Strange Flesh (9 page)

A profile shot of a delicate girl seated in a high-backed wooden chair. Attached to its central post is a wide band of rusted iron that encircles the girl’s neck. She struggles against the leather restraining straps and whimpers. I recognize the contraption from a James Bond film. It’s a vile garrote, beloved as an execution device by the Spanish up to the end of General Franco’s reign. These machines employed a dowel, or if the executioner was merciful, a spike that was screwed into the back of one’s neck, creating the pressure necessary for strangulation. In this case, Billy has replaced the spike with an oversized male Ethernet plug pressing insistently against the nape of her neck. Her breathing is labored, and as the thing presses harder, she starts to moan with progressively more erotic energy. Her body arches forward against the metal collar, throwing her small breasts into relief against the white silk of her robe. This goes on for a few beats until the network cable rears back like a snake and drives itself into her spine with a small spurt of blood. A close-up of her face as she inhales sharply in a sudden apex of ecstasy. The camera zooms in on her left eye, where, via some nifty special effects work, the spiderweb of broken veins slowly morphs into hexadecimal code.

The screen cuts to black.

Getting Wet
isn’t the first video I’ve seen that sexualizes the now classic sci-fi concept of the “wet interface.” To create a direct connection between one’s nervous system and a computer, you must penetrate the
skin. So the idea really doesn’t need a lot more sexualizing. Billy’s video takes a dim view of the prospect in suggesting that Gina is actually being strangled in her moment of networked transcendence. Making such a video might well get a woman interested in sexual asphyxia. And certainly there are a lot of both suicides and accidental deaths that stem from this sort of fantasy.

But I’d like to know how this girl went from risqué playacting to almost decapitating herself.

S
uffocating images from Gina’s video invade my dreams, and I wake the next morning with a drained and uneasy feeling, like a family of affectionate pythons has shared my bed. But better rest will have to wait. I have an early orientation meeting with a woman named Alexandra Xiao.

The GAME facility stands just on the edge of New York’s Lower East Side nightlife mecca. The building is a seven-story neo-Gothic that takes up half the block. Ringed by intricate iron railings, fronted with mullioned windows, and embellished with irate gargoyles, it looks more like a place to house impenitent nuns than a modern interactive arts facility.

I find Ms. Xiao in the large front hall that serves as one of their public event spaces. Her online bio says that she’s an ’11 alumna of PiMP and already an adjunct professor there as well as a senior GAME fellow. An accomplished 3D artist, she’s best known for a series of female characters from a hit martial arts title whose images now decorate the walls of fan-boys the world over.

She’s supervising the installation of a large aquarium, pointing with one hand and holding an iPhone in the other. “And you’re absolutely sure we don’t need any kind of permits for transgenic piranhas?” She sees me and says, “Look, I have to call you back.”

While the exquisite planes of her face speak of northern China, her musical English accent indicates a Hong Kong childhood. She’s wearing a navy pinstripe pantsuit over an
Urotsukidoji
T-shirt. The film is an
X-rated anime about a shy young student who grows a three-headed prehensile penis that ends up destroying Tokyo. My kind of woman.

“You must be our new resident. I’m Xan, your welcome committee as it were. Come to my office, and let’s chat.”

She leads me down a long hallway into a room whose every available surface is occupied by screens. There are banks of monitors connected to expensive workstations, multiple game consoles, and a group of wifi picture frames cycling through landscapes from popular shooters. I sit across from her desk, and she surveys me intently.

“Are you a gamer, Mr. Pryce?”

“James, please. And no, I’m more of a spectator by nature.”

Her mouth forms an evil smile. “I’m not sure your fellow residents will allow that. Passive engagement is considered
quite
last-century here. Abstinence is not an option. In this place if you’re not playing the game, the game plays you.”

“You’re obviously quite the ambassador.”

“Well, we have you in our clutches now, so better you understand right away that GAME is no fun if you don’t know the rules. Fancy a bit of background on the place?”

I nod.

“We humans have played games since the very dawn of time. But as we digitize them, it’s got to where, for some of us, that’s
all
we do. Our generation grew up playing video games, but those were just dollhouses: tidy wee worlds that live in your monitor. Today we’re capable of far more immersion. Not just modeling reality anymore. Now we want to manipulate it. To ‘machine’ it, if you will. Maybe even
replace
it.”

“I can think of a few improvements.”

Xan smiles. “Quite so. But a bit of caution’s in order. Something about treading the line between the virtual and real makes GAME’s little monsters hopelessly transgressive. If there’s an observable border of decency or prudence, the hateful players we breed here want to cross it like fighting cocks.”

She adopts a long-suffering expression. “Just this year we’ve seen the premiere of
Kewpie
, a game intended as a profound comment on the casual misogyny you find with internet culture. But in playing it, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for the real thing. Then there was the staging of a piece called
Flash Mob,
which resulted in several residents getting
nicked for indecent exposure. If we GAMErs hold the keys to the future, I’m not sure I want to live there.”

“What about Coit Files?”

“Coit? Ah, you mean
Billy
.” Apparently Xan disapproves of people inventing absurd handles for themselves in RL.

“How would you characterize his art?”

Xan weighs my question. “I can say this: it ain’t pretty.”

