Adam Killer
Adam Killer exploits a bug in the first-person shooter videogame, Half Life, to create a glitched, bloody disarray. The player's only option is to violently attack the main character, Adam, who appears in multiples in a white field.
In Adam Killer, Brody Condon deploys his prolific practice of game data refurbishments by glibbly valourizing the first-person shooter's most popular taboo--wanton and hapless killing.
His post-punk operation on the first person camera leaves us without a stable ground for mournful debate of the genre's dubious preoccupations, and instead positions the first-person shooter as a laboratory for experimenting with the notion of death, and even encourages our laughing about it.
Similar in antic to the early work of Peter Jackson [braindead etc], it's interesting how the addition of agency, as provided by gameplay, lifts the dramatic and comic refrain of Death and Play into a deliciously awkward predicament - what is left of death once ported to the virtual? If no-one was looking would you give it a go? Why is the FPS's interest in Death and Play any more controversial than when it appears in passive media like cinema and literature?
In this way there's something really honest about Adam Killer--cutting to the chase, we are left with a crowbar, a sealed room and an immaculately dressed and very willing subject.