Crucifixion and Epiphany
digital video (1980 x 1080), color, sound, 22’ 59”, 2020, Hong Kong
Created by Edwin Lo
A follow up to Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It (2020) and The Rupture of Promised Land (Or We Can Never Get There) (2020), Crucifixion and Epiphany is a commentary on religious iconography through the lenses of video games and archival materials. Using the format of desktop documentary, Lo disrupts the conventional dichotomies – real vs. simulacral, fiction vs. fantasy – to visually articulate the “downfall of mankind” narrative. Following Kevin B. Lee’s dictum that desktop cinema has cinematic aspirations but operates as a blank canvas, Lo’s screen performance is a captivating and multi-layered visual experience. Crucifixion and Epiphany is a creative (re)mix of multiple sources, a hybrid of machinima, desktop cinema, and archival footage. A study in media res, this work is the outcome of an experimental practice that resembles the vernacular obsession for narrativizing the so-called lore of popular fantasy video games on YouTube and Twitch.
Edwin Lo is an artist and researcher working with sound in various contexts and media such as performance, text, recording, video, installation and video games. Lo received a Master of Arts from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His work was exhibited in several countries, including Hong Kong, United States, Berlin, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Paris, Brazil, Switzerland, Sweden, and Shanghai. His work was presented by the Goethe-Institut and Para/site in Hong Kong, the Tokyo Arts and Space, the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Loop in Barcelona and Meinblau Projektraum in Berlin. His artist residencies include China, Germany, Japan. Lo lives and works in Hong Kong.
Luca Miranda: How did you become interested in desktop cinema?
Edwin Lo: My interest in desktop documentary and desktop cinema can be traced back to two main sources. First and foremost, for the past few years, my artistic production was significantly influenced and inspired by the theory of individuation and the notion of the technical object by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon and the digital object by Yuk Hui. These concepts inform my artistic practice both theoretically and philosophically. They have influenced my thinking and inspired me to explore different tools, systems, and relations throughout my works.
Secondly, my interest in desktop cinema and desktop documentary was inspired by Kevin B. Lee’s oeuvre. A pioneer in this field, Lee’s works and approach to recording a computer desktop are perhaps the most compelling reaction to today’s visual culture. I believe that desktop filmmaking forces us to rethink the paradigm and production of moving images in fundamental ways. In a sense, I came across his body of work at the right time because I wanted to do something outside the domain of machinima after producing various video pieces based on the horror game Outlast between 2018 and early 2020. During that time interval, I began thinking of something more elaborate and I was in the planning stages of what would eventually become Crucifixion and Epiphany. When I encountered Lee’s works, I immediately realized that I wanted to experiment with a format and an aesthetic that, at the time, were completely novel to me.
Luca Miranda: Crucifixion and Epiphany contains multitude insofar as it features a wide variety of sources, ranging from Wikipedia’s archives to video game cutscenes, from the iconic Adorazione to epiphany rites in both Florida and Italy. It’s truly multimedia, although the term has become somehow passé these days. Your virtual diptych – and triptych – is imbued with a mutation in fieri. Did you start with a detailed draft or did Crucifixion and Epiphany evolve organically during production?
Edwin Lo: I made Crucifixion and Epiphany after Those Who Do Not Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat It (2020) and The Rupture of the Promised Land (Or We Can Never Get There) (2020). Thus, Crucifixion and Epiphany is part of an ongoing dialogue, or perhaps, an epilogue of some sort or perhaps a short commentary about my two previous works.
When I decided to create Crucifixion and Epiphany, I spent some time studying the genre of desktop documentary and evaluating the different approaches. I came to the conclusion that there are no fixed rules on how to produce a desktop documentary. Some people like to spend a long time editing their screen performance, adding extra content, while others prefer a more direct, raw approach, without relying too much on editing. The latter are more interested in conveying their message as-is, with as little intervention or manipulation in post-production as possible. This is the style I prefer, because my intent is, first and foremost, to emphasize what happens during a single take. The editing process would inevitably erase or alter some of the original content. My priority is to select and show some things for a specific amount of time. I also appreciate the spontaneity of the process. My goal is to document any form of improvisation that happens during the screen performance.
