Anshuman Iddamsetty is a radio producer and national columnist living in Toronto.

Thursday
May172012

WAITING FOR HORUS

"Videogame laden" some would say.

But it's hard to ignore ideas targeted to my peculiar brand of nostalgia. From the unholy equation of Aliceffekt x Fez developer Renaud Bedard x Phosfiend System's (remember them?) Henk Boom comes Waiting for Horus.

According to a quote given to The Verge this is Quake clothed in the cel-shaded formalism of Jet Set Radio Future

I mean really.

Tuesday
May152012

THE DESCRIPTIVE CAMERA

Prints text descriptions instead of photos.

It's also creator Matt Richardson's attempt at ALT tagging the world. And commenting on post-Instagram fatigue. And the drift towards an image-governed internet as it leaves the visually impaired behind. We're covering a lot of ground here.

Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

And metadata. Did I mention it also uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk service? Yes.

Below, the conversation I produced featuring Matt, Spark host Nora Young, and me. Sort of. It aired on s5e182.

Sunday
May132012

FRAC(K)T

It's kind of like Myst meets Rez meets Tron.

Montreal developers Phosfiend Systems answer a question few have ever posed with FRACT OSC: what if a synthesizer was raised on pure CD-ROM era adventure? What then?

It’s an exploratory game, set in an abstract world built on sound. In the game, players explore this broken-down, abandoned world, solve puzzles that allow them to rebuild its forgotten machinery, which then allows them to create their own sounds and music within the world.

Monday
May072012

THE FIRST SIP

It's a riff on the "Hot Coffee Sex Scandal" that surrounded GTA: San Andreas when it came out, with the sex mini-game and all that. I was interested in the idea of making a sex game that's not a sex game...

That's Pippin Barr telling the always excellent Kill Screen why coffee was the perfect metaphor for the sexiest flash game in recent memory. Hot Coffee succeeds by distilling familiar tensions into a series of abstracted keystrokes. (Cynics might point out how close that is to the truth.) Oh sure, you're just pummeling down on a french press but look sharp; things are at stake.

Barr, a teacher of experimental interaction at the IT University of Copenhagen's Center for Computer Games Research provides an early post-mortem on his blog which I can't recommend enough as it goes into the many, many considerations powering the experience, including the obvious heteronormativity. 

...Everything from the inane business of “tuning innuendo” and figuring out just how phallic a coffee grinder can look to those more serious issues of wanting but failing to make the game gender neutral and searching for sexiness in 80×80 pixels.

Play it now.

Monday
Apr302012

NINE EYES

Jon Rafman's The Nine Eyes of Google Street View isn't new. His manifesto dates back to 2009, so #lttp doesn't begin to qualify this.

But three years later, his carefully curated images still resonate. What began as panopticon discomfort has turned into something more: an incidental record of modern life. The collection almost veers into mainstream waters now that visual non sequiturs are the new standard. Almost. I can only imagine what the ongoing project will look like once Mountain View monetizes altitude.

For the time being, the images return (see, timely) as part of Toronto's 2012 Contact Festival. It runs from May 3 to June 2 at the Angell Gallery.

Monday
Apr302012

SO BANDWIDTH

Hasn't died. No.

I just haven't linked to the last few episodes [via crippling laziness circumstances]. But what luck — CBC Radio is now aggregating each episode on their new soundcloud initiative. Infrastructure, yes.