Stranger 109

As I have addressed in previous posts, one of the hurdles that machinima faces as a fledgling art form is the same issues of representation all previous forms of media have had to overcome through their histories. When you look across the vast majority of machinima out there, the creators tend to represent that early gaming demographic that excludes both women and people of color. And as the ubiquity of home computing continues to grow and the gaming population proceeds to explode, we can only hope that this trend of homogeneous representation will be amended. But when we look through the history of any medium, these are simply part of the growing pains that each new medium undergoes. When we examine the trajectories of both Film and Television, they each demonstrate early tendencies to marginalize those who were not part of the dominant group. So while the landscape of machinima still largely encompasses the demographic of the early adopters we continue to see new voices emerge, representing not just different subjectivities but entirely new ways of envisioning what we can do with this ever-growing means of expression. I want to preface today’s Spotlight by saying that I have not chosen Katy Fosk’s Voices simply because she is a woman, but rather because she has created a unique piece here that illustrates some of the more inventive things being done with the “pro” machinima software out there: Moviestorm and iClone.

I would love to try and summarize the overall narrative premise to Fosk’s conceptually abstract film, but any attempt would likely be overly reductive. For me, I found it best to understand it as an experience and not a story in the traditional sense. That is not to say the film is without a story so much as it is an attempt to focus the attention on how the film tries to unfold the inner workings of its nameless male protagonist. The first 3 minutes are without dialog and use an eerily cacophonous arrangement of familiar and unfamiliar sounds that form the soundbed for the entire work. The latter half of the film consists of a series of dreamlike visuals accompanied by the voiceover reading of poem that seems largely influenced by Beat era standards like Kerouac or Ginsberg. The character models were distinctly from the Moviestorm software, now that I have had some time to play with that and grown familiar with it. The overall sets, however, looked uniquely crafted, likely the iClone portion of the piece, using pastels and neon colors. I wonder what motivated Fosk to choose these engines and their configurability over the milieu of a gaming engine. As so many games are designed by men with men in mind as their target audience, it would make sense that their aesthetic would not appeal to the taste’s of women. Perhaps this makes another case for the growing cottage industry of machinima software and its ability to be tailored to the unique visions of machinimators who do not fit into traditional gaming demographics. To check out Katy Fosk’s film, head over to Machiniplex where they do a great job of carving out a space for more alternative machinima. And hopefully we will continue to see new faces that represent the growth of machinima not just technologically but culturally as well.