So, production-wise, my process consisted in selecting relevant visual and audio content on the concepts of epiphany and crucifixion via YouTube and the Library of Congress online archive that can be directly connected to key scenes in Outlast 2, in order to create a dialogue. This content is related to the acts of giving birth and suffering. I did not make a detailed draft nor I followed a rigorous structure. I’m more interested in flow than adhering to a rigid structure. I wanted to show something to the audience in a specific time frame and I also wanted to overlap these things in a semi-improvised way. In the end, I made two takes. Then, I selected one and applied minor editing.
Luca Miranda: At one point during the video game Outlast 2, Laird Byron, the deformed dwarf mounted atop of Nick Tremblay, says “A modern Christ would use a camera, not a book. This is our gospel!”. In a certain way, your work ratifies this assumption: Crucifixion and Epiphany uses screencast, game-based, literature, and the multiscreen space-time continuum to generate several layers of meaning. Can you comment on the potential of machinima to reflect upon themes like religion, faith, superstition, and culture?
Edwin Lo: I consider machinima one of the most powerful examples in the art of appropriation. In fact, I’m interested in machinima’s potential for appropriation, transformation and/or subversion of existing game materials or scenes. At the same time, machinima is a form of reticulation, that is, it is a text that is always already related to something else, something disparate or inchoate. I think that machinima reveals the fact that video games have the capacity for continuous individuation, to borrow Simondon’s concept, in which art, milieu, and technology all play a significant role.
For Crucifixion and Epiphany, my original intention was not to produce work strictly within the confines of machinima. I wanted to take a detour, and to highlight the affinities between game and reality. To me, the key concern of Outlast is to investigate and examine the themes of religion and faith through technological means. I find these underlying concerns much more intriguing than the aesthetics or the mechanics of the video game per se. Machinima is a process that allows artists to think about gaming in ways that are not possible otherwise. So it’s both a technique and a way of thinking.
Luca Miranda: In your Outlast trilogy, you connect the videogame Outlast (2013) to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) and briefly discuss the idea of machinima-literature. In your latest work, machinima is connected to the literary nature of the archive. Can you elaborate?
Edwin Lo: The Fall (2018), The Heart (2018), and The Pit (2019) were my first attempts to incorporate machinima within my practice. In making these works, I remade the soundscape and created sounds using selected sequences from the game since my practice is strictly connected to sound art. As the creative process unfolded, I wanted to add something to the captured scenes. For this purpose, I turned to Edgar Allan Poe because I feel there is an overlap between Outlast and Poe’s stories in regard to the mood and to the very definition of horror. Besides, Outlast is a milestone in the first-person survival horror video game genre, while Poe is a prominent figure within the horror canon. Thus I wanted to interpret Poe’s work though machinima and, at the same time, create an artwork that could somehow synthesize literature, games, and sound.
Luca Miranda: Indeed, sound has always been a key concern in your practice. In many ways, Crucifixion and Epiphany is a commentary to today’s rich – sometimes cacophonic – soundscape. A constant stream and flow of voices, sounds, jingles, and reverberations. If you had to describe the role that sound plays in your work, what would you say?
Edwin Lo: As I said, my artistic practice revolves around sound. It’s my point of departure. In all my video game-related works, sound always plays a crucial role. In my previous pieces, sound is either placed in an environment created from scratch (such is the case of Procession or Miracles and Wounds) or aligned with pre-existing visual materials (as in the Outlast Trilogy). In other instances, my artwork is conceived as an active investigation of sonic history, as it happens in Those Who Do Not Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat It. During the production of Crucifixion and Epiphany, sound was my key concern as well. Specifically, I wanted to bring forth the conflict between the sources of sound and the images, in order to create an aural-visual dissonance, to emphasize the disconnect between what we see and what we hear. The outcome is a bit chaotic and unexpected, but at the same time, I like to think that such sonic conflicts can generate meaningful experiences.
Luca Miranda: When considered alongside Those Who Do Not Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat It (2020) and The Rupture of the Promised Land (Or We Can Never Get There) (2020), Crucifixion and Epiphany becomes part of a triptych examining the role that religion, capitalism, and socialism play in the modern imaginary. Whether it is blind faith in the “free market” or in Jesus Christ, your work examines the concepts of community, collectivism, and their potential outputs. I am thinking about the socialist utopianism experiments in the West, primarily arising from French, English and American Christian expressions of communism, as exemplified by Robert Owen’s New Harmony or Etienne Cabet’s Ideal City, for instance. I’m also thinking of movies like Midsommar (2019), The Sacrament (2013) or The Devil’s Doorway (2018). Were there specific sources or references that inspired your most recent work? What was the main drive behind this “unholy communion” between videogames, film, and audiovisual archives?
