(~timespace coordinates:) Over 100 years ago, the meteor “Moon Dragon” struck a tropical holiday resort. Most of the inhabitants perished, while those who survived began to show strange mutations… The rescue missions quickly retreated, and those who remained in the mutating environment founded the small and isolated community of Mutazione.
Fast-forward to modern day, where you play as 15-year-old Kai as she travels to Mutazione to help nurse her dying grandfather back to health.
Mutazione is a 2019 adventure exploration video game created by Danish developer Die Gute Fabrik. It launched for Windows, MacOS, PlayStation 4, and on IOS through Apple Arcade on Sep 19, 2019.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (Windows – MINIMUM):Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system / OS: Windows 7 / Processor: 2.6 GHz / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: GeForce 700 Series / Storage: 3 GB available space
“If only plants could speak. From extraordinary flowers to intricate leaf patterns, we admire their expressivity every day… without once wondering what they can teach us about self-expression. Take the plunge into the silent yet endlessly creative vegetal world, and discover a Nietzsche decidedly less conquering and nihilistic than what we’re used to.”
Disclaimer: This video essay is based on Nietzche’s published writings as well as non-canonical texts (ie his Unpublished Fragments).
Academic works that provided inspiration for this video were notably Vanessa Lemm’s article “What we can learn from Plants about the Creation of Values” and Gary Shapiro’s “Earth’s garden happiness: Nietzsche’s Geoaesthetics of the Anthropocene”, both published in the Nietzsche-Studien and freely accessible here:
A terrific debut. I have read a free sample of the book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. It is important for me to place Strange Labour within the vague contours of Eastern Europe for some reason. Eastern Europe, if such a thing exists, feels post-apocalyptic precisely in the sense that it does not fit with various standard post-apocalyptic tropes of existing SF. It feels like all the imaginings, fabulations, extrapolation of post-apocalypticism did not prepare us for this. Maybe in the same way that Laurie Penny wrote about the inability of ‘catastrophe porn’ or post-apocalyptic entertainment to prepare us for the new reality we are living at this moment.
The world-building – and this is not a building (but a world to be built?), is a work of Strange Labour that exposes us to the effects of abandonment, to the shadows of massive labyrinthine earthworks that suddenly ungrounded everything. I am maybe wrong but I feel there is a deep affinity with the outcome of rapid de-industrialisation, privatization, the dismantlement of welfare systems and abandonment of everything that happened after 1989 in Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland etc And I say this trying to avoid here the entire charge of Tarkovsky’s “The Zone”. The Zone appears as something immutable and thus zoned-off behind the specifics of a certain time and place, or even cordoned off by a particular historical chain-of-events. In a sense, Penner introduces us to something else, the dispersed drop-offs, the neurodivergent that cannot join the immense Stahanovist Çevengur voluntarism that has suddenly pushed the majority of humanity into a febrile and inescapable activity. Strange Labour has some affinity to most of what the best recent new weird (I am thinking about the works of VanderMeer – Borne, The Strange Bird) tells us – that definitely, something major happened, that it affected everything that came after, we just do not know exactly what. It does that without appealing to a biotechnologically-enabled posthuman frame, but at the same time, all the epileptics and the dementia nurses already inhabit that strange space. In a way, if we try and inhabit the world of Robert Penner it will not save us from disaster, it will maybe spurn us to appreciate its inchoate beauty and scavenge our own cosmology out of its shipwreck entrails. Such a world is not the wasteland of cannibals, murderous mutants and exotic dangers that most of post-apocalypticism abounds, but of care-work to be done, of temporary respite and mutual associations that do not settle into predictable patterns.
Somehow it makes us perceive the strangeness of that absent work. There is something else besides all the brutalist petroglyphs, cosmist mountain top sublime. Yes, the impossible monuments of Communist heyday – hold an almost intangible (for now) finality. At the same time, as a good friend wrote about The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party on Buzludzha Peak such remains became very quickly quite alien, almost unintelligible, its purpose unknowable or aims completely and increasingly irrecoverable. These are just the most scenic ruins apt for majestic ruin porn tourism – but what about this labyrinthine goings-on? What about the various lives, the experiences of people who live amongst such ruins, en route towards something else? What about that something that is being slowly digested and is digesting these natural-industrial habitats. Environments and habitats are indissociable from an entirety that is not larger than its parts. Many have made a home there, masses of people that once called it a place of work, are now rambling, searching, almost shambling but there is incredible wayside beauty. It is enough there is an after – but this after – has fused so seamlessly with what came all of a sudden as to be unrecognizable.
An American couple vacationing on a remote island in Thailand must uncover the mystery behind a strange video they find after waking up with no recollection of the previous night. The first major piece of the puzzle they find is a disturbing video that shows one of them killing the other.
It follows a young man (Holland) who lives in a dystopian world without women, where all living creatures can hear each other’s thoughts in streams of images, words, and sounds called “Noise.” When a woman (Ridley) crash lands on the planet, he must help her escape danger. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 