Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 367

Happy Independence Day from Kill Screen

Go play a videogame. 

This stunning installation turns a theater into an alien universe

Nimbes, a star-laced installation from artist Joanie Lemercier, is kind of like the field trip you took to the planetarium in 5th grade, except wondrous and immersive and not at all lame. Currently showing at a 360 degree, kaleidoscopic theater in Montreal, it is 15 minutes of cylindrical film that takes viewers to an alien universe.  

The creator says that the biggest challenge in shooting a film for a huge dome was framing a shot when the camera is facing in six directions, but looking at the results, it was worth the effort. Describing works like this makes it sound like I’m writing liner notes for ‘60s folk albums, so I will just say the content involves constellations and forests and stars, and defer to the pictures.

via Creative Review

Gone Home gets the retail release treatment, now comes in an old-school SNES box

Our favorite game of last year has unexpectedly gotten a physical release on DVD, which is perfect because one day many years from now your kid can find it on your shelf, boot it up, and have a very strange and metaphysical experience.

“Gone Home is a story about a high schooler in the '90s, and is in part about nostalgia for that era,” creative lead Steve Gaynor tells me. So it’s only natural that the disc is packaged in a rad, old-school, faux Super Nintendo box. For someone like me who grew peach-fuzz while playing 16-bit consoles, that is one hell of a nostalgia trip.

Plus, the retail release comes bundled with a bevy of fun, faux-retro goodies. Inside you’ll find a DIY Riot grrrl poster, a notebook that contains 40 pages of Gaynor’s notes and design documents, and, impressively, a DVD case drawn in the cotton candy-sweet style of Lisa Frank folder art. “Hopefully holding all these objects in your hands feels like you've unearthed something that might have been hidden in the back of someone's closet for decades, and has just now been rediscovered,” Gaynor says. That’s exactly how I felt when I played Gone Home, so this is the ideal companion piece. 

This handheld gizmo turns urban pollution into cool abstract art

Pollution is all around us, swirling invisibly and sometimes not-so-invisibly through the air in wisps of gasses and dust particles. This is a fairly disgusting consequence of post-industrial living. But Digioxide, an art project by vtol, makes environmental contamination all glitchy and pretty. 

The device, which sort of looks like a Geiger counter wearing Groucho glasses, sniffs out pollution in the streets, noxious stuff like carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, methane and propane, and renders the signals into algorithmically-generated abstract art. It’s surprising that pollutants look so aesthetically pleasing. 

Digioxide even has a built-in printer that lets you capture toxicity and print out your colorful art. This may ease your mind that you are standing amidst filth that is probably shortening your lifespan bit by tiny bit. 

Via Prosthetic Knowledge

Karmaflow: The Rock Opera Videogame is ridiculous, glorious

Rock and opera go together like baking soda and vinegar, so it goes without saying that Karmaflow: The Rock Opera Videogame is the most glorious, ostentatious guitar-epic ever played. I don’t think I’m overstating this. I don’t think overstatement is even possible. I mean, the trailer presents one minute of a lush symphonic power ballad while the main character, an amoeba-looking thing with angelic wings, soars with wailing dadaist mermaids in the pink sunset. If you were a stoner in the late '70s, welcome to heaven, you crazy diamond.

Without question, this captures the bombast of double-LPs like Tommy, The Wall, and Jesus Christ Superstar, but rock operas are more than campy absurdity. That’s why the team is recruiting the symphonic talents of the Dutch Metropole Orchestra, enlisting them alongside masters of metal, including Dani Filth, lead singer from the pitch-black Cradle of Filth. The results are very prog, again judging from the song in the trailer, the perfect musical form for carrying you all the way to the guitar-smashing climax with tears streaming down your eyes.

Circle Stop is colorful and evasive lightning in an iOS bottle

Three NYU students make a straphangers' delight.

Apple rejects educational game about slavery for being "offensive"

They may be right: it's already caused uproar in the Netherlands. 

Cuphead is roughly 40% done, but hey, it’s gonna be a trilogy

Is 1930s animation the new 1990s pixel art? Probably not. 

Twitter bot turns text adventures inventories into a sea of creativity

A ham sandwich, a green cable, a zipper, a cracked coconut, a grue suit.

Technolust is saving us from terrible VR before it’s even arrived

It will still arrive though, to be clear.