Recalling the innocence of the early days of the internet, Hiraeth-x is a first-person game. It explores the nostalgia we have for this time through the unmistakable aesthetics of the online spaces that Livi frequented during her childhood. 

Players are invited to wander through a liminal, underwater environment inspired by PlayStation 2 graphics and the web-design trends of the early 2000s, The serene setting evokes a time when ‘online’ was still a place people visited to escape reality, rejecting the hyper-connectivity experienced today where ‘online’ is no longer a destination, but has become inseparable from the physical world. 

As players roam through this landscape, a faceless narrator describes the freedoms of a lost world, a place that was at once a ‘playground, pressure-free, unsurveilled’. Using extracts taken from her childhood diaries, Livi’s work embodies a feeling of a time and place that can never quite be recreated. Hiraeth-x evokes nostalgia for a simpler, perhaps in some ways naive, internet full of possibility and asks us to consider our connection to modern technology.