PODCAST · arts
The Killscreen Podcast
by Jamin Warren
Join host Jamin Warren on conversations with someone of the most unique and experimental artists, designers, and thinkers in the worlds of games, play and cultureJamin Warren founded Killscreen and has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.
Episodes
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What Does Fear Sound Like?
I sit down with two composers who make audiences flinch for a living. Ryan Holladay scored Zach Cregger's Weapons and this year's Resident Evil with his brother Hays. Jason Graves wrote the music for the original Dead Space trilogy, Until Dawn and Still Wakes the Deep. This is the first of...
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Can a Game Be the Work of One Genius?
I open with a fan who has rebuilt P.T. from its own PS4 code, which raises the question under the whole hour: when a game can disappear, who is responsible for keeping it? Danny Snelson calls in from New York with a ZipDeck in tow, and we take a detour through Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, which...
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The Satellite Has Too Many Explanations
I open with Cezar Mocan's satellite, which finds a lake missing from the place its own records insist it should be, and would rather produce testimony than admit it does not know. The question I put to Danny Snelson runs through the rest of the hour: what happens when unreliability is the design...
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Nobody Knows What Happens Next
I open with Tomo Kihara, a Tokyo designer who has built an arcade cabinet that nobody scripted, and put a question to Danny Snelson that runs through the whole hour: what happens to authorship when the designer does not know the outcome either? The through line for this cycle is work built to...
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Does Water Have to Look Like Water?
I open with a 2015 Kill Screen essay about a police station built wrong on purpose, and end up asking Danny Snelson, a writer and professor of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, a question that runs through the whole hour: what does a work become when you move it into the wrong container? Ed...
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Do Good Games Taste Like Gasoline?
When Bennett Foddy was a fellow at Oxford, the college sold off its wine cellar and let the fellows judge the bottles. After twenty-four samples, the one that stopped him tasted like gasoline. That is now roughly how he picks games, and it turns out to be a useful way to think about difficulty,...
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The Backrooms Were Always About Games
Something a little different! We're focusing on the newsletter now and in a conversational way! This week, I sat down with Danny Snelson, a writer and professor at UCLA who spends his days thinking about the eerie. We start with a strange admission from this year's Venice Biennale, where the...
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The Pink Game About Corporate Violence
Catmilk is a digital artist and solo developer who has been building a game called Gossamer Matrix for about four years. It's a first-person shooter set inside a corporate tower in a climate-flooded future, where cities have condensed vertically, and private militaries defend shareholder value...
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Your Body Is Being Compressed—Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body
Lisa Jamhoury is an artist and performer working at the intersection of the physical body and computation. Her Capture Series—five years in the making—investigates what it means to live through digital representations of ourselves. Lossy, the newest piece in the series, had its world premiere at...
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Telling the Bees: Kyriaki Goni on Building a Game from a Stranger's Gift
In this episode, I talk with Greek artist Kyriaki Goni about Telling the Bees —her in-development game about a character called the Bee-Seeker, searching for the last surviving bees in a near-future Aegean archipelago on the edge of ecological collapse. We get into the ritual that gives the game...
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The Level Designer Who Went Underwater
Jakob Kudsk Steensen has spent fifteen years building a practice that doesn't fit neatly into any single category. He's not a game designer in the commercial sense. He's not exactly a filmmaker or a sculptor. He's someone using the tools of game engines to document ecologies that are…
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Lou Faroux: Internet Collapse, the Sewing Circle, and Building Digital Worlds from Queer Hollywood History
I sat down with Lou Faroux—French artist and filmmaker—to talk about growing up on The Sims, why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine, and what it means to treat internet collapse as an art subject rather than a catastrophe. Lou's practice is hard to categorize…
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Can Art Fight Climate Change? Kara Stone & Joshua Dawson on Solar Servers, Degrowth, and Making Work in a Crisis
What does it cost—materially, ethically, psychologically—to make digital art about the climate crisis? I brought together two artists who are building things inside the very systems they're critiquing. Kara Stone is a game designer based in Calgary who runs Solar Server, a solar-powered web…
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100 Strangers, One Controller: Making asses.masses with Patrick Blenkarn & Milton Lim
Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are the Canadian theater-makers behind asses.masses — an eight-hour live RPG where an audience shares a single controller to guide a group of unemployed donkeys fighting to reclaim their labor from machines. It's toured from Helsinki to Los Angeles, and after 55...
