Museum of Obsolescence

Created with Kieran Huang.

We named our game Museum of Obsolescence in reference to the poem of the same name by poet Tracy K. Smith. We felt this poem mirrored a lot of the theme and affective qualities that we wanted to discuss in our game (eg. simulation, archive, historisticity, digital performance, and commercialism). Our game is a museum, and as such we wanted to touch on the affect of archive and the spectrum of racialized images around the internet and digital technologies.

In our game, we constructed the museum and a hovering sight-seeing character to be represented as “blank slates”, all built with blank white “neutral” tones and shapes, which represent modernist and aesthetic codes of style that hide racial white hegemony. In the beginning of the museum tour, we decided to put in a long hallway that the player must traverse through to access the rest of the exhibits. In addition to representing this “blank whiteness,” we thought that the extreme blankness, and long intimidating hallway overall served to be unsettling, so it serves a dual purpose. We wanted the blank whiteness to emphasize Dyer’s definitions of whiteness as invisible and ubiquitous - the ascendant norm. Along these lines, we made sure to have a very strong, evenly distributed, bright white lighting all throughout the museum.

We open with a satirical “history of racism” emblematic of the “colorblind” mentality of a post-racial utopia, based on the popularity of the idea around Obama’s first election and the idea of the internet being a “great equalizer” that radically distributes power across race and gender lines. It is extremely oversimplified and mischaracterized - intended to be humorous in triumphing a “nuclear” narrative of racism. Basing our ideas in Lisa Nakamura’s ideas of “internet utopianism,” in which the internet is pictured as an ideally democratic, discrimination-free space - without gender, race, age, or disability, we wanted to demonstrate that the reality of this fantasy is that the “neutral, raceless” internet user is really only passing for the normalized white male, reinforcing the hierarchical structure of white male cultural hegemony.

In our project, we revisit many of the topics covered in class and collect them into exhibits for the player to look through. We use images of Fae Richards from Watermelon Woman to bring up the ideas of archive and fabulation - the internet and digital technologies allow for creation of new history and community empowerment and connection. We then explore the theme of historisticity in general as we include the rise of Facebook and simultaneous fall of MySpace as “Virtual White Flight”.  We connect this chronicle of digital history to Muybridge’s original racialized work to show the remaining racialized lense in the digital and visual culture. 

We used the Glenn Ligon picture that was shown in class to show just as how language was a ubiquitous signifier for meaning, so is the interface as it commands how we interpret and view media. The If You Had My Love music video by Jennifer Lopez also explores this notion of interface.

We explore the theme of surveillance through both Jennifer Lopez’s music video and an exhibit in which the character watches themselves. We wanted to encapsulate the nature of the surveyor and surveyed which Nakamura talks about in Digitizing Race, and the almost contradictory relationship consumer’s play as not only the consumer, but also the product. This is also solidified through the use of Muybridge as he measures his subjects under the guise of objectivity.

We decided to have the exit represent the exit in Jay Z’s Moonlight video in which the bench and tree are able to be emblematic of introspectivity. This follows into footage of the Charlottesville white nationalist march to show the current relevance and document the modes of history and news as it shifts from the cliche misinformed mockumentary at the beginning to current news.