religion

ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ALIX DESAUBLIAUX’S MARCHE VERS L'EST

Alix Desaubliaux, Marche vers l’Est, 2016

FINDING JOY AT THE END OF THE WORLD

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Marche vers l'est (2016) is an improvised performance in search of the end of the world in Skyrim, in which the artist deliberately looks for ways to break the game in order to bring its sheer artificiality to the foreground. As Alix Desaubliaux explains,

I wanted to play with the very concept of role playing. The character discovers that he is trapped in an artificial setting, a constructed world, a very elaborate trap. I made March of the East by chance, because I got bored with the game’s quest — the assigned goal so to speak — and I wanted to explore further and discover the boundaries of the territory I was traversing. As I used a cheat code to cross the last frontier between the playable world and the Out of Bounds area, I kind of gave up on my character in my mind and I knew I was leading her to an inevitable end. I knew I wasn’t going to play anymore as I was supposed to. But the more I walked east, the more I was surprised about the indefiniteness of the world. I was expecting an abrupt end, a fall into the void or something. This experimental exploration ends after a day and a night of (in-game) walking. The game map becomes gradually distorted but outside, there is no difference at all, apart from the main island that is no longer viewable. It was largely sufficient for me: I didn't want to push until I maybe came across an invisible wall or something that could technically end the world.

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ALIX DESAUBLIAUX’S DOGMEAT

Alix Desaubliaux, L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster), 2021

MAN’S BEST VIRTUAL FRIEND

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Dogmeat is the name of the loyal, faithful dog that accompanies the player in the post-apocalyptic scenarios of Fallout 4. This virtual animal was originally baded on River, the German shepherd of two of the developers at Bethesda. Also titled Dogmeat, this 2016 machinima focuses on the virtual animal and the emotional bond he shares with the player. Dogmeat is the solution to the breakdown of the simulation: it draws the character into an awareness of the fiction and the artificiality that surrounds him, the virtual setting in which they both find themselves. Dogmeat comprises a series of vignette at time uncanny, tender, tragic. It is a reminder that we are replacing IRL nature with its simulation. And yes, in case you were wondering we are, indeed, living in Philip K. Dick’s world...

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Alix Desaubliaux

Dogmeat

digital video/machinina, color, sound, 16' 31', 2016, France

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT ALIX DESAUBLIAUX’S L’AUTRE MONSTRE

Alix Desaubliaux, L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster), 2021

WHY LOOK AT VIRTUAL ANIMALS?

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A hybrid of video essay, conceptual walkthrough, visual poem, and documentary, L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster) exemplifies the most experimental side of machinima. The French artist - who’s been working with video games for several years - uses Capcom’s Monster Hunter World (2018) to bring to the foreground the affective nature of playing, that it, the emotional, emphatic connections created by interaction design, and specifically, by the relationship between the player and her/his avatars, that is, alter egos and sidekicks. At the same time, Desaubliaux highlights the inner workings of the virtual world simulated in the game, flora and fauna. Specifically, she brings to the viewer’s attention the sheer contradictions between the pro-environmental message of the game and the reality of video game playing, as game-related technologies - including streaming - are extremely power hungry and thus their carbon footprint is far from negligible. It’s remarkable that the more we destroy the environment on a daily basis, the more we strive to reconstruct an idealized version of “nature” in video games and virtual worlds where there is no trash, litter, and microplastics. In a sense, we are replacing IRL nature with its simulation. We live in Philip K. Dick’s world.

The rationale is simple: economics. Virtual worlds are just products to be sold to the masses and there’s nothing that works better than a cute, smiling creature from across the screen to close the deal. Desaubliaux stresses that the appeal of these kinds of games is the liveness of the worlds they depict, their dynamics and their responsiveness. But she also emphasizes the artificially of such constructs with an insistent use of glitches throughout the video: a beetle breaks apart and a cascade of pixels take over the screen. A close up of branches and leaves show the highly geometric, polygonal-nature of this world. Still, the sunsets and sunrises are always perfect. Rivers and oceans are clean. Animals roam free instead of becoming either roadkill or fodder for industrial farming. Desaubliaux engages in critical play, to borrow Mary Flanagan’s expression. She is also an explorer (in Richard Bartle’s terms) and a documentary filmmaker.

