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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 culture
Jamin 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.
Hey — I'm Jamin Warren, and this is Killscreen.
Killscreen is a newsletter and publication about games as cultural objects. Not reviews, not releases — but games the way you'd talk about a film or a painting. What they mean. What they reveal. Where they fit in the larger story of how we make and experience things.
Today's conversation is with Lou Faroux — a French artist and filmmaker who uses game engines, AI avatars, and found footage to make work about the internet. Specifically about what the internet did to us. Not what it gave us — what it did to us. To our habits, our attention, our sense of time.
What I love about Lou's practice is that she came to games sideways — through film, through collage, through an instinct for digital tools that felt native to the ideas she was already exploring. And in this conversation, we get into that whole arc. The Sims. Racing games as a kid. Why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine. And what she means when she talks about internet collapse — not as apocalypse, but as anthropology.
This is the first 27 minutes of a longer conversation. Paying members of Killscreen get the full hour, which goes deep into her current project — a virtual world built around queer Hollywood history from the 1930s. It's extraordinary.
If you want access to that, and to everything else we do — the Gaming Club picks, the full archive, the creator interviews — the best move is to become a paying member at killscreen.com. There's a link wherever you're listening to this.
For now — here's Lou Faroux.
Jamin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, where do you want to start? Do you want to start
with your practice or do you want to start with the game that you're working on?
I'm fine with starting in either place.
Lou: Um, maybe we can start with the piece and then slide to what I did before,
what do you think? Or how do you usually do it?
Jamin: Well, I usually go chronologically, so from the earlier pieces of your
practice to the game. That’s usually how I do it, but...
Lou: Let's do it, let's do it like you do, if it's good as well, because then it
makes more sense. It avoids to go back, we just go chronological, right?
Jamin: Yeah, of course. Go for it. Cool, so let's get started and... see here.
Alright, great. Can you tell me a bit about your relationship to games and play?
Like, yeah, how did you first get interested in digital worlds? I understand The
Sims was a part of your origin story.
Lou: Yes, very much. I was very into simulation close-to-reality games growing
up. I think I started playing—I might even have learned how to read on some
video games, because I started playing really young on small like online
interactive games. And from just like small online easy little games, I went to
more immersive. And for several years, I was mostly playing on like
driving—driving games, whether it was like RPM Tuning or Trackmania. I think I
loved driving through cities and landscapes I've never been in and I was super
attracted to. So for a long—yeah, for a long time, it was very much like driving
games, racing games, and then The Sims. I think I started being interested in
simulation games very young on.
Jamin: What did you do with The Sims? Like, there's different ways to play The
Sims, what kind of player were you?
Lou: Um, I was actually—I sort of like hacked The Sims and with my sister we had
add-ons that we would use that would make us like have enormous Sims, like, you
know, bigger than the walls. And we would like press this machine and have all
the points of knowledge, or just like do this other line of code and all of the
Sims are in love with each other in the room, and there's like five of them. So
I—I was very into pushing the boundaries of the gameplay, but also I just like
doing like celebrities, and I think I did my families and friends very much in
like, you know, fancy homes and fancy neighborhoods. That was also the use I had
of it. But true, there's many different people, sometimes they just do their
life and some people they do like fantasy or—I have a lot in my TikTok feed,
people that put some Sims in jail in some bunkers that they create and like
enslave them or like stuff like that. So I know there’s like many different
lores of approaching the game, right?
Jamin: Yeah. Yeah, The Sims is very interesting in that way because it both is
in the lineage of pure simulation games like SimCity and things like that, but
it is also highly imaginative, you know, pulls from like a dollhouse lineage as
well, like dollhouse and dress-up and those types of things which end up
expressed in games. So it does allow for either of those ways to play, you know,
you can either be someone who is creating a version of your own life and
imitating everything that you see around you or something more aspirational or
something you could never aspire to be. So it is a very flexible play space in
that way.
Lou: Mm-hmm.
Jamin: Okay, so from there, were you making games as well? Like at that age, or
was it just that you were just playing games?
