Disturbing Times Two, At Least


Going through my inbox, I noticed that I'd posted myself an email reminding me about this collection of illustrations of famous scenes done in the style of screenshots from The Sims. My first thought was "this would have been better if he'd stuck more closely to the game's style." Then I noticed what the pictures were of, and I realized that I'd never be able to play The Sims. The implicit representational biases in its world-view are just a little too much to handle once you've seen the Columbine shootings or Martin Luther King's assasination done in its graphic style.

Then I noticed the scenes from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, casually shuffled in with Reginald Denny. Another upsetting miracle of isometric perspective, perhaps: once the violence has started to look cartoonish, what would have been merely cartoonish acquires an unsavoury undercurrent of menace.

For a real mind-bender, though, go thumb through the pictures of events we know from famous photos: Ruby gunning down Oswald, Trang Bang, and Elian in the closet, and ask yourself the following question: where, in these isometric pictures, are the photographers who took the original photos that made the scenes famous?