My Electric Heart
Asylum: The Video Game
Asylum is an upcoming survival horror computer game from Senscape that will be released sometime in 2011 (so it can’t be too long now, unless the release is pushed back to 2012).
Almost nothing is known about the story except this: you explore the sprawling, intricate, nearly opulent-looking Hanwell Mental Institute, and the horrors that the inmates underwent. The main character is an ex-patient who has returned to the asylum “to understand why he is suffering from bizarre hallucinations.”
There’s a lot of focus on the actual exploration of the building – as creator Agustín Cordes claims, “Each single room matters and even the bathrooms are brimming with details,” and “The overall consensus is that exploring the Hanwell building feels eerily realistic and is filled with ‘touchably crisp textures.’” About the premise, “I will only say this: Asylum is supposed to feel surreal, like there’s something horribly wrong going on inside Hanwell as soon as you set foot inside the place. Don’t try to make any sense out of it, at least not until you’re halfway into the game.”
More words from the creator:
An aspect that has become very apparent during our testing is that Asylum, unlike most first-person adventures, is really fluid. There are virtually no loading times, control is quick and smooth, navigation is easy, you have an amazing deal of freedom of movement — all in all, everything feels just right. At times it feels like a first-person shooter actually, which is pretty cool if you ask me — after all, adventures should test your creativity and intuition, not your patience with the controls. In this regard I believe that we have definitely achieved our goal because Asylum feels, in one word, “modern.”I love anything to do with old insane asylums, especially in the context of horror, and if the teaser (showing the decayed and sinister corridors of the institute, and cells in which inmates are suffering in horrific, bloody ways) is anything to go by, this should be interesting and imagination-piquing.
A gameplay trailer was released last month, which is quite amazing.
Tags: decaying architecture, horror video games, insane asylum aesthetic, psychological horror, surreal, survival horror video games, trailers
Another trailer for Alice: Madness Returns
Here is a trailer, featuring gameplay, for Alice: Madness Returns, which was released earlier this month (making it the fifth and final trailer).
Alice: Madness Returns is released in the U.S. on June 14, and in Europe on June 16, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
I’m so looking forward to this!
Tags: alice in wonderland, american mcgee, colorful, cute n creepy little creatures, dark fairy tales, dreamscapes, gloomy color schemes, hauntingly beautiful, horror video games, innocence/menace, insane asylum aesthetic, insanity, madness, neo-victorian, psychological horror, surreal, trailers, victorian
Anouk Wipprecht: The Merging of Technology and Fashion
Anouk Wipprecht is a Dutch fashion designer who works in the emerging field of “fashionable technology,” defined by Sabine Seymour as “the intersection of fashion, design, science, and technology.” Anouk seeks to create a “higher state of connectivity between the body and our clothing,” a physical and psychological relationship wherein what we wear responds to us, and we are also affected by what we wear, producing something more than just the traditional function of coverture/adornment. What results is one-of-a-kind, architectural, avant-garde garments with bold silhouettes, vested with circuitry and a regalia of plastic tubes and the ability to respond in a unique and remarkable way to human bodies.
Picture via Coilhouse
The Birds, an installation piece inspired by the Hitchcock filmExamples of Anouk Wipprecht’s “wearable tech” include Fragilis, a dress that eerily mimics the function of the human heart and veins through motion and lighting (similar to the Heartbeat Dress, which conversely uses sound, recording the heartbeat of the model and relaying it to the audience through speakers embedded in the dress):
Daredroid, a dress that “combines pneumatic technology with open-source hardware and human temperament to provide you with a freshly made White Russian cocktail”:
And Intimacy (a project headed by Daan Roosegaarde), a set of garments that become more or less transparent and opaque in relation to their proximity to each other:
An interesting interview with Anouk can be read over on Fashioning Technology.
Tags: anatomical-themed, anouk wipprecht, avant-garde, bioart, biomechanical, fashiontech, fragility, futuristic, high fashion, wearable art, weird science projects, white
“Biojewelry”: Grow Your Own Bone Wedding Rings
Several years ago, Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott, design researchers at the Royal College of Art, and Ian Thompson, a bioengineer at King’s College London, teamed up to create wedding bands from bone cells extracted from five volunteer couples.
According to a BBC News article, “The scientists extracted the participants’ wisdom teeth to get at a sliver of bone that attaches them to the jawbone.” After extracting the bone cells for culture, “These are fed with nutrients and grown on a ‘scaffold’ material called bioglass, a special bioactive ceramic which mimics the structure of bone material.” It was a “long and fragile” process, but basically took place in the following steps:
The process
1. Extract bone chips from jaw. Rinse.
2. Place bone cells in ring-shaped bioactive ceramic scaffold.
3. Feed liquid nutrients and culture in a temperature-controlled bioreactor for six weeks.
4. After coral-like bone forms fully around scaffold, pare down to final ring shape and insert silver liner (for engraving).Harriet Harriss, one of the participants, says: “I love the idea that it’s precious only to us because it is, literally, us. It’s almost worthless to anyone else. To take something that is from myself and make it into something precious is a lovely thing and means quite a lot to me.”
