Frederick Maheux
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Frédérick Maheux is a multimedia artist whose main interests are emergent subcultures of the digital age, eschatological futurology, and speculative realism. Beside his work in experimental and documentary cinema, he creates noisy video games, produces industrial music under the name Un Regard Froid and practices the art of analogic collages. He is currently a doctoral student at UQAM in the communication department working on underground video games creation and their potential as epistemic objects. He is also a specialist in digital communication and marketing in the advertisement industry.
Hyperdeath
Hyperdeath
You are the Object. You freed yourself from the Subject. The Subject needs to reincorporate you in the Symbolic Order. You wish to escape the Simulation. You pray for Hyperdeath. Run. An arcade game from the third order of reality. Expect 5 levels of arcade alienation and a ruthless symbolic order. Hyperdeath is pure hyperkinetic fun, something between Tron’s Lightcycle and Pac-Man. To escape subjectivity and find solace in pure objectification, the players must survive 2 minutes in each of the 5 obstacles-ridden arena while being hunted by their own head: progressively mutating in a Tentacled Skull, what Eugene Thacker declares as the perfect “Weird-hauntological monster” (Thacker, 2008). The player cannot stop, must constantly run or be devoured by their subjectivity. The players also leave behind them a hyperreal wall, forbidding them to retrace their steps or loop in place. Each level is inspired by a key concept from Jean Baudrillard’s work : the masses, hostages and terrorism, the power of death, the end of language and the semiotic of sex. If you need a breath, simply pause and bask in the video feedback of our mediated reality. “Where life morphs into hyperlife (life more death than death), death into hyperdeath (death more life than life), motion into hypermotion (acceleration more inertia than inertia), nonmotion into hypernonmotion (inertia more acceleration than acceleration).” (Cholodenko, 2016