): Viktor Shklovsky called this effect defamiliarization. Berthold Brecht's version was called alienation. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote about his own version of it as recovery. Different words for similar things: penetrating the veneer that makes the world feel natural and inevitable. The Zone makes the constructed nature of reality visible by breaking it.

With Aria Engine, I try to mobilize these effects through zone logic. The smart-building starts as a self-regulating total system, but its internal continuity immediately collapses when you launch it. After a while, the architecture gets haunted by its own failures. It sprawls in a way the audience won’t always understand, contradictory and alive. It's a living ruin, not ever broken but always breaking. The collapse is ongoing.

RG - Is there anything in Aria that scares even you, its creator?

What scares me is thinking like my tools, making choices based on what feels statistically probable instead of what's actually interesting. If I'm not vigilant, the weird stuff smooths out so fast. At its scariest, being an artist becomes sorting through options something else provided. I’m scared of being a middle-manager.

RG - As a child of the 80s, you’re not a digital native, but you grew up with early game consoles and arcades. Was this important in how you started building these universes? And do you still play video games today? If so, what’s on your screen now?

PB - As a kid, I was enamored with game worlds before I ever played them. I spent years with Nintendo Power magazine before I ever owned a game console. That really shaped how I think about games. I learned that you don't need direct access to a gamespace to inhabit it.

These days I spend most of my time playing Microsoft Word as I write my dissertation, but somehow I find a half hour every morning to do a run of Slay the Spire. That dungeon has become a cozy space for me to return to for a long time now.

RG - Working with AI today, do you feel like the author, or more like an editor selecting, cutting, and stitching fragments until something holds together?

PB - Neither, really. Or both, but in a way that doesn't match what either word means. Working with AI, at its best, is a process of designing a rich context. It's about setting thresholds, deciding when to stop generating, choosing which systems to let run and which to interrupt. It's about designing the infrastructural conditions under which meaning emerges.

So doing this work is not exactly editing in the traditional sense, where you refine something you already made. It's more like systems dramaturgy. It's about scoring the conditions under which automation operates, where to allow it to complete, where to inject noise, where to refuse, where to let things break and stay broken.

RG - When did web3 stop being just a curiosity and start becoming part of your practice? Were you skeptical at first? How did that shift happen, and what keeps you minting on the blockchain today?

PB - I first minted work on Digital Objects in 2018. It felt like the right moment to engage with this new infrastructure, and the experience was genuinely positive at the time. A couple of years later the platform shuttered. Everyone lost access to the work they'd minted there. The contracts are still onchain, the metadata is intact, but the actual artworks haven't been human-legible for half a decade now. That ambiguity stayed with me. The promise of permanence met the reality of platform dependency. It taught me something about what "onchain" actually means versus what we imagine it means.

A2P came shortly after that (Casey Reas's project that eventually became the prototype for Feral File). It was a great experience and it felt different from Digital Objects. From the beginning I could tell Casey was thinking deeply about what it means to build infrastructure for artists rather than just creating a minting platform for collectors. So when Feral File was cooked up, I was excited to work with them. I made a small digital sculpture for their third exhibition, curated by Rick Silva.

Then came BOOM TOWN in 2022, a solo show curated by Julia Kaganskiy. I developed the work with my collaborator Dave Tandem, reflecting on the aging indoor malls I grew up with. This eventually expanded to thinking about boomtowns in the American West, these makeshift settlements that sprung up wherever resources appeared. Prospectors, speculators, people chasing fast wealth. Some became ghost towns. Others reinvented themselves. The metaphor wasn't subtle. I was building empty structures that would age according to block time, durational works that would evolve over a decade. The exhibition sold out in about ten minutes, which felt validating.

But there was a dark side of the experience that still haunts me. I was traveling constantly for my academic schedule back then (I’m getting a PhD in video games, writing my dissertation right now), working from public libraries because I didn't always have consistent access to secure networks. During the exhibition, my browser wallet got hacked. I still don't know exactly how it happened. I presume there was a security breach on my school's network, but I could never confirm it. I lost essentially half my annual earnings that year. Just gone.

People I spoke to in the NFT space told me to be proactive about the loss. Develop a new project, make that money back. It seemed like reasonable advice, so I started working on a piece for ArtBlocks. During early development, Tandem and I presented a work in progress at an event at BetaWorks in New York. While we were on stage, someone stole the two computers we had brought with us and were keeping in storage there. The guy was caught on camera. Nobody really tried to help us recover them. That moment crystallized something for me. The ethics of that community, or at least the parts of it I'd encountered, weren't aligned with how I wanted to work.

I stepped back after that. Not entirely, but enough to reassess what I was doing and why.

What keeps me engaging now, cautiously, is that the technology itself still has specific uses that align with certain artistic aims. The ability to embed systems into artworks that can exist independent of any single platform or institution is a poignant promise. This isn’t just a theoretical benefit, it's a practical one that serves particular kinds of durational work.

But I approach this work cautiously. What matters to me is whether the communities that form around this work share values beyond financial extraction.

RG - You could have become a game developer, maybe. What sparked the drive to follow an artistic path instead? What awakened the impulse to create art rather than just build games?

PB - When I started using Unity in 2015, it wasn't to make games. Back then, I wanted to expand my filmmaking work. I wanted real-time rendering and I wanted the immediacy I felt in live performance to enter my cinema practice. Game engines offered that. They were tools to complicate what I was already trying to do as an artist.

I think the difference is this, game developers build systems for play. They're thinking about mechanics and player agency. I'm thinking about atmosphere and the audience’s material experience of the work. I want worlds that feel like Tarkovsky, not Call of Duty.

Infinite Refill, by Peter Burr.

Drop on objkt.one this Thursday, Nov 20, at 6 PM CET.

More about the artist: www.peterburr.org

Read the essay: Fancy Worldbuilding

A talk with Peter Burr

“The Machine Isn’t Going to Reach Out and Touch Me”

Scorpion Dagger: a joke that keeps on going