Fall 2003

Restart/Reborn

For the past two and a half years the Los Angeles‹based media lab C-level has been developing increasingly complex and culturally provocative works out of their Chinatown space. This fall, C-level ventures to New York for the premiere of Waco Resurrection at The Kitchen from October 15-25.

"We've combined a state-of-the-art 3D computer game with an experimental performative installation environment," the group writes Filmmaker in an email. "Our previous projects, Tekken Torture Tournament and Cockfight Arena" – also being produce in October at The Kitchen – "were intensive investigations into the physical nature of gaming. We were interested in pushing gaming to the point of becoming a dramatic public event - as compelling to watch as it was to play. With Waco we're still creating a theatrical experience for the non-playing audience – players wear headgear/masks, while video projections and live amplified sound fill the space."

Waco Resurrection is the first in a planned series of EndGames, "a new game series based on alternative utopias and apocalyptic moments," according to the group. "Endgames attempts to incorporate elements of subjective documentary and experimental fantasy with experimental technologies to create a visceral gaming experience focused on extreme psycho-social phenomena."

And why Waco? "The apocalyptic rhetoric and militaristic posture of the Bush administration finds a striking mirror in the Branch Davidian episode," comments the group. "Although the exact date was never specified, the tenth anniversary of the siege finds us in a unique cultural moment: nationalistic sentiment and holy war are official administration policy; the current attorney general, unlike his predecessor, ascribes to a fundamentalism very similar to that of Koresh; and the constitutional transgressions of the FBI/ATF have become law under the PATRIOT Act."

For more information, contact C-level at www.c-level.cc and The Kitchen at www.thekitchen.org.

‹S.M.