She is also a geologist and an ethnographer. She uses the virtual camera to zoom in and out. Several sequences of her monumental documentary are reminiscent of the screensavers of AppleTV and of virtual aquariums: spectacular scenes shot by drones, up high in the sky so that the mess below is not visible, or simulations of microworlds, such as a fish tank in which entropic forces are kept at bay. She mentions the inherent tension between being a “tourist” in virtual worlds and a true resident, a “local”, which is how the game community perceives itself. It’s not just about aesthetics: to fully belong, one must be fluent in the language of the game and its creatures. One must be familiar with the lore, that is virtual folklore. She describes how players create this world by projecting their emotions onto the creatures that populate it, algorithms dressed up in fancy textures… 

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Alix Desaubliaux

L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster)

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 48’ 26”, 2021, France (in French with English subtitles)

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ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S WEEABOO WARRIOR

Christian Wright, Hugging Embrace, 2014

PURE BATHOS

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According to Urban Dictionary, the term Weeaboo “indicates a person who retains an unhealthy obsession with Japan and Japanese culture, typically ignoring or even shunning their own racial and cultural identity. Many weeaboos talk in butchered Japanese with the 8 or so words they know (i.e. kawaii, desu, ni chan). While weeaboos claim to love and support Japanese culture, counter intuitively, they tend to stereotype Japanese culture by how it appears in their favorite anime, which can be safely assumed to be offensive to the Japanese.”

Christian Wright's playful early machinima Weeaboo Warrior plays homage to the extreme Japanophilia of many Western gamers, or any gamer who is not of Asian descent. A tragicomic tale of a knight who desperately needs a new sword to fulfill his goals as an avatar, this machinima explores the bathos that permeates Dark Souls, thanks to an epic soundtrack that mixes Max Richter’s On The Nature Of Daylight and Motoi Sakuraba’s The Ancient Dragon. Another Wright's trademark — the use of intertitles or captions — is also at play. Once again, the juxtaposition of text and image create hilarious outcomes.

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Christian Wright

Weeaboo Warrior

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 09’ 59”, 2015, United Kingdom

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ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S HUGGING EMBRACE

Christian Wright, Hugging Embrace, 2014

“SOMETHING BULGING IN THE DEPTHS OF HIS LEATHER PANTS”

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A bizarre slo-mo conversation between two robotic characters about a “luring bulge” and “golden eyes” that sound sounds like it was lifted from a cheap erotic novel, Hugging Embrace, one of Christian Wright’s earliest machinima, takes glitching to the next level. Characters literally break apart as they discuss the need to find a more private place to indulge in post-human intimacies. The penetration test seems successful, as polygons converge and then explode in a myriad of pieces. A single caress produces unfathomable damage as hands disappear into bodies without organs and limbs vanish in a mountain of hay. Characters’ legs and arms twist unnaturally. A bodily union becomes a literal merging of dark souls. The video illustrates the cheesy dialogue in a comic way and obscenity turns into hilarity. Hugging Embrace redefines kinky for the avatar age. There’s flesh. And there’s skin. There are lubricated shafts. But not the kind you imagine.

“This was juicy”, we are told.

Oh yeah, that was juicy.

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Christian Wright

Hugging Embrace

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 14’ 30”, 2014, United Kingdom

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ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S HOLY SPIRIT

Christian Wright, Holy Spirit, 2016

THE “X” ON YOUR CONTROLLER IS A CROSS, YOU KNOW.

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Clocking at less than three minutes and thirty seconds, Holy Spirit is the shortest of the three installments comprising Wright’s triptych. It is also the most intense. Shock and awe: a frontal attack on all senses, Holy Spirit uses repetition as its main rhetorical tool. Scenes repeat three times, creating a pattern of violence and devastation. The sound (noise?) is brash and harsh throughout the entire video. A long shriek is accompanied by the visual deconstruction of the onscreen images, as glitches and other kinds distortions and corruptions gradually take over. Nobody will hear you screaming in a virtual space.

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Christian Wright

Son

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

Father

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 10’ 13”, 2016, United Kingdom

Holy Spirit

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 3’ 21”, 2016, United Kingdom

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ARTICLE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S FATHER

Christian Wright, Father, 2016

IS VIDEO GAME PLAYING A CULT?

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The work we’re currently exhibiting on VRAL, Son, is part of a monumental project created by Christian Wright in 2016, consisting of a trifecta of machinima titled Father, Son, and Holy Spirit respectively. The fil rouge connecting these works is the idea of ritualistic play, that is, the repetitive actions performed by the player, which Wright associates to the supernatural as it is represented in video games and in gaming communities. Father’s main “characters” are the four elements — Earth, Water, Air and Fire — which are interspersed with religious iconography, including the image of a fish, several churches, altars, tabernacles, and crosses.

Punctuated by the recurring use of slow motion and fixed camera, Father opens with the image of people floating or falling from the sky, a metaphor for the biblical falling of Man (sic) and the need for redemption through the sacrifice of Christ in the Christian mythology (in fact, the Savior himself does make an appearance at 3’ 09”). We see hordes of undead and walking skeletons pray for the return of the Sun/Son of God, either in natural environments and human made infrastructures, such as cathedrals.

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Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text and access the content consider joining our Patreon community.