Edwin Lo: I appreciate all these connections you are making. I think one of the main sources of inspiration may be related to my own upbringing. I grew up in a Catholic and Christian environment, from elementary school to high school. The same applies to my family and relatives. I do not necessarily identify as a Christian, but I have some ideas about religion, faith, church culture, collectivity, and the activities surrounding a Christian community since childhood. I think this indirect influence has deeply affected me, and remained an underlying theme throughout my life, something that probably led me to produce these works. In a sense, through these works, I tried to articulate my skepticism about faith and religion. It also forced me to confront what I consider the horror of cults. It is worth mentioning that the sect depicted in Outlast 2 is somehow modeled after real events that took place in Jonestown, even though there is not a direct connection to the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project members. Even for the game developer is nothing more than a reference. My original intention was to create a machinima. However, after reading the public files about Jonestown available on the FBI online archive, I discovered another kind of horror. Thus I wanted to create a visual dialogue between real life tragedies and the fantasies depicted in the video game. As I began working on this project, what truly horrified me was the realization that so many people fell victim of protracted psychological and mental manipulation, not to mention physical violence. It is tragic that they did not achieve what they tried to pursue: the Promised Land, the utopian commune, the equality of all human beings... All that they accomplished was their own death. That is why I decided to change my original plan. Instead of making a machinima, I switched to a hybrid of machinima and archival materials in order to produce an audio and visual journey about the video game. I wanted to combine game sequences with what I found in the archive and the tragic events of Jonestown.
Luca Miranda: Desktop cinema and desktop documentary are often associated with found footage, which is, in turn, connected to the horror genre and themes such as the supernatural, religion, and the weird. I remember reading that Spanish director Jaume Balagueró (Rec, 2007) once stated that he wanted to make a film that could mimic “the experience of playing video games”. By connecting different kinds of gaze (the cinematic gaze, the game gaze, and the internet gaze), the act of looking becomes the process of absorbing various data which have been homogenized under the aegis of the digital. What does “looking” mean to you, today?
Edwin Lo: Since its emergence in the Nineteenth century, the language of cinema has challenged our perception. As you know, there are countless filmmakers and artists who have experimented with different types of gaze. Furthermore, video games and the culture of play have become the vital forces in reshaping our understanding of cinema and its peculiar framing of reality. In this respect, I think Harun Farocki is one of the prominent artists and filmmakers who demonstrated – beyond any reasonable doubt – that video games and machinima can allow us to rethink our visual culture as well as the issue of digitality. With the emergence of what Yuk Hui called the digital object – a new type of industrial object after Simondon’s technical object – I think the gesture of looking has become even more crucial for us. We must acknowledge the emergence of novel relations and the new aesthetic potentials of digital objects, as they expand and enrich the ongoing dialectic. To better understand the status of looking in the digital age, we can rely on the theory of the digital object. In short, what we are looking at or gazing does not simply pertain to the optical, but also to the relational, and above all, to the philosophical.
Luca Miranda: Why are you so fascinated by Outlast? As a video game, Outlast is both an interactive critique of gaming conventions and an example of interactive archival footage. On the one hand, Outlast appropriates and redefines the notions of found footage and database cinema (as described by Lev Manovich); on the other, it updates games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) and Her Story (2015). Why did you decide to make a machinima to examine this intriguing conflation? What makes this format so conducive to question the process of making audiovisual content via digital means?
Edwin Lo: I have been a video game player since the introduction of the Nintendo NES. At the same time, I am fascinated by the spectatorial nature of gaming: I love watching people playing video games for hours. Outlast holds a special place in my heart, not only because it belongs the first batch of PC games that I purchased after playing mostly on old consoles such as the Sega Dreamcast, the Sega Saturn, and many console emulators via OpenEmu of macOS, but also because I like watching people’s reactions, screams or jokes online as they play the game. I think these are the main reasons behind my passion for Outlast and my decision to use it to make art.
Also, when I began exploring computer game cultures, I came across the community of modders and in-game photographers. It was like discovering a brand new world. They both gave me ideas on how to develop my own project and I was fascinated by the potential of the free camera mods.
