Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 267

The Ludic Rashomon

A game world made up of many stories of different weight.

Step aside Nancy Drew: Jenny LeClue is the next evolution in teen girl detectives

A teen girl detective story mirrors the dark whimsy of Lynch's Blue Velvet.

The director of the greatest cult sci-fi cybersex film wants to make another

There are few interactions more intense than sex. And I mean good sex. Not the kind of sex where you're lying on your back just taking it. Being a supine host for an unaccomplished zealot is no fun. But when you want to taste and inhale your partner, and they return that same lust, what forms is a chemical experience doused in sweaty ecstasy. This kind of sex might be the ultimate interaction. In the cybersexual universes of Shu Lea Cheang this is an undisputed fact, and it is big industry.

Cheang makes tech-fetish sci-fi porn movies that turns data consumption into a liquid activity. Bodies are injected, orgasms are collected, sensations are transfused from machine to flesh, and vice versa. Her visions of the future see data as a white stream of semen, itself packed with information, carrying it from one vessel to another. The orgasm becomes the catalyst to transmission and everybody wants to be connected. 

her status as celluloid's cybersex queen. 

Right now, Cheang is trying to raise funds via Kickstarter for FLUIDØ, a film of her jacked-up vision that takes place in a BioNet era—apps are bodily liquids, organs are re-engineered, and the body becomes hardware itself composed of tubes that can be hacked into (both physically and technically). It's also set in a post-AIDS era, following years of experiments by pharmaceutical companies, which has led to gender fluid ZERO GEN humans who have genetically evolved to carry a bio-drug inside them. This drug has become the "hypernarcotic for the 21st century" and is, of course, found in their ejaculate. It's the new sexual commodity.

FLUIDØ as a film concept is over 10 years old, it being on hold since the company that would have originally funded it went bankrupt. This crowdfunding effort hopes to bring it alive once again. Where it finds any gusto is on the promise of more of Cheang's imagination. Anticipation is gleaned from her 2000 cult sci-fi porn film I.K.U., which alone proves her status as celluloid's cybersex queen. For those not familiar with I.K.U., Cheang has released two short clips from the film to introduce its hypnotic images, those that swirl its world of sex into thick colors, merging gender-blurred porn actors, a heavy VHS aesthetic, late-'90s computer graphics, and the occasional slip into anime.

You can see those clips below but, be warned, they feature nudity and are therefore NSFW.

Simply put, I.K.U. is a film in which replicants have dildos for arms, meandering between subjects as they collate sex energy for corporate databases. When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, people walked out. A lot of them. About forty percent of the audience rose out of their chairs and left according to Cheang. They were shocked. As the film's subtitle says, and what that audience must have missed, is that I.K.U. is not love, it is sex. But what the departed missed out on is I.K.U.'s treatment of sex as something more than titillation. It is an evolution of sex. It understands the power of the act, especially in its use with new technologies, which are always proven by their facilitation of porn (virtual reality porn was at the top of the list for the Oculus Rift, for example). Sex is used as a measurement of a machine's advances.

close-up liquids and naked human bodies 

I.K.U. is commonly referred to as a post-Blade Runner film, as its "mix of sensation and suggestion is perfectly suited to the post-hypertext world of post-verbal storytelling," according to Rhizome's Ruby Rich. It pulls you into this world of pure feeling, as a viewer, with its "throbbing techno soundtrack, [plunging you] directly into the action by the animation tunnels that materialize at the onset of arousal," Rich continues.

It's also a film that's post-videogame. It invites you to dive into the screen. Inside is a world where the spaces that distance our bodies from the electronic entertainment we interact with has been sealed as tight as a duck's ass. The human-machine relationship has been made internal and forever by our new cyborg lives. I.K.U. communicates all this with its swathes of close-up liquids and naked human bodies, with the animated computer interfaces and washed-out digital effects, all of it interlaced as if it were part of an orgy-induced dream. As Rich also writes, it sees "pornography and science fiction, film and video and computer, matinee and late-night, gallery and porn arcade, all merge into a single movie experience." Cheang and her films don't want you to play, they want you to come get fucked.

