{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Killscreen Podcast","title":"Does Water Have to Look Like Water?","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3683,"description":"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?\n\nEd Smith's piece on Resident Evil 2 called horror architecture \"anatomically correct but tonally wrong.\" Danny maps that onto Freud, onto the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel, and onto Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film, where a typewriter on a desk is asked to carry 30 years of player fluency.\n\nThen I turn to Miles Buckle, a London artist who rebuilds Rear Window, Amarcord and Hitchcock's Rope as late-'90s games nobody will ever play. Danny traces the impulse back to Lego and forward to Roblox, and lands on why a JPEG face stretched over a low-polygon head is more unsettling now than it was in 1998.\n\nThe last stretch is Danny's own book, The Little Database, free and open access from the University of Minnesota Press, and the desktop directory of 44 small archives it has grown into. His best example is Paul Sharits's flicker film Dots, which on celluloid at Anthology Film Archives is close to hallucination and on YouTube is a blotchy field of squares. The compression is not the failure. It is what lets you see YouTube at all. Quick hits to close: Mitch Anzuoni's money laundering simulator, Joshua Mattson's Defence Contractor Fantasy World and its latex hand, and a new alt-control cabinet at Wonderville in Brooklyn.\n\nLinks\nEd Smith, \"The horror of Resident Evil 2’s police station\"\nMiles Buckle Makes Games You Can’t Play\nThe Little Database expands into a desktop directory\nKill Screen on the Resident Evil film’s save points\nKill Screen on Defence Contractor Fantasy World\nDanny Snelson, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats\nThe Little Database desktop directory\nScott Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions\nPippin Barr, v r 3\nMiles Buckle on Instagram\nPaul...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/zTYr6doDWNgE9y4YNtSYWKFBPjWC_pIPoM2oNdCN1X0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80MGIx/ZDc3YWEyZTY5MzFl/NmNmNmZlZWFmMTRl/YmNhYS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}