Of course, there is more potential for this project than just offbeat wedding rings made from the beloved’s own bone cells. It could eventually be used to grow bone replacements for implantation, so that the bone required to, say, repair a damaged jaw, wouldn’t have to be harvested from a piece of a rib, or elsewhere in the body. “Dr. Thompson says he thinks it will be used in clinical practice, but not in his lifetime.”
via goetia on Tumblr
Tags: anatomical-themed, bioart, biotechnology, bizarre, bones, jewelry, sinister arts and crafts, weird science projects
“Deus Ex: Human Revolution” Trailer
Another upcoming game I’m excited for is Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the third installment in the Deus Ex series.
Categorized as a “cyberpunk action RPG,” Human Revolution takes place in a dystopian world in 2027, where there are great technological advancements, particularly in biomechanical augmentations, but also the attendant upheaval and corruption. The trailer opens with a dream sequence/metaphor for the protagonist’s bionic enhancement, related to the story of Icarus, which I love.
A longer/more elaborated version of the trailer can be seen here, with a clever/dorky [h+]³ symbol appearing at the end to represent the concept of the game (“Transhumanism cubed”/“Deus Ex 3”).
With lush visuals and an intriguing storyline, Deus Ex: Human Revolution looks to be promising. It’s certainly one of the best game trailers I’ve ever seen. It will be released on August 23.
Tags: biomechanical, bionics, cyberpunk, dystopian, futuristic, icarus, renaissance, trailers, transhumanism, video games
Trailers for “Alice: Madness Returns”
Several months ago I posted the short teaser trailer for Alice: Madness Returns, the upcoming sequel to American McGee’s Alice which will be released on June 14th of this year. Here are three more trailers which give an enticing taste of the game:
Tags: alice in wonderland, colorful, dark fairy tales, dreamscapes, hauntingly beautiful, horror video games, innocence/menace, insane asylum aesthetic, insanity, madness, neo-victorian, psychological horror, surreal, trailers
Victorian Prosthetic Arm
Speaking of Victorian prosthetics, here’s a picture of the hand on a prosthetic arm from the late 19th century, currently resting in the London Science Museum:
via GizmodoI don’t, however, think it’s “creepy” as many others seem to, it just looks very neat and elegant and amazingly detailed. Have they ever seen a modern-day prosthesis? And they think that looks creepy! Hey, if I lost an arm, I think I’d rather have something like that than one of the flesh-colored plastic/hook hand contraptions around now.
Tags: prosthetic, victorian
BioShock Infinite
This is the debut trailer for the third installment in the BioShock series, which has an American exceptionalism theme and takes place in another alternative-history, this time airborne city called “Columbia” in 1912:
(My favorite part starts around 1:45, with the floating roses.)BioShock Infinite will be released sometime in 2012.
I’m very excited!
Alice: Madness Returns
American McGee’s Alice from 2000 is one of my favorite video games, because it’s just so stylish. A short teaser trailer for the sequel, titled Alice: Madness Returns, which is set to be released sometime in 2011, has surfaced.
Tags: alice in wonderland, american mcgee, horror video games, madness, victorian
Fatal Frame II
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly is one of my favorite video games.
It’s creepy, moving, and engaging. It has some of the best voice acting in a video game I’ve ever heard. I love the tender/complex/dependent relationship between Mayu and Mio, which does remind me a little of the one in A Tale of Two Sisters. Mayu, the weaker sister, is the one who seems so much more emotionally vulnerable, and who needs to be taken care of by Mio, but is sometimes left behind by her, even though it’s not fully intentional.
Mayu and Mio are two sisters who come to a deserted place called All Gods Village. The game mostly takes place in these eerily elegant, sparely furnished, minimalistic Edo-period houses, inhabited by many, many ghosts. They try to piece together the story of the Crimson Butterfly Sacrifice, a ritual that took place periodically in the village where two twins were sacrificed to seal off the entrance to the Hellish Abyss. This failed during the last ceremony, causing the village to be annihilated. There’s only one weapon, the Camera Obscura, an old camera from the 19th century which can capture images of ghosts and exorcise them.
The horror of the game builds up; at some point, it becomes genuinely creepy. It’s like watching a horror movie unfold, and to be actually playing it yourself and going through the actions intensifies the dread. The ghosts are varied and move in creepy, bizarre ways; examples are the Falling Woman, who repeatedly falls from the ceiling, shrieking, and squirms/wiggles on her back towards you, and the Hanged Woman, whose neck is bent at an impossible angle. The Twin Sisters, who are undeniably twisted victims, seriously creeped me out; I never knew when they’d pop up again, whispering, “Why do you kill?”
The only faults I found are that at some point after the middle of the game, the dialogue, including the letters and journals you find, and the stones from which you can hear people’s thoughts on a special radio, becomes kind of repetitive and barely tells you anything more. It doesn’t seem as well-developed as the earlier dialogue. Video games never, ever tie up in a satisfactory way for me, because they’re not movies; they are always something of a letdown. I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow the resolution just wasn’t quite engaging/explanatory/psychically fulfilling enough for me. I felt like the message of the ending I got was contradictory to everything I thought about the game. My general attitude towards the Village and the Ritual was that they just perpetuated a traditional evil in some misguided attempt for collective security. But it seemed like the ending implied that compliance was okay, or resistance impossible/fruitless. Like sometimes you need to just close your eyes and let an external force take you over and lead you over the precipice. It was also kind of abrupt. That’s hard for me to accept. I don’t know if the other endings have a different tone.
But I still love it.
I’d give it 4.5 out of 5 ♥s.
Tags: asian horror, edo-period japan, ghosts, sisters, survival horror video games
