WIRE MOTHER: POWER GRAB
[ FIRST VENTURE INTO A WORLD. ]
As my final project wraps up, I want to reflect on the foundations laid for what I hope will continue to be a world I am fascinated by. So far I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface of its potential. My fascination with the themes I want to explore in WIRE MOTHER extends past the time I’ve been working on it so far, and as expected the project has warped and shifted over time to accommodate these fascinations. I think this is the joy of personal work. It can be organic and relevant to the things you want to draw, create and explore.
[ GAMEPLAY ]
Before starting I had already been thinking about WIRE MOTHER for a couple years, but, for me, conceptualising a world will always bring it into sharper focus and change the ideas I start with. The most significant of these was to establish the primary mechanic of the game - the player can exchange health for ammunition and vice versa, even during combat. This forces them to consider these as a singular resource pool. Thematically, it pushes this idea of self-mutilation in relation to violence inflicted upon others, and also as a sort of freedom. My protagonist, THE MUTILANT, is almost entirely artificial, and has transformed himself into a weapon. He has also sacrificed his arm to create the conversion engine of the chainsaw gun, and feeds flesh into its chamber to create this ammunition. This process is reversible but painful. In my drawings I want to show that the combat is not effortless. THE MUTILANT sweats, cries, screams, stumbles his way through battles. Efficient and beautiful movement is contrasted with jarring moments of self-violence. I imagine that in the game, if the exchange of health and ammo is performed enough he would throw up, but this would not affect the combat itself.
This transformation of the organic into the violent extends into the secondary characters. Most visibly, in the Vesuvius Boss, whose head is moulded into the shape of a large gun. It will be fun to push this in future designs.
[ CYBERPUNK ]
In general I am very inspired by body horror films and the exploration of the definition of humanity as explored in cyberpunk media. The cyberpunk genre can often be reduced to its surface aesthetics as laid out in films such as Blade Runner: bright neon washes, dim atmosphere and integration of advanced technology into human lives, particularly in amongst the working class. But the heart of cyberpunk, at least to me, is exploring the boundaries of corporeality and artifice. Often what is considered officially ‘cyberpunk’ becomes too wrapped up in the surface details and becomes too restrictive. My favourites of the genre often don’t fit these restrictions. WIRE MOTHER is very inspired by films such as Videodrome and Possessor, as well as genre classics like Ghost in the Shell and BLAME!.
In part, my love of body horror and this idea of self-mutilation as freedom come from events in my own life. I have always felt a lack of autonomy with my own body, combined with a constant assault of rhetoric against people with bodies like mine. A particularly insidious one was a myth that my mind and body were in misalignment, and by curing the mind I could ‘save’ the body. A pivotal realisation for me as I aged was that the signals that had been blamed on my mind were, in fact, coming from my body. There was no misalignment to be cured. I think cyberpunk connects with many people who feel this way because it directly discusses these ideas of how the mind relates to the body, and, often, produces no simple answer. I like when fiction leaves the viewer with their own interpretations; hand-holding in media is a pet-peeve of mine.
[ BRUTALISM ]
I have a deep love of brutalist structures, and a lot of post-war architecture more generally. Brutalism recalls something alien and overwhelming. Inside these buildings I feel small, like an insect landing on a structure it doesn’t fully grasp in its consciousness. I find in the modern day there is a feeling of being constantly monitored, whether through surveillance, registration and identification, or social media. In these spaces I feel unimportant, which makes me feel free. This feeling of vastness is perhaps my favourite emotion, and, besides the ocean, I encounter it the most reliably in these huge, concrete spaces. Artwork that invokes this vastness is hard to find in my opinion, which makes it all the more rewarding when I do. If there is one thing that I feel that I have not sufficiently demonstrated in my works so far it is this sense of space I want to invoke in WIRE MOTHER.
Lately I have been reading the Southern Reach series by Jeff Vandermeer, starting with Annihilation, and have fallen in love with it. Strangely, although it is primarily concerned with the natural world, it gives me the same feeling that brutalism does. The world he creates is both hostile to human life and to its comprehension, and is perhaps the best example of this feeling of vastness in a written work that I have found.
[ COMPLEXITY / MOVING FORWARD ]
My current work is not up to the standard I want to achieve. I hope that, with the extra time I now have after finishing my course, I can return to my multimedia experiments. I want to use and refine 3D work particularly to push my ideas of what concept art can be, and who I am as an artist. WIRE MOTHER as a world is not limited to what I have already created, and I am excited to push it in new and complex directions. My work so far is only the beginning of this world.