A few years ago, around 2016, with the encouragement from Ip Yuk Yiu – who has been a good friend of mine and mentor since my graduate studies in Hong Kong – I tried to incorporate video game mechanics and play elements into my work because, to a certain extent, it is challenging to make site-specific sound works here in Hong Kong as space and support are relatively scarce. After all, sound art is a minor art form in Hong Kong, unlike places like Germany or the United States. I thought it might be a good artistic strategy to produce my sound projects in the context of video games. I was not sure whether it was a suitable option for me at that time. That was why I experimented with the format of machinima to create a variety of works. I wanted to expand and enrich my practice.
In recent years, I have not exhibited often in Hong Kong. In fact, I tend to work more in Japan and Germany. For these reasons, I believe that the digital medium can provide opportunities that are unknown to physical or studio-based work. And now, with a persistent, global pandemic, I think this makes even more sense, both practically and artistically.
Luca Miranda: In video games, the themes of crucifixion and rebirth are usually conveyed as narrative props. They are rarely given much attention. I can recall specific instances, e.g. baptismal scenes in Bioshock Infinite (2013), the figurative references in Fallout: New Vegas (2010) or several scenes of The Last of Us Part II (2020), but in Outlast 2 crucifixion and rebirth are a recurrent motif. Did you consider using other video games in the planning stages of your project or was Outlast 2 your first and only choice?
Edwin Lo: I wanted to specifically engage with Outlast. Crucifixion and Epiphany is meant as a discussion between the themes that I previously mentioned and my own reaction to the game. Thus, the project is kind of a meta-commentary.
Luca Miranda: In 2013, French artist Camille Henrot produced Gross Fatigue, widely regarded as the artwork that transformed desktop cinema, up to that point considered a vernacular practice, into a legitimate contemporary art genre. Gross Fatigue was described as “an intuitive unfolding of knowledge”. Can desktop cinema, in your opinion, really “unfold the knowledge” or, more modestly, unlock the inner logic of the digital?
Edwin Lo: In a contribution to Being and Technology, philosopher Yves Michaud discusses Simondon’s aesthetics. In his essay “The Aesthetics of Gilbert Simondon: Anticipation of the Contemporary Aesthetic Experience”, Michaud writes: “Every inventor in the matter of art is a futurist to a certain extent, which means that he exceeds the hic et nunc of needs and ends by enlisting in the created object sources of effects that live and multiply themselves in the work; the creator is sensitive to the virtual, to what demands, from the ground of time and in the tightly situated humbleness of a place, the progress of the future and amplitude of the world as a place of manifestation.” (1)
To me, desktop cinema possesses a futuristic layer that opens up new relations and creates a synthesis between looking and listening. Thus, it introduces a new paradigm in thinking about the medium of cinema and our own sensorium. Just a few years ago, nobody thought that lifting images, sounds, and entire sequences from the web or from a video game or computer game could have aesthetic potential. But some artists have that futuristic mind that allows them to imagine and formalize new relations produced by the unexpected interaction between tools, technology and the cultural milieu. More importantly, artists can help us to augment our understanding of aesthetics in this technological milieu. Crucifixion and Epiphany may be a small attempt to unfold something tangible through a (re)mix of history and fiction, using a remediated video game as a delivery channel. That is why I remain optimistic about desktop cinema in unfolding knowledge and the inner logic that informs the notion of the digital. However, what kind of knowledge is that? What is the relationship between such knowledge and the essence of the digital? I think we will need some more space and more time to find answers.
Luca Miranda: What is next for you? Will you be pursuing this innovative genre of desktop machinima and game video essay in the future?
Edwin Lo: Yes, I think I will further explore about this type of production in future. I have some ideas for future projects but they are still in the developing stage at this time and I still need to find a way to connect the dots and assemble the various materials. I think my future projects may deal with the analogy between politics and violence in both game and reality as they relate to history and technology.
1. See Ives Michaud, “The Aesthetics of Gilbert Simondon: Anticipation of the Contemporary Aesthetic Experience”, in Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, Ashley Woodward (Eds.), Gilbert Simondon. Being and Technology, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2012, pp. 121-133.
Crucifixion and Epiphany
digital video (1980 x 1080), color, sound, 22’ 59”, 2020, Hong Kong
Created by Edwin Lo, 2020
Courtesy of Edwin Lo, 2020
Made with Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013)