Latest / The Killscreen Podcast / Lou Faroux: Internet Collapse, the Sewing Circle, and Building Digital Worlds from Queer Hollywood History
Transcript
- 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?