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Vadim Nickel Is Waiting for Games to Hear Themselves
What does it mean to really listen to a game? Vadim Nickel is a researcher and game developer at Concordia University who studies exactly that question. His recent survey of sound-first games—titles where music and sound drive the action rather than just accompany it—turns up only 43 examples...
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The Body Is the Controller: Symoné on Circus, Memory, and Live Play
Symoné is a British-American interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of circus, dance, and game technologies. Her piece Nullspace Motel is a one-hour live performance where audience members are pulled from their seats to play a custom video game — and what they do shapes the story...
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Dance Moms Trained a Generation to Perform for Algorithms
Competition dance trained young girls to hold their bodies in anticipation of judgment—to perform flawlessly, make difficulty look effortless, and measure themselves in real time against a crowd. TikTok rewarded all of that. This was not a coincidence. In this episode, I'm writing about Maya…
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What If A Love Eternal's Story Doesn't Explain Itself?
Toby Alden is a game designer and DJ based in Los Angeles. Their platformer Love Eternal — released today — is an eight-year collaboration with their brother Sam that grew from an earlier, near-unbeatable freeware game called Love. In this conversation, Toby talks about making music and games in...
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He Fed a Classic Anthropology Text To Make An AI Game. Here's What Happened.
In 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific changed anthropology forever, introducing the world to "thick description" and the rigors of deep fieldwork. A century later, researcher Michael Hoffman is bringing that text into the future. In this episode, Jamin Warren sits down...
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Doors That Don't Open: Simon Flesser on Constraint, Preservation, and Northern European Melancholy
Swedish studio Simogo spent their first five years making seven games—Year Walk, Device 6, Sailor's Dream—then two games over the next decade. Their new Legacy Collection preserves that early mobile work by recreating the iPhone itself inside modern platforms, complete with virtual gestures and...
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Why This Game About the Haitian Revolution Has No Bullets
There's already a game about the Haitian Revolution. It's part of Assassin's Creed. You sneak around, you stab people, you "free the slaves"—and the game gives you an achievement notification. Dom Rabrun thinks that's bullshit. The Haitian-American painter and game designer is building Vèvè-Punk:...
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Spending the Big Bucks
Big Buck Hunter made a quarter billion dollars by perfecting one thing: the tactile pleasure of pulling a trigger. This arcade shooter stripped hunting down to its essential tension—the moment before you fire, when your heart jumps and your hand trembles—then packaged it for drunk people in...
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The Dog, The War, & The Souls You Can't Save
War games let you be a hero. Alan Kwan's games make you helpless. In this conversation, we explore Scent—a 20-minute experience where you play a dog witnessing an unnamed war. No shooting. No saving. Just survival, souls, and the anxiety of watching violence you can't stop. Kwan spent seven years...
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Why should we treat video games as archaeological sites?
What happens when you apply the "steely, assertive mind" of a professional archaeologist to the shifting digital landscapes of video games? In this episode, we sit down with Florence Smith Nicholls to discuss her transition from excavating Bronze Age Greece to conducting the first formal...
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Silicon Valley in a Sand Trap with Sam Ghantous
The same silica that powers your GPU fills the sand traps at Augusta National. Artist Sam Ghantous joins us to discuss "your golf course made my GPU," his three-channel video installation that traces the geological origins of our digital obsessions. Ghantous admits he's afraid of hardware.…
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Exploring the material culture of games with metalwork, jewelry, and a little bit of horror
Artist, jeweler, metalsmith, and art conservator Lauren Eckert shows us what it means to look at craftsmanship through a contemporary lens. Drawing from inspiration from the objects in video games, religious iconography, and classic science fiction VFX, Lauren’s work gives metals and jewelry a…
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How to design political games with a broken heart
Can games seep into life's political, social, and cultural realms? Across projects that fuse game development, filmmaking within game engines, LARP (live-action role play), and more, Mario Mu interrogates this question. The Croatian-born artist now lives in Berlin, where he researches games…
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Sam and Andy Rolfes put the life in livesteam
Sam and Andy Rolfes self-describe their work as “overly navel-gazing, obsessed-with-layers, weird.” From visualizing songs by Lady Gaga and BLACKPINK to facilitating mind-bending, improvisational performances at MoMA, the duo are in a perpetual toggle between real life and the screen. Cleverly...
