Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 264

Chill out with an astronaut's view of the world in Planetarium

Send a person to the Moon and they'll come back with stories about the Earth. Why is that? All the scientific guff aside, the Moon isn't all that interesting; it's a rock with hardly anything on it besides large, dark, basaltic plains. But what the Moon does offer is a brilliant view of the Earth and it's one that only a handful of people have been able to consume so far.

all that's left is the beauty 

One of those is Frank Borman, the Commander of Apollo 8, and one of the first humans to see Earthrise from the Moon, back on December 24th, 1968. He had a few things to say about the experience. "The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me—a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance," Borman said to Life magazine in 1969.

He's right. From what I can glean after having spent a significant amount of time with Daniel Linssen's Planetarium, you cannot make out the politics of a planet from such a distance. There aren't even specks of life visible. And with that detachment all that's left is the beauty held by the planet's formations of rock, greenery, ice, and water. The game doubles down on this by applying some chill, electronic bleeps and spacey chimes over the top, and the result is relaxing enough to make you drift off with a smile upon your face. 

Planetarium does a little more than provide a lullaby-like experience, though. You're given no task but there's plenty of information to take in. You find planets not by travelling to them but by typing in a random word or series of letters. Once the planet is brought before you, it'll spin at speed to show you all its sides, as if trying on a new suit and asking for your opinion. The only other interactions you're granted is related to temperature.

You can bring up an alternate "temperature view" of the planet in swelled purples and blues. It's undeniably pretty. But the purpose for it being there is to aid in your experiments with rising and decreasing that planet's heat. At its coldest, a planet will usually be light blue with ice, while at the hottest you'll often see a dark blue orb as the melted water has flooded the surface. In between those extremes you can get anything from lush forests to continents entirely made out of exposed rock. And somewhere amid all of that variance lies a tiny sweet spot that allows life to thrive. 

"I felt very, very small" 

The type of life and the conditions that it requires to exist changes greatly from planet to planet. There are arachnids stomping through forests and beasts hurdling over mountains to find if you're thorough enough in your experiments with the temperature slider. But what each planet's specific conditions reflects is how much a miracle it is that there's life at all. It's such a small slither of a chance, and that's only taking into account the temperature of the planet in Planetarium, and not the many other factors that inform the creation of life in our actual universe. 

While that may seem uplifting it simultaneously acts as a reminder of our own insignificance. And so what Planetarium may lead you towards realizing is Neil Armstrong's more ominous reflections on life on Earth after having seen our planet from his distant view of it from the Moon. Armstrong famously recalled putting his thumb over the Earth, which he described as a "tiny pea, pretty and blue," blocking it out from his privileged perspective of the universe. "I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small," Armstrong recalled. 

You can download Planetarium at a pay-what-you-want price on itch.io.

Madison Square Park's latest trees are mirages made of mirrors and metal

Trees where there are none.

What happens inside this museum stays inside this museum

"I don't see it," were the first words out of my mouth, when my mom took me too see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre when I was eight. After days of hype, I felt betrayed by both the tour guide and my own mother. I was promised history, and all I got was a bunch of butts in my face while I tried to jockey for a glimpse at the postcard-sized magnus opus.

One of the most defining differences between the virtual museum and the real-world one is that pervasive sense of solitude. Instead of jockeying for a moment alone with the artwork, the implication of a virtual space is that it was built for you, the player. Of course, in artwork, the viewer always plays a part in creation. But virtual space comes alive only when the player enters it, as if the artwork had never existed before you. As if it sprouted by way of immaculate conception for you and you alone.

The virtual museum crafted by a student group at SAIC (School of Art Institute of Chicago) evokes isolation with each step. Walking from exhibit to exhibit, your footsteps echo, a diegetic sound that simultaneously grounds and unnerves you. In the real world, appraising artwork becomes a performance, as you stare into this or that famous painting to try to stir up the feelings you're 'supposed' to feel.

each interaction with the artwork is unbearably intimate 

In the virtual museum, each interaction with the artwork is unbearably intimate. Featuring an interactive vignette for every exhibit, it takes more than just active participation to appraise it. Despite your isolation as the player, you are thrust into conversation from the very first exhibit onward—both figuratively and literally. On the literal level, the first vignette drops you into a world of colliding cultural symbols. All at once, you are bombarded with everything from Seinfeld's opening musical number to a tolling church bell. Christ the Redeemer stands high above, while down below an enlarged breast endures your gaze. 

Figuratively, each student-artist is part of a larger, collaborative dialogue. Leaving his or her own mark on the work, the interactive vignettes render you—the player—a mediator between their unique brush strokes. Because you may be the sole visitor, but you quickly learn that this museum is more populated than even the Louvre at pique hours. The exhibits stitch together the sensibilities of each collaborator in an abstract game of telephone pictionary.

The resulting artwork smacks of sporadic individuality, like the freakish pigeon-baby who greets you in one exhibition room. As he dances his twitchy pigeon-baby dance, you catch a glimpse of the idiosyncrasies that make up the human touch—something that has become all too rare in the sterilized, impersonal museum experiences of the real world. 

You can experience the museum retrospective exhibition for free on Mac and Windows.

The Qun Demands It: The Evolution of the Barbarous Other

The secret racism behind high fantasy's brutish races.

