Falling Elvis

On Saturday I visited the Contemporary Art Museum in Amsterdam and saw a piece by a Dutch artist who had taken the software used by game programmers to simulate someone being shot and applied it to graphic images of Elvis. I don't usually connect with digital animation work but this was strangely moving and it threw up lots of questions about death as comic or tragic, ugly or beautiful. Reminded me of my original idea for the Readymade Residency of dying a death, stage death, people who have died in performance e.g. Tommy Cooper. This isn't part of the act etc. Karma Physics > Elvis is a modification of the bloody science fiction first person shooter computer game Unreal 2003. The viewer is pulled slowly through an infinite pink fog filled with floating, twitching bodies of Elvis Presley. The convulsions of Elvis are controlled by the original game’s Karma Ragdoll real-time physics system - generally used to simulate the physical dynamics of game character death. To watch the video click here.