Kill Screen

Rising is a series on game-makers on their way up. Brussels-based artist and choreographer Nikima Jagudajev's journey to games pre-dated any of the typical signposts one associates with them. No trips to the arcade. No older sibling leaving a console in the den after leaving for college. No random YouTube videos.

Hello hello! First of all, thank you so much for riding with me while I took a nice break this summer. (And a special thanks to Aleksandra, Chia, and Raphael, who became members while I was away.) As many of you know from creative endeavors, big and small, time away is an excellent way to rewire and refocus. I heard someone say that the narrower your expertise, the wider your interests need to be, so that means spending time away from the very thing you know so well.

Game designer Stephen Gillmurphy tells me that he has a hard time finishing things from start to finish. Ideas come to him quickly, while daydreaming usually, but then something isn’t quite right, so he makes some adjustments. He calls it drift, but in Spanish, one might call it sobremesa, that byzantine logic of post-dinner conversations that starts here and moves poco a poco somewhere else entirely.

Catmilk is a digital artist and solo developer who has been building a game called Gossamer Matrix for about four years. It's a first-person shooter set inside a corporate tower in a climate-flooded future, where cities have condensed vertically, and private militaries defend shareholder value floor by floor. The premise is deliberately hyperviolent. The color palette is, improbably, pink. What caught my attention was the texture. The game looks stitched. Woven.

I had an amazing time at DEMO2026 at the New Museum in New York City. Part of it was the nostalgia of riding my bike over the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, and part of it was being without childcare responsibilities, staying up late talking with artists, and sleeping in. I was ready to get home after a couple of days, but it was a nice change from working from home here in Los Angeles. DEMO is part exhibition, part working conference, and part presentation.

The entrance to the Fun and Games arcade in Framingham, Mass. makes visitors feel like they’re boarding a spacecraft. Silver doors with nearly opaque window panels slide open to reveal a metallic catwalk, which is surrounded by strobing lights that suggest you are entering hyperspace. For a kid, it makes you feel like you’re blasting off from the drab strip malls of Route 9 on an intergalactic adventure. That’s before you step inside to find that the place feels like—well, like a dingy video arcade.

If you subscribe to Criterion, you may have recently noticed the “Corporate Thrillers” playlist that runs through that genre of film, mostly clustered between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, that uses the office building as a kind of pressure chamber: The Firm, Michael Clayton, The International.

I'm in New York City this week, and the thing I remember most about my time here is the nights: those hazy evenings when the weather is warm, and it seems like the world is completely in the right place. It is truly a type of madness, a delirium, wrought purely by youth, altered states, and the cultural collision attendant on cities of any shape or size. Dance parties are a natural, emergent expression of the urban environment.

I'm off to the DEMO Festival in New York City this week, one of the few media arts festivals in the United States. NEW INC is an arts and tech incubator run by the New Museum, and a place I have a real fondness for. The first Killscreen office was on Chrystie St., just on the back side of the then two-year-old building, and we were delighted to get reflected light in the SANAA-designed space.

At that moment, Lisa Jamhoury was making a piece about loss; she, too, was losing an unimaginable part of herself. Pressed cheek to cheek, breath to breath, she prepared to say goodbye to her mother as she prepared to grieve what would come next. "I could have never imagined the world without my mother; it feels so empty," she told me.