Lou: I was—I was very much a user. I would be then on the like computer
interface, I would play a little bit with them like silly terminal things,
and—but I was not—I had no idea we could make it actually. I think it took me
some years to actually realize that it was possible to be behind the scenes of
it. And I actually started making films. And I think my films were very much
influenced by video game culture and online culture, such as I think of This is
How the World Ends that I did in 2019 or 2020. And it was during the lockdown,
so it was very much lockdown-oriented in a VIP software that could offer
services of having an online life to avoid lockdown regulations and reach people
who would do it to avoid any regulation and would pay extra to have, you know,
more gigabytes on this fictional software that was named Beyond Beyond. And
actually the whole—the whole part of the upload where there was like an example
in a film where people are uploaded, and then I used The Sims and filmed in The
Sims to play that part. So I think that was the first steps of using video games
directly, whether it's the images themselves, whether it's as a narrative. So
that was one of my first films actually. And yeah, 2020, This is How the World
Ends. And then I think it was also always present as well in Take Me to Your
Dreams that is another film I made about digital immortality. And I think that
the way in general that I use the characters, I think that I direct them like
avatars more than as a director that directs their actors and actresses as, you
know, realistic people. I think that in my films, they're more avatars and
characters and I think that's a direct reference to video games because they're
not interactive because a lot of my work, especially early on, is film pieces.
But I think in the way that they go around the story and they have this little
bit of an NPC behavior, that is drawn directly from video games, I think.
Jamin: Yeah, I mean, it does seem like you also draw these like very strong like
character types, you know, like having like the hacker or the tech executive or
the influencer, like they do have these very strong personas as well as opposed
to just being—in addition to being like digital versions, so you are kind of
like drawing on a very specific known entity in online life as well.
Lou: Yeah, true, true, which I could not do, I could not have Mark Zuckerberg
play starred in my films, right? But with this, you know, deepfake-ish
impersonation, then I can steal this entities.
Jamin: Why—why do you feel like you gravitated towards film as opposed to making
games? You know, because some people have that experience that you had playing
games growing up and that leads them immediately to making games and you spent
time developing another craft and another discipline before kind of like coming
back to games and virtual worlds.
Lou: Yeah, I think that's a good question because—because yeah, the way I also
think of, you know, the writing, the scenarios, I can't write a proper scenario,
it's very non-linear, so it would actually fit most likely a video game better.
But maybe because of my means, it was very easy to just be able to tell a story
from a computer-generated film grabbing fan footage and this piece of dialogue
and then writing this one with—I think it was when I urgently wanted to create
some works, then I had this very, you know, cheap and easy access to a free
editing software and just sticking the pieces together like collage. And I think
that I was able to tell my story enough this way. And maybe then there's also a
sense of authority somehow, because then I get to tell what's the beginning,
what's the end. And maybe I needed these years and years of films digestion to
understand how people respond to a narrative and then being able to add the
option of interaction is a whole new dimension. So I think I needed this like
years of digestion of understanding the reception of the narrative and being
able to tell mine to add another layer of freedom in this narrative. You know
what I mean? Yeah, I think that's my answer.
Jamin: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s almost like you respect the
process of interactivity so much that you wanted to make sure that you could do
it right and be sure that you had something to say. You know, it’s interesting
because some gamemakers dive more for systems-based—like people who really focus
on the mechanical side of games, you know, like the moment-to-moment
interactions of players, that storytelling side never really develops, you know,
they’re really only interested in those moment-to-moment interactions and not
any of the other things. So yeah, it's interesting to see how games are emerging
from a cinematic or a narrative point of view that you've come from.
Lou: Oh, yeah. Because then the technique I don't know it so much, then it’s a
whole lore to have merged with the narrative side, it's true, yeah.
Jamin: Yeah, well we'll talk about that I guess once we get to the actual piece.
