A Sea Made of Plastic [Podcast]

I open with a 2015 Kill Screen essay about a police station built wrong on purpose, and end up asking Danny Snelson, a writer and professor of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, a question that runs through the whole hour: what does a work become when you move it into the wrong container?

Ed Smith’s piece on Resident Evil 2 called horror architecture “anatomically correct but tonally wrong.” Danny maps that onto Freud, onto the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel, and onto Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil film, where a typewriter on a desk is asked to carry 30 years of player fluency.

Then I turn to Miles Buckle, a London artist who rebuilds Rear Window, Amarcord and Hitchcock’s Rope as late-’90s games nobody will ever play. Danny traces the impulse back to Lego and forward to Roblox, and lands on why a JPEG face stretched over a low-polygon head is more unsettling now than it was in 1998.

The last stretch is Danny’s own book, The Little Database, free and open access from the University of Minnesota Press, and the desktop directory of 44 small archives it has grown into. His best example is Paul Sharits’s flicker film Dots, which on celluloid at Anthology Film Archives is close to hallucination and on YouTube is a blotchy field of squares. The compression is not the failure. It is what lets you see YouTube at all. Quick hits to close: Mitch Anzuoni’s money laundering simulator, Joshua Mattson’s Defence Contractor Fantasy World and its latex hand, and a new alt-control cabinet at Wonderville in Brooklyn.

Links

• My feature on Miles Buckle, who makes games you can’t play
• Ed Smith, “The horror of Resident Evil 2’s police station”
• The Little Database expands into a desktop directory
• Kill Screen on the Resident Evil film’s save points
• Kill Screen on Defence Contractor Fantasy World
• Danny Snelson, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats
• The Little Database desktop directory
• Scott Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions
• Pippin Barr, v r 3
• Miles Buckle on Instagram
• Paul Sharits, Dots 1 and 2 on UbuWeb
• Fiasco, from Bully Pulpit Games

Corrections

• We refer to “The Curse of the Golden Idol.” The game is The Case of the Golden Idol.
• Joshua Mattson is based in Linz, Austria, not Germany.
• The Grand Theft Auto VI story concerned a single Army unit offering a four-day pass as a reenlistment incentive, not the US military broadly.

Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester.