Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 270

Drone footage of ghost towns make them look even more deathly

The metaphor is so obvious that explaining it feels wasteful. Drones capture footage of ghost towns: drones and death, drones and abandonment, drones and societal disintegration. Sadly, we've seen this morbid movie before.

drones remain macabre vehicles. 

Well, not exactly this movie. Mic’s Max Plenke has collected examples of drone footage of ghost towns and, as the headline puts it, "the results are haunting." That is not untrue. Filmed from any angle with any device, Chernobyl and Auschwitz-Birkenau will always be haunting. The same goes for Tomioka, Japan, which was abandoned after the Fukushima radiation leak. Insofar as the list counts two radiation zones, the abandoned Satsop Nuclear Power Plant cannot help but feel haunting. Context matters. There’s also Craco, an Italian town that has been abandoned since the 1960s due to earthquakes and landslides. Plenke’s list also includes Detroit’s abandoned Packard Automotive Plant because, well, who really knows?

This drone footage of Detroit, which was taken by cinematographer John Marton, “look(s) more like an extension of the Chernobyl footage,” writes Plenke. This, it should be noted, is an artistic choice and not a positive claim. Detroit is not Auschwitz or Chernobyl or Tomioka. Nevertheless, the conflation of Detroit and genuinely deadly sites is not an accident. As Kyle Chayka noted in his Hyperallergic essay on the roots of Detroit's ruin porn boom:

“The idea of momento mori jumps to mind when thinking about Detroit’s ruin porn; literally translated as “Remember you will die,” the genre uses a symbolic language of dead things, skulls, skeletons, wilted flowers, to communicate the inevitability of death and the importance of living a just life.”

The conflation of tragically literal and largely figurative death is, in other words, not limited to Plenke’s list. It is an artistic choice that is made on a regular basis. The additions of drones to this equation only make things more macabre. If a city didn’t already look like death, a drone will do the trick. That is what drones do. It is not their only use—far from it—but drones remain macabre vehicles. Gloomy locales don’t need the drone’s help, but it will do the trick.

 

Shut Up and Take My Money! A Tale of a Poor Gamer

What does it mean to be a consumer of videogames?

Be Fearless and Speak Now using a Taylor Swift keyboard

Who needs words when you can have a keyboard that only dispenses Taylor Swift quotes?

Tay Text has the Taylor Swift quote for every occasion, with the possible exception of natural disasters.

Deconstructing videogames for the purpose of art

The "levels" and "bosses" structure has greater implications than those contained in videogames.

Peer into the mysteries and secrets of a 1970s suburb

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DOES NOT COMMUTE (iOS, ANDROID) 
BY MEDIOCRE AB 

At a busy crossroads in a 1970s suburb it is your task to drive every car at once. You steer one auto-accelerating vehicle to its destination, time rewinds, then you steer another while avoiding your former self. At every stage this act is repeated until you're dodging chaotic traffic of your own creation. But the lasting appeal of the game isn't so much this challenge as it is the lives that you peer into without their knowing. Each car, bike, and boat has its owner, and they are all diverging from the road, or their duties, and some from morality. Adulterers, religious charlatans, and ghost cars all converge on the road before heading off their separate ways. Each character is an engrossing, peculiar mystery and it's no wonder: they're all penned by guest author Simon Flesser, better known as half of Swedish duo Simogo. The result is an enchanting drama spread across the secret motivations of even the most insignificant journey we take.

Perfect for: Nosy neighbors, road racers, mystery hunters.

Playtime: A safely driven hour, or many crash-happy ones.

The post-apocalyptic world will still be boring

The novel Slynx evokes the minutiae of survival, and points to a new path for games.

MSHR's electric glyphs evoke the alienness of our tech futures

LaTurbo Avedon's Panther Modern opened up its tenth room recently. It's an online exhibition space that encourages each of its contributing artists—all of who have their own 3D model file known as a "Room"—to experiment with the possibilities of software when creating their installations. The architecture of this exhibition is entirely virtual. It's altered according to the aesthetic demands of every project. All the rooms together form a honeycomb of net art that wouldn't be possible in physical space.

Over the months, Panther Modern has hosted works as divergent as the frazzling, low-res and color-rich girly aesthetic of Emilie Gervais in Room Three, and Kim Laughton's hyper real, ultra-reserved silver-and-white naked gallery space in Room Eight. Now, occupying Room Ten, are the distinct creations of Portland-based duo Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper, who collectively identify as MSHR. It's among the gallery's wildest sights.