I raise my eyebrows, looking for more. But she stands and takes my arm. “Why don’t I show you?”

As we walk back to GAME’s main entrance hall, Xan says, “Your Billy’s idée fixe is something he calls ‘The Bleed.’”

She treats me to a disquisition about how throughout history we’ve tended to surround ourselves with ever more sophisticated imaginary environments. It used to be books and plays, then film, but now we have these giant online spaces. Part of their allure is how they grant us the ability to act as someone else, through the use of these ornate masks we call avatars.

Xan tells me that Billy liked to explore how our enthrallment to lavish fantasy worlds can have a pronounced impact on the real one. He sought to inspire moments when your biological self
bleeds
into your avatar, and vice versa.

She leads me to a small alcove set up as a public gallery space. While most of the “work” produced at GAME is intangible, they’ve filled the room with posters and exhibits illustrating demos, play-tests, and events. A corner of the space is dedicated to one of Billy’s previous offerings.

On a glass pedestal poses a hideous sculpture of Satan. Spiraling ram horns, cloven feet, barbed tail. Oddly, he appears as though he’s been burned by his own hellfire. His crimson skin shows large black and brown spots. The latex has bubbled in some places, melted all the way through in others. I look closer and find not a statue, but rather a devil costume arrayed on a neutral mannequin. He’s reaching forward with one of his clawed hands holding a charred wooden frame that houses a fifteen-inch video screen. A small brass nameplate reads
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
. The screen cycles shots of human faces contorted in horror.

Xan explains, “So one advantage of having this scary old building is
that it makes a jolly good venue for our annual haunted house fundraiser. We often invite visiting artists to do special ‘installations’ exploring fear.”

“That sounds scary.”

“No, they’re generally quite good. We only select those who don’t place themselves above delivering cheap thrills. Many of our residents hail from PiMP, and so in 2012 a couple of the new ones had met Billy. Just starting the program, wasn’t he? They knew he had a yen for high-concept nastiness, so why not see what he could do with a room?”

“I suppose you’re about to tell me.”

“On the contrary, many thought it a smashing success. At the debut, we were disappointed to find a cheesy mockery of those evangelist hell houses that dress some oaf in a Satan costume”—she gestures to the thing in front of us—“to frighten teens into preserving their virtue. We asked, ‘Is this really the best he can do?’ But just watch.”

She touches the screen a few times, and a video starts rolling.

In a dark room packed with people, the actor dressed as Satan stands on a slightly elevated stage. He makes a showy gesture to summon his dark powers. Behind him erupts a shower of sparks. Flames jet toward the ceiling. The devil turns and throws up his hands with malign ecstasy. But in doing so, his tail drags through one of the gas jets. His costume catches fire like rayon pajamas. Spasming with terror, he trips into the room’s painted backdrop, which ignites in a blazing sheet. The devil starts screaming. After an agonizing moment of indecision, so does the crowd. Two GAME staffers run from offstage to extinguish the actor, but by now the flames have ascended to the heavy curtains draped around the room, and the fire is clearly out of control.

The crowd surges to flee, and you can make out the accordion impact as they hit the exits. Then the cascading frenzy of panic when they realize:
the doors are locked
.

But those nearer the fire keep pressing forward. A petite woman goes down calling for help. This is obviously the moment at which Billy’s portraits of horror were taken. Someone being pulverized against the doors screams, “I can’t breathe!”

The video cuts to black.

“Ouch,” I say.

“Yeah. Anyone who’s been near the stage at a big music festival can tell you it’s not a pleasant feeling. But with an inferno at your back . . .”

Xan pauses, remembering the experience. “Billy had rigged that wall with sensors that tripped when a certain ‘safe’ amount of pressure was applied. At the critical moment, it just fell down like a drawbridge, and people got out without any serious injuries. The fire was all just special effects. He’d hired some guys from the Madagascar Institute to teach him how to rig them.” Madagascar is a Brooklyn-based collective known for staging wild bashes involving flamethrowers, pyrotechnics, and rocket-powered carnival rides. “But needless to say, that was the one and only performance of Billy’s hell house.”

“Not afraid to set fire to a crowded theater.”

“Yeah, he has a pretty aggressive attitude toward your First Amendment. Toward his audiences too. The guy goes around saying, ‘Art, like games, must have something at stake.’ You can see why, even here, people find him hard to take. But I have to credit the little blighter. He set himself the task of creating real fear in the most contrived setting. People come to a haunted house
knowing
that you’re going to try to scare them. It’s easy to get a yelp when you have someone in a funny wig jump out at them. But then they’re laughing about it the next second.”

“But no one was laughing after this.”

“More like hyperventilating. Billy was really able to jar us out of our role as ‘fake’ victims. The way he’d built the context helped. Prominent fire code warnings posted at the building’s entrance. He search-optimized a news story to appear just under the links to our ticketing website so almost everyone would read the headline ‘Ninety-six die in Rhode Island concert blaze,’ before they came to the show.” She shakes her head in admiration.

“With all that in our subconscious, his artificial fire shattered our superficial suspension of
disbelief
and made us actually
believe
we were about to die. That, for him, is the Bleed, the moment when the imaginary becomes shockingly real. When you and your persona fuse.”