The Art Wire

gold extra
The Art Wire

A gold extra podcast about game design, innovative theatre, digital storytelling and new forms of narration. "The Art Wire" is created and produced by gold extra. www.goldextra.com

  1. BRIEFS Special: Fantastic Annihilation // Aleksandra Jarosz

    MAY 9

    BRIEFS Special: Fantastic Annihilation // Aleksandra Jarosz

    In this episode, host Evgeni Pozankov talks with Aleksandra Jarosz, the lead designer of Fantastic Annihilation, a subversive and intense “action-clicker” game made for Briefs 2024: Death. Developed with collaborators Thomas Feichtmeir and Alejandro Rodriguez Ramallo, the game challenges players to systematically eradicate all life on Earth— not as an idle diversion, but as a demanding, real-time experience. Aleksandra discusses the game’s philosophical roots in Peter Wessel Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah” and her inspiration from conceptual art exploring ecological destruction. The gameplay riffs on idle genres like Cookie Clicker, but turns them on their head: instead of passively waiting, players must actively and aggressively click, sterilize, upgrade, and annihilate, facing a relentless struggle against organic reproduction and time. The game’s standout feature is its dark, finite ending: players are ultimately forced to kill their ever-cheerful guide “Annihilation-chan”—a nihilistic cheerleader quoting existential philosophy—and finally, themselves. It’s a deliberate, unsettling closure that reflects on ecocide, ego, and the human desire for control, presented through grim humor and genre-bending design. This episode dives deep into game design as narrative, balancing mechanics with message, and flipping conventions in both storytelling and player reward. A true clicker with an end, Fantastic Annihilation is a radical experiment in existential gameplay.  Fantastic Humans are: Alejandro Rodriguez Ramallo, Aleksandra Jarosz, Thomas Feichtmeir, Hexenkraft BRIEFS: https://www.goldextra.com/en/briefs-a-microgame-series

    52 min
  2. Total Refusal - Leonhard Müllner: Beneath the shiny surface of textures

    08/14/2024

    Total Refusal - Leonhard Müllner: Beneath the shiny surface of textures

    This episode somewhat an AIxperiment: Picture this: I’m at "Fantoche", this funky animation festival over in Switzerland. Not so random this time, because both Leonard Mülner from the Total Refusal collective and I were invited to showcase our works and sit on a panel to discuss them. All was so spontaneous and comfy, I only realized afterwards I had recorded the whole thing in German. So what to do now, throw it all away? ooor turn this into an AI experiment? So, I decided to clone our voices, run the interview through some text-to-speech magic, and voilà—an English version! The result however was, let’s say, a bit on the "wooden" side. Turns out, using reading samples instead of conversation samples wasn’t the best move. Nevertheless, give it a listen: Explore the worlds of digital subversion with Leonard, a key member of the activist art collective Total Refusal. In this spontaneos interview Leonard reveals some insights to the creative processes and motivations behind their work, and how they define the boundaries between art and activism. From exploring virtual landscapes to challenging societal norms through digital mediums, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, art, and resistance. Tune in to hear his thoughts about dystopias, brain-appetizing game concepts and some glimmering rays into an utopian future: Solarpunk. (By the way, you can find the german - unedited - interview attached at the end: 44:10 )

    1h 50m

About

A gold extra podcast about game design, innovative theatre, digital storytelling and new forms of narration. "The Art Wire" is created and produced by gold extra. www.goldextra.com

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