Tigerbob Mystery Garden is an interactive zero-player art game by Gossamer Rozen. Inspired by Gossamer's knitting practice, jacquard textiles, antique woven tapestries, and video game dungeon maps, the project applies procedural generation to the artist's unique visual language.
The pixel art is formatted for JavaScript by translating the work into arrays on spreadsheets, a process similar to Gossamer's knitwear programming practice.
Each token contains the same set of 103 tiles, which are placed on a grid according to Perlin noise and handwritten rules. The token hash is used to determine the Theme (colorway) of the token and the first 24 tiles selected on your starting screen (this is the static image/thumbnail for your token).
Explore the garden on your desktop computer by using W, S, A, and D keys to scroll. (Press one of these keys first to initialize the game.) Reset back to your starting screen by pressing 0.
Counting & Games
The game encourages discovery by hiding animals, objects, and characters within the dense foliage. Scroll too fast and you might miss something you've never seen before.
Counting and identification is embedded in the work, much like a game of hide and seek. Counter attributes like the number of Garden Tiles, the number of Trees, Animals, Coins, and more are tallied for each token's unique set of 24 tiles.
Gossamer Rozen is a process-driven artist exploring their visual language across a range of artistic mediums, producing a variety of art objects and art products like framed tapestries, knitted apparel, plush toys, card games, stickers, prints, and more. The work produced is unified and presented under Tigerbob, a brand designed to uplift the work of the artist rather than extract from it.
The slow process of hand sewing, hand carving, tattooing, typing, and machine knitting is meticulous and repetitive, a type of meditation that is integral if not more important than the finished work. Gossamer is particular about history and material, exploring their heritage and identity in their work.
Gossamer Rozen (a.k.a grelysian) is a transgender, nonbinary, femme, African American & Filipino fine artist and tattooer in New York City. Gossamer has worked with and collaborated with brands such as The Boston Globe, Patagonia, Squarespace and Dr Martens, and has been creating work professionally since 2008.
