Players travel through a virtual world in a futuristic vehicle—a vast, reduced landscape that unfolds like a future desert. Along the way, they encounter short, familiar phrases drawn from advertising, media, and everyday culture. The game world follows a simple principle: two possibilities. Always. Left or right.

Each choice initially appears small and insignificant, yet together these decisions form a path whose meaning as a whole only becomes visible at the end. The world changes with every decision, making tangible how a larger context emerges from a multitude of individual moments. The world can heat up, dry out, and transform into a volcanic wasteland, or cool down, freeze, and become a silent snowy landscape. Between these extremes lies a narrow zone of balance—a world that remains unchanged.

The music follows the same logic of transformation: Szdåt’s soundtrack stays close to ambient—slow, spacious, and slightly worn. It changes constantly but quietly, following each decision without ever pointing to it. The intention was to create a soundtrack that players inhabit rather than simply listen to. After the final decision, the radio takes over: A song emerges, composed of the selected phrases and decisions – a personal echo of the path taken.

Seven decisions result in 128 possible variations. None of them is right or wrong; each is a consequence of the player’s actions. Only at the end of the journey does it become visible what kind of world has been created. The pyramid appears—depending on the path taken—as a volcano rising from a glowing desert, as an iceberg in a frozen landscape, or as a human-made structure within a state of balance.

The virtual world of The Power of Two is part of the two-part media artwork Pyramide von morgen at Karlsruhe’s Marktplatz. Its physical counterpart is a white sculpture in the urban space—an abstracted replica of Karlsruhe’s Weinbrenner Pyramid by Norina Quinte and Andreas Hölldorfer (ato).

Like many pyramids, the historical original primarily refers to the past. It preserves memory, protects what is historically significant, and marks the burial site of the city’s founder, Karl Wilhelm. Although the pyramid is an identity-forming symbol of the city, it remains, as a monument, removed from direct access. The new pyramid shifts this perspective.

As a white, uninscribed form, it appears as a projection surface for possibilities. Its inscription, “In Erinnerung an unsere Zukunft” (“In Memory of Our Future”), formulates a paradox that reverses the familiar relationship between past and future.

The Pyramide von morgen does not erect a monument to what has been, but rather creates an image of thought for what is to come. It asks how future generations will look back on our present and what traces today’s decisions will leave behind. Pyramids have always served to preserve the past and inscribe memory permanently into the landscape. This work adopts that gesture and redirects it in the opposite direction: it does not preserve what has already happened, but imagines a possible future as a memory.

Together, the two parts of the installation connect past, present, and future in different ways. The white pyramid formulates the question of the future as a spatial gesture; The Power of Two translates it into a participatory experience. What the sculpture expresses as an open form in the urban space becomes an action within the game: the future appears as a state that emerges only through a multitude of decisions.

The work resists simple certainties or clear-cut judgments. No single decision explains the world that emerges; only in retrospect does the totality of many small shifts become visible. Players do not choose the outcome. They choose the path. It is through the accumulation of many small decisions that a world gradually takes shape.

In the end, the pyramid remains—as a memory of a future that has not yet been written.