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# Carl Burton’s gorgeous GIFs are being turned into a videogame
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/islands/
- Published: 2016-08-31T12:00:41.000Z
- Updated: 2016-08-31T08:06:54.000Z
- Description: Shopping malls. Airport bookstores. Hotel lobbies. Carl Burton—the artist and animator behind Serial‘s second season GIFs—is creating a videogame that exploits the “boringness” of these liminal, corporate spaces. Using the foggy, surrealist art style of his GIFs, ISLANDS is a videogame you experienc
- Author: Nicole Carpenter
- Tags: News, Carl Burton, gifs, ISLANDS, Surreal, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

Shopping malls. Airport bookstores. Hotel lobbies. Carl Burton—the artist and animator behind [*Serial*‘s second season GIFs](http://killscreen.tumblr.com/post/128823321523/saveroomminibar-the-art-of-carl-burton?ref=killscreen.com)—is creating a videogame that exploits the “boringness” of these liminal, corporate spaces. Using the foggy, surrealist art style of his GIFs, *ISLANDS* is a videogame you experience, rather than play.

Anthropologist Marc Augé calls these spaces non-places—”If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place,” Augé wrote in *Non-Places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity (*1992). A parking lot is a non-place, too. It’s a place meant to be temporal, to be traveled through. A place that, just by parking in it, a person is in adherence to a set of rules. Anonymity. Augé theorized that entering this sort of non-place strips a person of her “usual determinants.” When passing through a non-space, she’s simply a user of *that* non-space.

Neutrality in these spaces give them a sort of uncanny quality

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/dce18d5f475a6585f15ea002bd5887f5/tumblr_ocn7xcintb1r4dhkuo4_500.gif)

Neutrality in these spaces give them a sort of uncanny quality, Burton said. That’s what he’s focusing on with *ISLANDS*. Burton is aiming to confront the surreal aspects of these spaces, echoing the “strange truth” of non-places Augé uncovered in his research: “The face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others,” Augé wrote.

*ISLANDS* is about making these spaces that feel intuitive and experiential, Burton said. “In *ISLANDS*, each space is a self-contained scene that you interactively trigger that transforms it into something more surreal, yet strangely functional,” Burton said. Ten environments will be available to explore—among them, a waiting room, a parking lot, a lobby, all in Burton’s gorgeous, minimal art style.

*ISLANDS will be released on Mac, Windows, and iOS platforms in fall 2016\. Voting for ISLANDS is open on [Steam Greenlight](http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=735850142&ref=killscreen.com). See more of Burton’s work, which include short films and illustrations, on [his website](http://carlburton.io/?ref=killscreen.com#%5F=%5F).*

![tumblr_ocn7xciNTb1r4dhkuo7_500](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/tumblr_ocn7xcintb1r4dhkuo7_500.gif)

![tumblr_ocn7xciNTb1r4dhkuo8_500](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/tumblr_ocn7xcintb1r4dhkuo8_500.gif)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/6239e4272e93f0aa95b9c8c7785f69f9/tumblr_ocn7xcintb1r4dhkuo5_500.gif)