The Compression Zone
Asian Premiere
Shaheer Tarar United Kingdom 2026 45 min Rating To Be Advised
A video game descends into a pixel dungeon where demons demand a sacrifice for your data.
Playing alongside the game’s protagonist, we descend into a techno-pastel dungeon called The Compression Zone, where data demons offer to act as our messengers but demand something in return: a Faustian pact for our times. Homebrewed on the Unity engine and updated at every performance, Shaheer’s video game shifts our focus to the tools of perception in our digitally mediated realities. It unpacks how the algorithmic logics of data infrastructure shape what we see: data is packaged and compiled, deployed across corners of the globe, stretching over land and coursing through undersea fibre-optic lines—leaving imprints on the very environments they render on our screens.
Drawn partly from his move from Lahore to Canada during his growing-up years, the video-game lecture traces the expansion of cartographic imagination precipitated by the early internet. At the same time, it explores how the convenience of instant knowledge rests on compression algorithms that make a value judgement about what counts as ‘loss’ in the process.
Synopsis Writer: Gabriel Goh
Undercurrent, Q&A
23 Oct, Fri 7:15PM / 45 min
Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Annexe Studio
Undercurrent
24 Oct, Sat 6:30PM / 45 min
Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Annexe Studio
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The Compression Zone
Shaheer Tarar
United Kingdom
2026
English
45 min
Rating To Be Advised
Asian Premiere
Shaheer Tarar
Shaheer Tarar is a media artist and geographer based in London, where he is currently a lecturer at Central Saint Martins. His net-art projects and experimental video games explore how digital infrastructures produce images, and how those images in turn shape our worldviews. His works have exhibited internationally. The Compression Zone was commissioned for transmediale 2026.
Shaheer Tarar
Shaheer Tarar