One of the things I noticed with your work is that you keep returning to like
this moment when the internet doesn't work. You know, it's not a catastrophe
exactly, you know, it's not an apocalypse, it's like something a little more
ambivalent. Yeah, do you—I mean, do you think of like for internet collapse,
like do you think of that as being like a—are you mourning something that's lost
there, or do you feel like you’re just thinking about new possibilities in a
post—when the internet finally goes down?
Lou: I think it's almost—the majority of it is almost about more how it modified
behaviors and society, and almost on an anthropological level so quickly. So I
think I'm interested in the human interaction of it and the human habits of
integrating this massive, you know, omnipresent tool more than an actual fear of
its disappearance because, you know, as long as two computers are connected,
internet exists, right? So—but I think it's more about the—it’s about how, I’m
more interested in how, and then imagining its disappearance helps taking a step
back about how—what we let internet become and the project of what it was and
what it aimed originally and how it shifted also so quickly to, you know, very
far from open source, knowledge-for-all kind of like projects that was at the
beginning. So I think it's a pretext to talk about internet itself. I'm of
course a part of it is an interest for, you know, geopolitical issues of—and
very like concrete, very like pragmatic issues on how the internet exists and
how it could not exist at the same time and what it takes to maintain. And I
think that tells a lot about the design of the internet as well, like the lack
of resources I would say to the general public about how internet actually
works, you know, the internet of objects and how the knowledge is stored and how
the data is stored. And I think it's many different fascinations and concerns
about its actual existence more than its disappearance that is the topic of the
Internet Collapse. But yeah, I think the rapid change in behaviors and in the
brain, you know, and in the body, in the way you use the body because of the
tools, I think it's what interests me the most. And also yeah, a little bit the
nostalgic grieving part of its evolution is also in some layers the topic of
Internet Collapse.
Jamin: Yeah, I mean it's an interesting type of like apocalypse, you know, like
it just goes back to like—you know, there was a world before the internet, you
know, it's—you know, that did exist. I grew up in a world where the internet
was, you know, was on the rise like in the 90s, you know, so I’m 44, so you
know, I remember the moment where the internet became a more—you know, I'm aware
of the evolution of it. So it’s a very strange kind of apocalypse, the idea that
like maybe it might exist in the way it was when I was, you know, 10 or
something like that, which isn’t frankly all that long ago. In a way that that's
very different from like an apocalypse where there is no electricity or, you
know, there’s no electricity or you know, I just some of the industrial ways
that we think about the apocalypse. So it is a very interesting idea to think
about just what if we’re just not connected in the same way, it’s not that long
ago.
Lou: But from what you say, it also makes me think of this little game I like to
play in my head and that led to Internet Collapse as well, that is—is this, you
know, a little 50 years chapter that could end in a minute and that would have
been just a small tab in the history of humanity? Or was this, you know, 2,000
years without internet just a little start and then internet is on for like, you
know, millions of years and will transform what we think humanity is? So I think
it's also about this dichotomy that, you know, as you growing up 40 years ago
will have no idea that it even existed. So it’s I think it's this little
craziness that I like to play with.
Jamin: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you’ve talked in the
past about like nostalgia for Web 1.0, you were just talking about that, about
kind of the dreams and the optimism for Web 1.0. I think the other part of it
too is like—the other part of it too is like the issue with like the social web
is really more about those like habits and behaviors. Like I see that in some of
your pieces, I think it's in KD Tox, you know, you kind of have these avatars
that are still going through the memories of kind of like zombies, you know,
they're still reenacting, scrolling, and they're doing these actions even though
they're not connected to the internet. And so I do think that that's the—that’s
the problem, right? It’s like these new behaviors that were introduced and then
reinforced. And yeah, maybe those are just habits that can be broken pretty
quickly but we can move forward just like the overall history of the internet in
a different way.
Lou: Totally.
Jamin: Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg is like a recurring figure in your—recurring
character in your work, and then Kim Kardashian in KD Tox. What—why those two
people specifically? What was it about, you know, the two of them that—what they
represent for you as an artist?
Lou: I think it wasn't meant to be done important in the beginning, and then
empirically became main characters in my works, but then I think it almost
became like a self-referencing joke because I could use, you know, Sam Altman
would be a very interesting character and I have not explored yet, but it will
come. But I think it's because of their own images that also interested in them.
