Your Body Is Being Compressed—Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body

Your Body Is Being Compressed—Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body

Lisa Jamhoury is an artist and performer working at the intersection of the physical body and computation. Her Capture Series—five years in the making—investigates what it means to live through digital representations of ourselves. Lossy, the newest piece in the series, had its world premiere at South by Southwest 2025. In this episode, I talk with Lisa about how a traumatic car accident sent her from circus performance into software design, a 1940s sculpture called Norma that explains everything wrong with how we build technology today, what it actually feels like to walk through Lossy, and why she reached for Kurt Vonnegut to write through grief. This is the main feed cut. Gaming Club members get the extended version—including Lisa's full breakdown of the Norma sculpture, her reflections on motion capture as an ethical practice, and more of our conversation about digital death and the right to be forgotten. Join the Gaming Club at killscreen.com—$6/month gets you extended episodes, monthly game selections, creator interviews, and the editorial layer that makes it all make sense. Read more at killscreen.com. * (00:00) - What Lossy Means * (00:20) - Meet Lisa Giammori * (03:02) - Trauma To Tech Critique * (10:26) - Naming The Capture Series * (14:20) - Norma And The Perfect Body Myth * (15:59) - Wrap Up and Where Next Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. Subscribe to Killscreen [https://www.killscreen.com/membership/] for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com  Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

Telling the Bees: Kyriaki Goni on Building a Game from a Stranger's Gift

In this episode, I talk with Greek artist Kyriaki Goni [https://kyriakigoni.com/] about Telling the Bees —her in-development game about a character called the Bee-Seeker, searching for the last surviving bees in a near-future Aegean archipelago on the edge of ecological collapse. We get into the ritual that gives the game its name, the anthropological research behind every design decision, and why she wants players to physically perform the waggle dance to unlock parts of the game. This is exactly the kind of work I cover at Killscreen: art that uses interactivity to reveal something true about the world that couldn't be said any other way. If you want more of this—interviews, essays, and cultural criticism on experimental games and interactive art—the newsletter goes out every Tuesday and Thursday, free, at killscreen.com. And if you want to go deeper,  membership gives you extended cuts of every episode, full transcripts, creator interviews, and a curated monthly game experience. Join at killscreen.com. * (00:00) - Ritual of Telling Bees * (00:34) - Meet Kyriaki Goni * (01:30) - Naming and Family Traditions * (03:33) - The Basket Origin Story * (07:20) - Researching Ancient Beekeeping * (10:23) - Designing the Bee Seeker * (12:41) - Wrap Up and Where Next Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. Subscribe to Killscreen [https://www.killscreen.com/membership/] for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com  Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

The Level Designer Who Went Underwater

Jakob Kudsk Steensen [https://www.jakobsteensen.com/] has spent fifteen years building a practice that doesn't fit neatly into any single category. He's not a game designer in the commercial sense. He's not exactly a filmmaker or a sculptor. He's someone using the tools of game engines to document ecologies that are disappearing. In this conversation, we talk about how he started modifying Unreal Tournament at 12 and never really stopped. We talk about why Fortnite's commercial success is directly responsible for the expressive tools artists like Jacob now use for free. We talk about the Far Cry 2 modification he made seventeen years ago—a swimmer, an island, a slope too steep to climb—that was the first time he thought of himself as an artist. We talk about the Berola glacier, which he digitized in 2022 and which collapsed the following year. We talk about what it actually feels like to dive into a volcanic vent. And we talk about Song Trapper [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/208cbda8-65b5-433a-a4dc-aa8aeef9f484/Screenshot+2025-10-18+at+09.17.04.png?format=2500w]—his most narrative work yet, and his return to something that looks more deliberately like a game. The full Otherworlds [https://phi.ca/en/events/jakob-kudsk-steensen-otherworlds/] exhibition is on view at Phi Centre in Montreal through the summer. * (00:00) - Meet Jakob Kudsk Steensen * (01:27) - Origins Nature and Mods * (04:42) - Why Unreal Works * (09:16) - Other Worlds and Mourning Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. Subscribe to Killscreen [https://www.killscreen.com/membership/] for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com  Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

Lou Faroux: Internet Collapse, the Sewing Circle, and Building Digital Worlds from Queer Hollywood History

I sat down with Lou Faroux [https://www.instagram.com/loufauroux/]—French artist and filmmaker—to talk about growing up on The Sims, why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine, and what it means to treat internet collapse as an art subject rather than a catastrophe. Lou's practice is hard to categorize, which is exactly why I find it so interesting. She uses game engines, deepfakes, found footage, and AI avatars to ask something most of us feel but struggle to name: what did the internet do to us? Not what it gave us — what it did to us. To our habits, our bodies, our sense of time. In this conversation, we get into her origin story as a gamer who hacked The Sims with her sister, why Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian keep showing up in her work as near-religious figures, how she builds with gaming assets the way a painter builds with color, and what she means when she talks about internet collapse as a subject for anthropology rather than science fiction. This is the public version of a longer members-only conversation. Paid members get the full hour, including a deep dive into her current project —Diamonds and Dust—a virtual world built around queer Hollywood history from the 1930s. If this conversation makes you want more, the best next step is signing up for the Killscreen newsletter at www.killscreen.com [http://www.killscreen.com]. It's free to start, and it's where I do my most serious writing on games as cultural objects. * (00:00) - Welcome and Setup * (01:36) - Games and Early Play * (03:09) - Hacking The Sims * (05:20) - From Games to Film * (12:25) - Internet Collapse Themes * (18:55) - Zuckerberg and Kardashians * (25:54) - Gaming Language and Wrap Up Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com  Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

Can Art Fight Climate Change? Kara Stone & Joshua Dawson on Solar Servers, Degrowth, and Making Work in a Crisis

What does it cost—materially, ethically, psychologically—to make digital art about the climate crisis? I brought together two artists who are building things inside the very systems they're critiquing. Kara Stone [https://www.killscreen.com/tag/kara-stone/] is a game designer based in Calgary who runs Solar Server [https://www.solarserver.games/], a solar-powered web server hosting low-carbon games from her apartment balcony. Her latest game, Known Mysteries [https://www.solarserver.games/onnow.html#], is set in a near-future Alberta where oil and tech have fused into something indistinguishable. Joshua Ashish Dawson [https://joshua-dawson.com/openin] is a speculative designer and filmmaker who builds fictional climate futures from CGI and live action — ghost towns in the Atacama Desert, deregulated water systems, server farms built from the copper that destroyed the communities they replaced. In this conversation, we get into what geography gives you that abstraction doesn't, whether the medium is complicit in what it critiques, and how both of them stay sane while making work about catastrophe. * (00:00) - Welcome and Format * (00:51) - Tech Supply Chains and Climate * (02:29) - Meet Kara and Her Path * (05:08) - Solar Server Explained * (09:15) - Designing Known Mysteries * (15:59) - Aesthetics and Constraints * (18:42) - Meet Joshua and Next Steps Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com  Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]