You can support FLUIDØ on Kickstarter.

h/t Rhizome

No Man���s Sky and the technology that created 18 quintillion planets

Procedural generation strikes a balance between randomness and order.

Turns out that playing real-life soccer as you would a videogame leads to hilarity

Soccer is a popular sport—by some measures, the World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world. Soccer videogames, particularly the FIFA franchise, are also quite popular. In all likelihood, the Venn diagram for fans of the sport and fans of the videogame resembles a circle more closely than two tomatoes on a vine. One might therefore assume that the gameplay of soccer and its related videogames could be merged into one super-game to rule them all: NKOTBSB, but for soccer. 

Golden Goal, Norway’s mischievous sports talkshow, put this hypothesis to the test, and the results weren’t pretty. The show’s latest experiment involves two sides—each with five outfield players and a goalkeeper—that play on an indoor pitch while wearing VR headsets that relay the view of the pitch from overhead. The big problem with this new form of soccer is that none of the players can find the ball. They purposely wander to and fro but it’s all for naught. Occasionally, a goal trickles in. Nobody is quite sure what is going on. As if they were trapped in a suddenly dark room, the players feel around with their hands.

A marvel of prankster game design. 

This is not Golden Goal’s first marvel of prankster game design. The show’s hosts have previously roped referees and former pros into matches played on steep slopes and while wearing plastic bubbles. The show’s greatest achievement, however, will always be the time they hooked players up to electric dog collar that could be triggered by the opposing team’s coach. Golden Goal uses game design as an agent of chaos. 

There is, however, a serious point to be made here: Broadcasts and videogames have different visual languages than the sports they purport to reproduce, and for cause. Audiences at home benefit from a holistic view of the spectacle. Players, on the other hand, require a more opinionated point of view. The ability to see everything, which is often fetishized, can actually be a disadvantage if it comes at the expense of some sense of perspective. This phenomenon isn’t limited to soccer; American football is usually filmed from the side of the field, an angle that would be as disorienting as Golden Goal’s overhead camera. Games and broadcasts, even if they exist to convey athletic events, reframe them in ways that are easily comprehensible when sitting on your couch.   

Everything changes in Life Is Strange���s third episode

A tale of two butterflies.

We're commemorating memorial day

We're observing the national holiday today, and will be back in full swing tomorrow.

A 3D printed zoetrope brings a horrific biblical episode to life

Before Miyazaki, Disney, or much of what can be deemed modern animation, there was the zoetrope. Popularized in Victorian Britain, the zoetrope is a circular device upon which a series of frames are either painted or affixed. If spun at a sufficient speed, these frames appear to be in motion. In effect, the device is a flipbook merged with a carousel.

Zoetropes are no longer necessary. There are far more efficient ways to create an animated sequence, and therein lies the zoetrope’s charm. To wit, here is a 3D-printed zoetrope designed by artist Mat Collishaw, and modeled by Sebastian Burdon: 

You may notice that this is an unusual zoetrope insofar as it is both a figurative and literal carousel. It is set in a circular pavilion in which the outer colonnade serves to delineate each frame. At first glance, the moving sculpture appears to be little more than a carousel: there are children moving round-and-round, after all. The beauty of this early form of animation, however, is that the children aren’t simply spinning in circles; they are being subjected to a biblical onslaught.

easy to imagine it being soaked in blood. 

Dubbed “All Things Fall,” this zoetrope is based on Peter Paul Rubens’ “The Massacre of the Innocents.” Rubens painted two versions of “The Massacre of the Innocents.” He invested the better part of a year in the first (1611-12) and about twice as long in its lesser follow-up (1636-38). The 350 figures in “All Things Fall” were created in a comparatively brief six months. In any other context, that would be viewed as an involved process, because that's what it was.

When in motion, “All Things Fall,” like Rubens’ paintings and the biblical episode that inspired them, is all about infanticide. One can see children being tossed out of windows. Elsewhere, soldiers and parents fight over their infants. Though Collishaw and Burdon have created a zoetrope that is entirely white, it is easy to imagine it being soaked in blood.

Come by the Ace Hotel May 26 for games, drinks, and music

I mean, why wouldn't you do this? 

