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Antiviral

Antiviral is the directorial debut of Brandon Cronenberg, the son of the master of “body horror,” David Cronenberg. It bears a marked similarity to his father’s work, but still manages to hold its own, has a distinct style, and is not merely a copy of Cronenberg films like Videodrome and eXistenZ. It’s eerie and fascinating, a subtle combination of horror, science fiction, and surreal atmosphere. The visual style has an elegant spareness and crispness that is pure and precise. I found it well worth watching, and very interesting.

The protagonist is Syd March, played by the beautiful yet intensely sinister Caleb Landry Jones. He works for a company which sells live viral infections harvested from the bodies of celebrities to customers who yearn to share their illnesses, and commune with them via the shared infection. This film brings up some intriguing concepts about the survival of the human body past the death of the individual. For one, it makes the point that to viruses, the human body in itself is irrelevant, it is the host cells, the basic biological level, which matter. One of the characters makes a reference to the first human immortal cell line, telling March that the cells of a woman who died of cancer in the 1950s are still alive and being grown today, so that at least on a biological level, her death has not been complete. He comments that “the afterlife is getting extremely perverse.”

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“Neverending Nightmares” Kickstarter Campaign

Neverending Nightmares is an upcoming PC game, in development by Infinitap, which promises to be eerie, atmospheric, and horrifically surreal. Inspired by the creator’s struggle with OCD and depression, the art style was influenced by Edward Gorey, and game influences include Silent Hill and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Some of the imagery in the game comes from “intrusive thoughts” that have recurred to the developer, Matt Gilgenbach. In an interview with Penny Arcade, he describes how his personal experience with mental illness influenced the project.

The game focuses on exploration and has an interactive narrative structure, in which your actions cause the story to branch off and determine what the ultimate reality you awaken to will be. The gameplay and controls are simple and minimalistic. I love psychological horror games which involve little “action” (such as Tale of Tales’ The Path), and feel that they allow you to be more fully immersed in the experience, so I’m looking forward to this intriguing title.

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Ergo Proxy

I’ve just started re-watching the sci-fi anime show Ergo Proxy, and again I’m struck by its visual splendor. Ergo Proxy is a deeply philosophical, beautifully animated dystopian cyberpunk series which deals with the existence of humans and AutoReivs (androids) in the domed city of Romdeau, built to protect its citizens after global ecological disaster thousands of years in the past. The main character is Re-l Mayer, an intelligence bureau agent who is assigned to investigate the “Cogito virus,” which causes infected AutoReivs to become self-aware. The “Proxies” are mysterious, godlike beings whose nature is enigmatic yet deeply human. Taking place both within the seemingly utopian, futuristic city and outside in the vast, dark expanses of the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the capacities and origin of the Proxies are slowly unraveled. In this gorgeous animation, cerebral engagement, existential musings, emotional intensity, and aesthetic rigor combine in a rare way to produce a dreamlike, vague, often abstruse, but ultimately compelling story.

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Prose Poetry Manifesto: From Hakim Bey’s T. A. Z.

“I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror–everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.”

— from The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
by Hakim Bey

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Shanghai’s 1933 Slaughterhouse

This beautiful concrete, glass, and steel edifice, designed by British architects and built by Chinese developers in 1933, is an Art Deco wonder of space, natural light, and enigmatic curves and bends. It’s hard to imagine that this incredible building, which reminds me of a Lovecraftian elder city of stone labyrinths, was originally designed as a slaughterhouse.

Its maze-like passages were built to herd cattle along to their deaths. The rough surfaces were to prevent cattle from slipping, even on floors slick with blood. Atlas Obscura says, “The hulking spiderweb of intertwining staircases, ramps, bridges and corridors was all part of guiding the flow of both thousands of workers to their stations, and millions of cattle to their deaths….Ultimately it is the interlocking staircases and twenty-six ‘air bridges’ of varying width that connect the outer areas with the circular core that give the building its mind-bending M. C. Escher quality.”

It underwent a major renovation in 1998 after being abandoned for years, and is now used as a sort of mall and simply called “1933.” This architectural gem reminds me of Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, a gorgeous midcentury industrial district of military factory buildings built in the ’50s in a Bauhaus-inspired style, which was reclaimed and redesigned by artists in the ’90s and 2000s, and is now a home to art studios, galleries, and cafes, with a unique, spacious, majestic, beautiful, half-sterile feel. 1933 would be amazing as a center for art and creativity.

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Formulaic Halo: The Art of John Brophy

The beautifully rendered paintings of Seattle-based artist John Brophy, evoking images of the Holy Virgin, combine the divine and the empirical, innocence and malice. Religious iconography is a predominant theme, and it goes hand in hand with math, science, nature, disaster, violence, and mythology. The mystical is juxtaposed with mathematical formulae, Christian virtue is bedecked with symbols of 20th-century evil such as Nazi swastikas and atom bombs. This surreal imagery has an immediate photographic realism that is achieved through Brophy’s technique of first making a 3D study of the work using Maya, ZBrush, and Photoshop, and then executing it in oil paints à la 15th-century Flemish masters. The polished, perfect tangibility of these images makes them all the more poignant.

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