Trip Through Minecraft’s Ingenious ‘Acid Interstate’

August 29, 2016, 10:25am

Two years after the Tate Modern hosted an official exhibition of Minecraft artwork, we’re still seeing creative users push the medium to previously unimagined heights. The latest example of this is YouTube user MiningGodBruce’s Acid Interstate project. Bruce’s third iteration of the project functions as a visualizer for “Singa” by Topaz (á la Chemical Brothers’ Michel Gondry-directed video for “Star Guitar“), in which a scenic mining cart ride quickly transforms reality into a bent landscape that’s unlike even the most ambitious worlds we’ve covered on this site.

MiningGodBruce posted a lengthly explanation of how he achieves the effects in the video on YouTube, explaining how he synced “Singa” up the terrain and citing, “250+ hours of total recording time, almost one year to produce, and years of ᴇsᴏᴛᴇʀɪᴄ [sic] knowledge of a variety of Minecraft mods,” as the secret to his style. He also posted a neat video from inside development mode, which provides another perspective on the surreal reality he created. We’ve seen some impressive Minecraft builds, but Acid Interstate is noteworthy because of MiningGodBruce’s dedication and arcane knowledge of the medium. I’ve never played Minecraft on psychedelics, but I imagine that it looks something like this.