An unholy matrimony of noise music and sparse videogame worlds

Patrick McDermott says that ambient and noise is the most interactive music he has ever felt, both as a listener and composer. What he especially enjoys about this type of arcane composition is that it lets you dream up whatever visuals you want as you listen. "The sonic world it creates, the mood it induces, the space it allows with often the long length of tracks, the a-typical structure, the lack of lyrics and traditional elements"—all of this, he says, makes for a unique interactive experience between the music and your mind.

grainy, unsettling soundscapes. 

McDermott practices what he preaches. He's the co-founder of Driftless Recordings along with Joel Ford, a label that champions instrumental, experimental, ambient, and "challenging" music above all else. But he's also an artist himself, working under the name North Americans, and whose second album titled "Legends" is comprised of muddy drone noise and grainy, unsettling soundscapes. He is, of course, releasing his new LP through Driftless Recordings.

Compared to his first album, entitled NO_NO, McDermott sees Legends as being "a more focused, cohesive product with a more premeditated narrative." Despite saying that, he's conflicted on that last point, claiming that he doesn't want to stick a specific story to the album, but mentions that it does come from a place of sickness and chemical-induced tiredness felt when travelling across the states. He's transposed this experience into drawn-out and loud industrial whirring that he finds meditative. None of the six songs on the album run under five minutes, with the longest being "Graves" at 12 minutes, it described aptly by McDermott as "weaving a rusty hum through a thicket of blown out noise, rising and rising before it eventually recedes to nothing."

Another admission towards the narrative of Legends by McDermott is taking inspiration from the film The Proposition, meaning that it's "darkly obsessed with space and the unknown that massive, yawning blackness represents." You can hear this as the inhuman groans of Legends subsume all other sounds while you listen. But to better help you, as a listener, to envision the sonic shapes that McDermott has constructed, he had a 3D virtual environment made for you to wander around in.

This was handled by DJ and video wall programmer Ryan 'Ghostdad' Sciaino. He worked closely with McDermott to create a suitably sparse and alien environment to accompany the album as it plays in order over the top. "I think of the game as sort of a digital meditation, so if you're not in the ideal place to experience Legends EP then maybe this will get help you there," Sciaino said. Most of what you see inside are enormous rock faces that surround you on all sides. Sometimes these mountainous figures yawn with voidspace, opening giant maws and pulling up their skirts to reveal a haunting nothingness where you cannot go. Beyond that, you'll usually find a series of randomly placed objects that you can use to stimulate an imagined story attached to this strange location while the music churns in your eardrums.

overwhelmed me with what was obviously terror. 

When I ventured inside this 3D world the vast aloneness of the space was immediate. With my first few steps I saw bombed out buildings made of dry rock, a lone monolith staring out the sun, and a spinning tunnel of ooze-flesh in the middle of nowhere. What struck me most, however, was a large inverted silver pyramid hanging over a lake (the same pyramid on the album's cover art, I learned afterwards). Entering the lake, the water's shimmering surface turned inside out to become a liquid black ceiling. Ahead of me were what seemed to be the glimmering scales of fish, but upon closer inspection were revealed to instead be a huge flock of tiny birds flapping in the water. The music shuddered as I watched them glide and suddenly this calm scene overwhelmed me with what was obviously terror. It was as if the mesmerizing sight of these birds was a siren's song, causing me to forget that I needed to breathe, with the music's aggressive turn snapping me out of the lull to have me realize that I was drowning.

This was an experience unique to me and this was something that McDermott wanted to ensure that the videogame accompaniment to his music would enable. "It's important to me that the visuals are uniquely generated every time. I didn't want a video, to force my or Ryan's vision of the project firmly on the listener, where instead they can roam around and make their own version," McDermott said. The randomized assemblage works as it allows just enough room for you to conjure up wild narrative theories across your journey. It works as it's as ethereal and sporadic as the album, using low-level interaction with a dreamlike 3D space to enhance your listening experience. 

To download the Mac version of the "Legends" videogame world click HERE, or for the PC version click HERE.

You can purchase a copy of Legends on cassette HERE. You can also listen to Legends on Soundcloud. To find out more about Driftless Recordings head over to its website.