Faculty of Art

Integrated Media: Digital Painting and Expanded Animation

Beatrice Douaihy

Flesh Prison Manifest

A digital animation that datamoshes footage of The Sims (2000), a lo-fi life simulation computer game, and carnalizes its pixels to signify an abjection: a muddy, repulsive border where the self meets the impossibility of digital embodiment.

“Flesh Prison Manifest (2021) is a digital animation that datamoshes footage of The Sims (2000), a lo-fi life simulation computer game, and carnalizes its pixels to signify an abjection: a muddy, repulsive border where the self meets the impossibility of digital embodiment. The animation centers around a female avatar; her form is reduced to its surface and becomes subsumed into the game’s home environment. Walls take on the appearance of skin, their uncertain depths collapsing and squirming over a muculent soundtrack. Through impressionistic glitch techniques, the structured void of the digital domain becomes enmeshed with gelatinous textures, creating a perceptual space where computer detritus is troubled by tactility. The paradox of a fleshy pixel becomes a symbol of where the self locates itself in the ambiguous oppositions of corporeal/representational. As the avatar reconstructs itself with human substrate, a fallacy emerges in the digital-physical union. The abject manifests as a mutant cadaver, immortal in its virtual life state – an impossible object.”