Mark Zuckerberg also represent this early stages of Web 2.0 that seemed to be
more connecting and hopeful than it actually is now. So I think he’s an easy to
fit in character because he fits that very dystopian narrative of, you know, the
internet shifting to a completely different political place that Mark is also a
symbol of. You know, seeming very American Dream kind of like little genius
nerd, self-made, but ends up being the MAGA billionaire supporter. So it's—you
know, is a very good material to talk about political shift of online places as
well. And I think the Kardashians are they're very important, they're very
important in the culture they're from what, you know, people work on buying,
looking like, communicating, the whole—the whole lore of social media culture is
very much influenced by them, and not only since Kim Kardashian but also since,
as you know, the way they use communication since O.J. Simpson and the way they
influence the culture as TV reality and they invented a way to present oneself
with digital representation tools. And we've witnessed many stages of the
Kardashian in the last, you know, almost 30 years now. So I think I use them as
almost religious pillars. They're like—they appear and they appear as, you know,
cultural influencers almost that—it's almost like I could do a documentary about
a politician, but it would not be as, you know, it would not have as much impact
as the Zuckerberg and the Kardashian have on people, right? Because it's
unprecedented the quantity of insights and engagement and interest is
unprecedented in any form of culture. So I think it's this—and also with the
Kardashian specifically, I think they did understand something about—yes,
communication for sure, but I think they represent American culture as well
because in my understanding, in my perspective, I think that in the system that
is America, the United States of America, people are not citizens, they're
employees of a company, and then the federation is a company. And this family
being a business and having no boundaries between what's business and what's
life, what's family, what's private, what's not, I think that they touched
something about what—you know, about how we live under capitalism. And in that
sense, I think they're just an immense resource of contemporary human
relationships and just contemporary culture in general beside internet.
Jamin: Yeah, I mean they're also very interesting characters for me. They
represent these two sides of, you know, celebrity or fame and commerce. You
know, in years—in eras past, like the most famous person in the country would
not necessarily be someone who runs like a Fortune 500 company. You know, like
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, like their fame is directly
connected to how pervasive the products that they've built, the companies that
they've built, and that's pretty—that's pretty new. You know, I guess we
certainly had that, like with the robber barons, Rockefeller, Carnegie, but even
so they were not nearly as—they were not visible in large part because people
were very mad at them and it was not like safe for them to be out in public.
They knew that they needed to be protected from everyday people. And then with
the Kardashians, it's kind of the opposite, right? Where in the past usually
like fame would be enough, that was enough to be famous. But it's not enough to
be famous, you also need to become more like a Mark Zuckerberg, you need to
build an empire and you need to be selling things. And so they do sort of
represent these—this interesting contemporary dynamic under capitalism between
fame and commerce. And they've kind of approached it from the same way.
Lou: And also I would say they created fame—oh, sorry. They created fame before
they created a product, which is a funny way to go. They built the image and
then they like, oh, we can make products out of this image. And in their
relationship, if I can add, I think that I use them as a system representation
where tech companies—so let's say like San Francisco, Silicon Valley creates
like shells, they code shells, empty shells. And then the Kardashians, L.A.,
create content. And then they go hand in hand to, you know, waterboard the
market of their presence. And it goes hand in hand.
Jamin: Yeah. Well, looking at some of the—you know, one of the things that was
interesting to me about your films is like the use of gaming imagery or gaming
shorthand. You know, like you use the GTA that death sound, that death sound
that I don't know how to describe it, it's like whatever that sound is when you
die.
Lou: Oh yeah, [makes sound].
Jamin: Yeah, that kind of like reverby slow-motion—and you know, in addition to,
you know, I see like things from, you know, 3D assets that you've pulled, and
yeah I was curious about specifically like do you—have you built like an
inventory of that gaming language? Like I think you've used some of the Sims
music in one of your pieces, I was just curious about these—like how do you pick
these elements to work into your video projects?