Impunity Landscapes V, Merchants of time
3D playable game.
Merchants of time is a 3D interactive game that explores the disproportionate power held by central banks and the vulnerability of individuals to their disciplinary technosophy.
The environment is set against the backdrop of the 2019 Lebanese financial crisis, triggered by systemic corruption, embezzlement, and outright theft orchestrated by the highest ranks of Lebanon’s central bank in coordination with a loosely regulated banking sector.
Sonic and visual cues —such as Lebanese bank logos, news footage, sound bites from banks mission and vision statements, and protests soundscapes— are dispersed throughout the cave, interwoven with admonitions from the Merchants of Time, fictional entities that guard its depths.
Modern central banks rely on the supposedly apolitical independence and expertise of unelected and unaccountable techno-servants. At best, this is a constructed narrative about the true value of time and, critically, who is entitled to define it. At worst, these narratives mask decisions, sometimes criminal, with the potential to plunge entire societies into crisis for decades to come.
Merchants of time places the player alone in a vast, unmapped cave system existing outside any specific place or time. Empty, hostile and devoid of emotions, the environment is marked by traces of both past and future ruins. Player mechanics are intentionally limited to endless roaming, observation, and enduring an unknown path with no clear beginning or end — mirroring the minimal agency and understanding that citizens have over how central bank policies shape our present and future lives.
This work, the last of the Impunity Landscapes series, is both an archive and a sacrificial altar confronting the entanglement —anchored in fragile systems of trust and collapse— between modern finances and faith.
This work was first developed during an art residency at Takeover, Beirut.
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