The Art Wire

gold extra

A gold extra podcast about game design, innovative theatre, digital storytelling and new forms of narration. NEW EPISODES: Every first friday of the month! "The Art Wire" is created and produced by gold extra. www.goldextra.com podcast.goldextra.com

  1. Boris Labbé - recorded at Festival d’Animation Annecy

    08/01/2025

    Boris Labbé - recorded at Festival d’Animation Annecy

    In this episode, gold extra´s Reinhold Bidner talks with Boris Labbé, a multiple award-winning French animator, director, and media artist. This conversation was recorded in mid-June 2025 during the Festival d'Animation d'Annecy, the largest animation festival worldwide. Originally from the fields of fine arts and traditional animation, Boris Labbé has been expanding his work for years: besides animated films he also creates audio-visual performances, and shows his works in intallations and exhibitions. In the last years Boris also experimented and created with VR and AI, but he always maintains a clear understanding of the narrative he wants to deliver, a clear focus on his artistic style, and an ongoing research process combining traditional handcraft techniques with new technologies. He has received numerous awards, including the Golden Nica at the 2016 Ars Electronica Festival (with Rhizome), the Grand Prix at Venice Immersive in 2024 (with Ito Meikyu), and the Off-Limits Award at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival (with Glass House). These are just three of the many awards he has received since 2011. Boris Labbé’s work forms a cinema of multiplicity. Repetition, re-presentation, collages, patterns, metamorphoses, and perpetual movement, as well as constant citations of art history, literature, and philosophy have all become essential resources of his audiovisual language. https://www.borislabbe.com/ https://www.goldextra.com/en

    44 min
  2. BRIEFS Special: Fantastic Annihilation // Aleksandra Jarosz

    05/09/2025

    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

About

A gold extra podcast about game design, innovative theatre, digital storytelling and new forms of narration. NEW EPISODES: Every first friday of the month! "The Art Wire" is created and produced by gold extra. www.goldextra.com podcast.goldextra.com