A curatorial debut by Rosa Marouane (@largershandytattoo) Get Digging was a fresh use of screen one at the Rio in Dalston both showcase and fundraiser. The program consisted of 6 KittyHorrorShow games: Exclusion Zone (2020), Chyrza (2014), Anatomy (2016), Grandmother's Garden (2020), Tenement (2020), and Lethargy Hill (2020); each game was to be screened in its entirety
Each game was screened with no introduction, context or title card. We are invited into the safety of the dark and violently pulled out again by a different alien landscape. We were watching Rosas gameplay walking us through the events of each game — a pseudo machinima. The game's sound is the most striking difference between this exhibition and the experience of playing on a smaller scale. The crackly, noisy murmurs which make up many of the game's dialogue and ambience gnawed away at the speakers throughout, reverberating through the cinema. The way the sound design forces you to listen, carefully you strain to hear the ghostly voices and whispers in the desert of the 3D landscape you have to focus, lean forward cup your ear. An extreme closeness to something inaccessible. The worlds presented are uncanny reflections of our existence.
Anatomy (2016) @Kittyhorrorshow
Throughout the program we dug deeper through the pixels, starting with more ethereal environments: allusions to religion, hope, and the existence of another. Both Exclusion Zone and Chyrza allude to otherworldly beings, a civilisation long gone and monolithic structures with unknown motivations. Anatomy brings us down to the dirt, a house, recordings and a tape player. We watch through POV as our protagonist trudges through a dark empty house to collect and play each tape. The voice on the tape instigates a sense of suspense, suggesting houses are not the place of sanctuary we know but instead a mouth waiting to close in around us. Each time the doors swing open on the screen I am looking through my fingers, this is not our world, I must listen hard, gaze into the pixels to understand. The seduction is key in its effectiveness, I am sucked in, holding my hands over my face, I want the protagonist to slow down, and take more care, we don't know what's on the other side. Relentlessly the protagonist goes on without fear, a door opens without invitation, and a chill goes up my back.
Subsequently, we are ordered into Grandmother's Garden (seemingly an ode to fixed-camera early PlayStation horror, think Resident Evil) to “get digging”. The player character does so, and upon uncovering grotesque worms the game ends, but we fall in. Landing in a place of purgatory Tenement takes us through a landscape littered with spirits. Hard lines separate textures, the expansive cityscape is vague in its form, large towers appear as paper as pyramids and at the edge of the street a sheer drop into nothingness. The longest of the six Tenement wallows in its misfortune, with monotony we talk to each figure we find, waiting patiently for the text to scroll over the screen read and move on. Tenement forces us to sit for a while, be complacent, understand then destroy this expanse we have become accustomed. The final film in the program Lethargy Hill is a further dive into a hellish landscape, seemingly a woodland, we read a story on screen, a bloated, rodent mother, birthing family members to hate, there is no rhyme or reason to its logic, rules don't exist here, a husband made of hair and twigs, a daughter made of spiders. The rodent mother becomes bored with her playthings in gruesome detail we read how they are dispatched the world around us now sinking into a dark deep magenta.
Lethargy Hill (2020) @kittyhorrorshow
The screen goes blank and we are released back into our world, like moths to a light escaping the dark corners of screen one.
Each game alluded to an extreme offscreen horror something unknowable, hidden maybe deep inside one's self. Going into much more detail about each game here would only be doing them a disservice, these titles are available for purchase through Kittyhorrorshows icth.io here. KittyHorrorShows games lend themselves well to this exhibition format, lulling the audience in with their aesthetic before releasing waves of discordance, surrealism, and physiological horror across the screen. I would be excited to see more of this in the future, games, and machinima in the cinema removing us the viewer from the computer screen, desk and phone these are usually consumed on.
Giving the otherness of virtual worlds the space to breathe can only be a good thing…right?
Please see this link to Rosa’s surgery recovery fundraiser https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-sew-me-back-together?member=32567421&sharetype=teams&utm_campaign=p_na+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer - archived post from 2024