Blur���s new, brightly coloured music video is a Super Mario dreamscape

If you ever wanted to see Gorillaz and Blur frontman Damon Albarn dressed up as a giant ice cream cone, now’s your chance. Britpop group Blur have re-envisioned Super Mario World in their music video for “Ong Ong,” replacing Mario and Peach with Mr. and Ms. Okay, two smiling yellow circles.

The video follows the journey of Mr. Okay as he tries to rescue Ms. Okay, who has been taken from him by the evil forces of Mr. Cream, Mr. Brown, Mr. Red and Mr. Black—also known as Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree of Blur.

The music video has the same ideas behind it as their 1999 music video “Coffee & TV,” which featured two anthropomorphic milk cartons— Blur’s former mascots—as they search for a missing Graham Coxon (perhaps a prediction of Think Tank’s shaky recording process without the songwriter). While that video featured dulled colours and the tragic death of the female milk carton, “Ong Ong” inspires nothing but happiness, the clouds and hills all displaying smiley faces reminiscent of the happy flowers and clouds of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island and Super Mario World.

Bits and pieces of Hong Kong, where Blur spent five days recording their latest album The Magic Whip, are thrown in, with Ms. Okay kept in a pagoda castle. The side-scrolling format and lyrical platforms make Blur fans everywhere—okay, maybe just me—desperately wish for an actual game. (The unfinished Gorillaz 3D adventure game does not count.)

Not only does the video envision The Magic Whip’s most upbeat song in 8-bit NES glory, but, after the game has been “completed,” the real-life band “come back to life,” adorn their costumes and run around. The cute, happy settings of the music video are a sharp contrast to the more subdued, melancholy sounds of the album, but it’s good to see the band return to their former glory in videogame format after going more than 10 years without a Blur music video.

Watch the music video for "Ong Ong" above or click here.

Torfi Frans Olafsson of Eve Online talks space and interactivity at Two5six

"We know a lot about space, we just don’t know about the little green men living on other planets."

Torfi Olafsson of Eve Online talks space and interactivity at Two5six

"We know a lot about space, we just don’t know about the little green men living on other planets."

How a Civilization V mod makes corruption the least of FIFA���s Problems

This Civilization V mod makes sense of the FIFA mess.

Whodunnit? In Her Story, you'll always write the answer

Overanalysis for the information age.

Moon Shadow turns you into a glitch artist by warping what your phone sees

Connor Bell obviously wants to live in a visually fragmented world composed of data glitches. One of psychedelic blemishes and askew electronics that bend canvasses into a lively state of decay would suit him. I know this because Bell is the co-creator of Glitch Wizard, which lets you frazzle photos, videos, and gifs as if it were the hacker's preferred version of Instagram (and it may well be).

But not only that. For the past few weeks, Bell has been letting me play around with another project of his, and it's not unlike his last, this time being called Moon Shadow. While that title is certainly more mysterious than "Glitch Wizard," once you start thumbing around with it on your touchscreen it's immediately obvious what it's all about.

something ungodly fidgeting around on the screen. 

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"The app blends a live video feed with a series of generative video shader effects on different portions of the image selected by color matching," Bell explained. "The concatenation of unique, non-deterministic effects creates a unique representation of the users perspective."

In other words, you point your smartphone at whatever's in front of you, and then warp the camera feed with hand-picked layers of discoloration and visual deformities. Net artists and graphics programmers such as Cale Bradbury and Devin Horsman have contributed to the range of shader effects available to choose from. One called "NETGRIND" plasters large tie-dye stars onto whatever color of surface you apply it to. Another called "CANDY" casts pinstripe patterns of tootie-frootie colors over walls and ceilings if you wish. It gave my apartment a saccharine coat thick enough to tempt Hansel and Gretel to my door, I'm sure.

Then there are the less friendly tones, such as the shredded TV static of "VOID NOISE" and the black-and-white data streams of "BLIXY." Combine the two and you have something ungodly fidgeting around on the screen. Flip the camera for a selfie and you'll see you've been turned into demonic digital viscera. 

It takes away the control that we have over the image 

If you go far enough, stacking up filters without much thought, it's akin to strapping on a pair of kaleidoscopes in front of your eyes. But Moon Shadow's ability to have you assign filters to certain colors does encourage a more artistic hand. With or without that, it's easy to overload the app, which sees serious slowdown on the frame rate of the camera feed, but then, the stuttering hardly feels out-of-place. This is real-time interaction is something that you don't get as much with Glitch Wizard and it marks the difference between it and Moon Shadow.

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Instead of disfiguring existing media with post-processing effects as in Glitch Wizard, what Moon Shadow enables is for you to apply filters prior to the creation of digital videos or photos. It takes away some of the control that we have over the image after it has been captured and favors experimenting with happenstance and accidents in the process of manufacturing the image.

This also makes it feel a little more personal. Glitch Wizard is designed for you to share your media with others on social media once you've tweaked it to your liking. Whereas Moon Shadow is more of an interplay between you and the app that's projected onto the live reality in front of you. It's more true to the tradition of glitch art, which has always been formed by an accident realized through analog media, rather than produced with clear intention by the user.

You can download Moon Wizard for free on the App Store. It's also coming to Android.