MSHR describes their work as comprising "sculptural synthesizers" and "ritualistic performances." Typically, they host alien discotheques that might involve moving their hands over peculiar interfaces, or splaying themselves across a lavish, circuitous "hyper scape" that resembles the exposed guts of a Venetian emperor. With the absence of the two performers (Murphy and Cooper) in Room Ten, it's the standalone synthesizers that dominate the digital space here as if their surrogate offspring.

What you see immediately are large concrete symbols pulsing with the colorful exuberance of deep sea jellyfish amid the black space. There are liquid computers with fluorescent rainbow bead trimmings and steel-ribbed furniture adjacent to mirror boxes. Looking strictly at the shapes, there's a mixture of occult paraphernalia and ancient glyph patterns; the images are labelled with words such as "Ursa" (perhaps referring to the constellation) and "Phurpa" (an embellished ritual dagger from Tibetan cultures).

ancient stones turned into psychedelia 

MSHR explores these ancient hieroglyphs explore them as if through the eyes of an electronic future, one that these icons have been dragged into by time, and manipulated by their technology so as to make them comprehensible. So there are cables and plugs running between the iconic structures to supply them with gratuitous electric currents, as if they were meaningless without some kind of neon energy running through them, some colorful life in their bones. 

MSHR brings more than this curious interplay of the ancient and the future—aged stones turned into psychedelia—to their space. It's a show of both light and sound. As you open up Room Ten in your browser you are confronted with an analog machine screech that simultaneously pip squeals as if performing a guitar solo while barking in deep-bubble synth tones. It's a lot to take in at first, but the sounds inform your perception of each digital structure, just as the carefully selected lighting, layout, and camera angles do. 

How you interpret all of these vibrant installations is up to you. Even if you get nothing out of it, you can probably still enjoy the kaleidoscopic allure of it all, spread across the room as otherworldly beings in magnificent display. And if not that, then you have the other nine rooms of the Panther Modern to check out, finding something more to your taste.

You can access all of the rooms in the Panther Modern using the links here. For more information on the works of MSHR check out its website.  

The kawaii pillow fight version of Nidhogg is just as unforgiving

ＢＥＤ✰ＨＯＧＧ brings the lethal fun of Nidhogg to a pillow fight 

Fight for your right to sleep comfortably in B E D ✰ H O G G

In the battle to defeat a B E D ✰ H O G G, no pillow is safe

How an algorithm created music out of people's unrehearsed interactions

Watch the audience sing as it moves.

Simon Stålenhag's latest paintings depict sci-fi as through a child's eyes

The beauty of an imaginary childhood is that it never has to end. You can keep going back to the well in search of inspiration. Thus, Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, whose 2014 book Tales of the Loop depicted the suburban milieu of his youth albeit with a sci-fi twist, is now raising funds on Kickstarter for a two book volume featuring Tales of the Loop and the forthcoming Swedish Machines, Lonely Places.

Stålenhag’s images start as pictures of Mälaröarna, where he grew up. His Kickstarter video reveals it to be a quiet area filled with industrial and infrastructural detritus. Watching the video, one gains an understanding of how a child could see this world as part of a sci-fi universe.

That universe, it should be noted, is both of the future and of the past. The devices that hover through its skies, while not of this world, often take on the appearance of props and effects from the '80s and '90s. Indeed, Tales of the Loop is an engrossing work because it encourages you to spot the influences in Stålenhag's work. In some instances, his sci-fi creations are clearly evolved forms of farm tractors, the sort of things a fertile imagination will conjure up when bored.

The paintings are a window into childhood's imagination. 

In that respect, the paintings of Simon Stålenhag and their accompanying stories are a window into the imagination of a child, where free-association reigns supreme and any object can be interpreted as having descended from outer space. This is a popular idea: Man of Steel and recent entries in the Transformers franchise have sought to juxtapose the idyllic world of childhood with clanking devices descended from other worlds. But Stålenhag’s work stands apart because of its earnestness. There are fantastical objects in his world but they exhibit a peaceful harmony with nature. They are not necessarily here to kill you and they are definitely quieter than the foreign objects seen—and heard—in the films of Michael Bay and Zach Snyder.

To find out more about Tales from the Loop and to support it check out its Kickstarter.