Matteo Ruggiero / sxilence
Title image for A Bird That Mistook a Street Lamp for the Sun.

visual novel / installation / 2025

A Bird That Mistook a Street Lamp for the Sun

A short decision-making visual novel and installation. You follow a bird that mistakes a streetlamp for the sun, and under the overexposure your navigation starts to break.

How do we swim in a world drowning in images? Using void narration and methods of hyperlink cinema, the work asks what kind of sense-making is possible in times when we feel it slipping away.

In the form of a simple decision-making visual novel, you join a bird that mistakes the glow of a streetlamp for the Sun. Under overexposure, your navigation breaks, glitching through a speculative landscape and the anatomy of pain itself.

The body is a praying machine. Together with the bird, you meet entities, ghosts of unlived futures, whispers of geological trauma, and the fragility inside planetary bones. Deep time, catastrophism, and bodies of dust.

Dust to dust, welcome to the world without us.

The body is a praying machine.

Are you obsessed with beginnings?

Yes x yes.

installation / screen / visual novel trace

Selected media

Installation view with suspended objects and projection text.
installation field / screen as wishing surface
Tall installation view with suspended elements in a blue-lit space.
installation body
Installation view with a screen suspended in a metallic frame.
suspended screen
Close-up of the installation screen surface.
screen surface / overexposed portal
Hanging text object from the installation.
text object
Game screenshot with a bird and branching text choices.
visual novel / beginning loop
Black-and-white game screenshot with text over a landscape.
game screenshot / buried story
Black-and-white game screenshot showing a distant plume or storm.
game screenshot / no exit