xXx_FANTASYLAND_xXx is a multimedia project that combines audio, live performance, and video game design to create a surreal, horror landscape of experiences being objectified as trans and racialized bodies. Utilizing core principles of video game design to create an interactive experience, accompanied by a soundscape created in a live DJ-style musical set, we place the audience in an unexpected position as both a victim and voyeur to the fetishization of the performer. Questioning the position of authority in a relationship between the two and subsequently, contesting the submissive and involuntary image placed upon women as subservient and obedient. Players gradually become more aware of the performer’s involvement in their video game experience through expressions of intimacy and desire towards the audience within the music being performed, creating a feedback loop that watches and is watched.
Being in the spotlight as a performer, re-articulated and re-formatted through CRT TVs, poetry, and video game elements, a direct connection is made. The live performance’s effect on the video game causes the entirety of the project to act as an explicit articulation of the constant invasiveness faced in both physical and online spaces. While appearing to play into a fantasy for the technological and academic male gaze, that perpetuates women alongside machines, without autonomy and oftentimes blended together as AI assistants or chat bots expected to provide, project_xXxFANTASYxXx subverts the traditional linearity placed on marginalized bodies. Our project indulges in the complexity of our history with intimacy, utilizing our stories as the center of its narrative evolution and highlighting the absurdity of undermining underrepresented and silenced voices. In order to fulfill the constant, “perfect” expectation oftentimes placed on marginalized bodies without being dehumanized, project_xXxFANTASYxXx must exploit what interacts with it to remain lively and desired. The performer, acting as a cog in the machine, is a part of the numerous sequences that create the abrupt and absurdist environment riddled with repetition and distortion.
The project utilizes the Open Sound Control protocol to send packages between the Unity Game Engine, Ableton and Max MSP. Through this protocol, the components of the piece are able to communicate over a network and control different aspects of the piece. This allows the music being produced to change and modify the game directly, and interactions within the game environment are able to affect the sounds being made directly. This interplay forces the players to become performers themselves as their movements and choices become broadcasted through the music being performed. Embedded sensor information, such as distance and sound, around the area where the player is seated is also being collected as a means of influencing the game and music.
