The flies' choreography amplifies my longing for the void. (Drawing down the moon)

A transcorporality prototype for cosmic omnicide. The experience lasts 8 minutes. Something is happening. Will you be aware of it?
I highly recommend playing with another person - one on the keyboard, the other on the mouse.

Control:
WASD – Flight direction
E – Turn off ultraviolet and compound vision
Spacebar – Move in/out
Mouse – Human vision
Left click – Human localization
ESC  - Quit

One summer night, during a scorching insomnia, I decided to wander around without a precise destination. The drift took me to the industrial district. As I hesitated to explore a disused warehouse, my ears picked up an incessant mechanical hum that appealed to me. I headed for the source: the back door of a small, otherwise uninteresting structure. Despite the high volume, I could make out a second sound frequency: swarms of insects swirling over the nearby garbage cans and around the security light. This spectacle caught my attention. I remained frozen in this spot for several dozen minutes.

This temporary paralysis was also provoked by paranoid anxiety, as if something outside my field of vision was watching me, preparing to attack me. It wasn't a legitimate fear that an assailant was lurking in the darkness. Instead, it was a cosmic terror, the conviction that something external to this world was about to tear the boundaries between its dimension and mine. I knew consciously that this anxiety was caused by fatigue and my intolerance to extreme heat, but I remained sucked in by what my imagination was proposing. I also wondered how these insects perceived the same situation, the light, myself, and how debilitating nausea would seize me if my cognition were connected to the vision of these creatures—double vertigo.

This state is one that I cherish, linked to my interests and preoccupations: access to realities that exceed perceptual capacities to reach that which is external to the human.   La chorégraphie des mouches amplifie le désir du néant (Décrocher la lune), is an attempt to share this experience, which is both sonic and subjective, using video games' affordances to generate sensory disruption.

This project is a prototype for further development in insectoid perceptual simulation. Recommended reading:

Alaimo, Stacy. (2012). « States of Suspension : Trans-corporeality at Sea », Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 19, no. 3.

Bogost, I. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or, What it’s like to be a thing. University of Minnesota Press.

Borst, A. (2009). Drosophila’s View on Insect Vision. Current Biology, 19(1), R36‑R47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2008.11.001 

Diclaro, J., Cohnstaedt, L., Pereira, R., Allan, S. et Koehler, P. (2012). Behavioral and Physiological Response of Musca domestica to Colored Visual Targets. Journal of medical entomology, 49, 94 100. https://doi.org/10.1603/ME10257

Parikka, J. (2010). Insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology. University of Minnesota Press.