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Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley creates game worlds from autonomous archives
What happens when games account for the players’ identities? Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s work does just this. Traversing game design, performance, and sound art, the London-born, Berlin-based artist constructs stratified game experiences that depend on the player’s privilege. Someone who...
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Rachel Rossin creates entropy from infinity
How do we account for the tension between technology’s infinite, unrestricted promise and the impermanence of being human? Rachel Rossin interrogates this slippage. Floating between painting, VR worlds, holograms, and more, the Brooklyn-based artist carries with her the essence of what it means…
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Salome Asega on cultivating the ecosystem of art and technology
Embodied” may be the best word to describe the projects of artist, researcher, and educator Salome Asega. She has created VR experiences that evoke the channeling of diasporic spirits, a Kinect lesson that reinstates a dance form’s history, and a roulette wheel that sends participants to...
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Gayatri Kodikal excavates the ruins of history, time, and play
On a walk around Old Goa, artist Gayatri Kodikal chanced upon an archaeological dig in progress. Her curiosity swelling, she jumped over the fence to see what was on the other side: a mysterious severed hand thought to belong to an ancient Georgian queen. This object spearheaded a multi-year,...
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Yasmin Elayat believes art drives innovation
Yasmin Elayat is a self-proclaimed ‘hybrid’—she’s a new-media documentarian, a creative technologist, a collaborative storyteller, and a spatial designer. She co-created #18DaysinEgypt, a collaborative documentary centered on the Egyptian revolution; co-directed an interactive documentary set...
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Nicole He on talking to computers
Nicole He is a creative technologist whose work lives in the space between video games, physical computing, and witty conceptual art. With experience advising projects for Kickstarter and imagining projects for Google, she’s programmed AI to converse with Billie Eilish for Vogue, physical sensors...
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Monument Valley's Lea Schönfelder on designing within constraints
When we look at our phone screens, we typically aren’t thinking about the borders. We don’t notice the edges of our phones and how those boundaries limit our experience. It’s no wonder Apple’s crowning achievement for the iPhone X was adding a teeeeny bit of space to the edge of the phone. But…
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Videogames, conspiracy theories and the American imagination
p>-- We recorded this long before QAnon took hold and the President of the United States was advising people to inject disinfectant into our veins. Since then the relevance of conspiracy theories has become more important. This was recorded live in 2016 at the Killscreen Festival. When I moved to...
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The Stanley Parable's Davey Wreden on breaking the fourth wall
When people ask what it means to make a game, they typically point to a standard set of devices: points, scores, levels, and so on. It’s rare that story makes the list. And yet, gamemaker Davey Wreden was able to move the medium to new heights with a deep exploration of story in his breakout...
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MoMA's Paola Antonelli on thinking of games as design objects
Well, we know what videogames are, but what does it mean to be a videogame designer? I posed this question to Paola Antonelli, a force in the world of modern art. She is currently the Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design as well as the Director of R&D at The Museum of Modern...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Join host Jamin Warren on conversations with someone of the most unique and experimental artists, designers, and thinkers in the worlds of games, play and cultureJamin Warren founded Killscreen and has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.
HOSTED BY
Jamin Warren
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Killscreen Podcast have?
The Killscreen Podcast currently has 38 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Killscreen Podcast about?
Join host Jamin Warren on conversations with someone of the most unique and experimental artists, designers, and thinkers in the worlds of games, play and cultureJamin Warren founded Killscreen and has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with...
How often does The Killscreen Podcast release new episodes?
The Killscreen Podcast has 38 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Killscreen Podcast?
You can listen to The Killscreen Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Killscreen Podcast?
The Killscreen Podcast is created and hosted by Jamin Warren.
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