Catharsis Commander: Explanation and Analysis

Brian Schrank

NOTE: This text is best read after playing Catharsis Commander.

Introduction

Catharsis Commander is a simple videogame that makes a "gestalt commentary" on what we may really want from Youtube. As you play with it you also play with your catharsis, desire and cognition.

Clip Shape

The original footage of each video clip is enframed in a rectangular format. We don't tend to see the rectangular frame, it has become transparent, due of its cultural dominance. Without disrupting its own transparency the rectangular frame offers limitations and affordances, such as its compositional qualities. For a basic example, an object centered in the screen as opposed to on its periphery will have a different connotation of centrality or importance to its context.

In Catharsis Commander video subjects are cut out of their rectangular frame in order to “un-capture” them and release them from their frames and their previous transparency. This results in the subject’s isolation from its context and creates a subtle contextual void. This void is an affordance the player can exercise, conceptually filling in the context of each subject. This could be a mimetic filling in, where the player “accurately” tries to imaginatively re-contextualize the subject into its original footage and context. Or, conversely, this could be an expressive filling in, where the player freely associates with the subject, configuring a new conceptual context that could be ironic, tragic, humorous, mundane, etc.

Clip Duration

We’ve established that the non-rectangularity of subjects serves to partially break them out of their current frame. The video clips are short, averaging about 3 or 4 seconds each. This temporal isolation of the subjects also serves to break them from a frame of a slightly different type, a temporal frame, of the before and after. These subjects are waiting in a suspended climactic now, until it is activated by a click. This property allows multiple subjects to be played simultaneously, or in succession, forming aggregate contextual compositions. Of course not clicking on certain clips also positions them into a relationship of stasis.

Clip Selection

Clip selection is a very subjective process, and is analogous to a reporter or DJ. While seeking and selecting the 100+ video subjects I established categories such as food, sex, cuteness, violence, drama, music, politics, etc., to balance out the content. These were mostly based around popular American culture. More or less heavily themed versions of the game could be comprised of any combination of categories. A configuration around a singular theme, such as videogame power-ups, Saturday morning commercials, uses of the abject in film, political speeches etc. all would form unique investigative tools for players and as gestalt commentary for gamemakers. Or, juxtapositions of contrasting categories, for example, fast food, porn and war might be particularly provocative to investigate connections between objectification and consumption.

In future versions of the game it would be advantageous to increase the number and intensity of clips of the type that the player clicks on. For example, if a fast food clip is clicked, several more fast food clips become available and their content intensity increases. This way gore, scat and hard-core porn aren’t a distraction for uninterested players unless they click on subjects that lead into those extremes.

Clip Moment

The clip moment chosen may or may not necessarily be the intended or consensus climax of the original footage (that is if it did have a climax at all). In popular films the climax is often felt and indicated by the music and soundscape. In vocal-heavy songs the climax may be the second or third cycle of the voice-wrenching chorus. In pornography the climax is self evident. In news footage, which is already much abbreviated, the reporter will tell us when the important event will occur and will often slow down video time so we may stew in it.

The climax may or may not have the most cathartic potential. From the same film, a despairing heartbroken whisper may purge more of our emotion than a perilous light saber battle, even if it ends with triple amputation. Of course, it may not, hence the wide range of genres, audiences and subplots of cinema. Like clip selection, moment selection is extremely subjective. Reporters and editors not only select “all the news fit to print” and DJs select the tracks to play for the crowd, they also select how to frame and show that content. Perhaps procedural or flesh and blood “catharsis jockeys” will be a mainstay of how we parse new media in the future.

Clip Motion

The video clips travel from the center of the screen to its edge like a blobby star field. This factor may be more important than using irregular clip shapes to decontextualize the subjects. The player can’t affect this spatial motion; he can only click them to make their videos play as they continue to travel. By moving in this way, the clips are imbued with an auto-dynamic quality (or aura) that legitimizes the subject’s isolated existence apart from its original contextual footage. This is enhanced by the fact that they are only playable when they are large enough and onscreen. If the clips were stationary and always randomly accessible, their autonomy would be diminished. They would feel more like orphans –like they were surgically removed from their old context. In their present form they reminiscent of “Nomad thoughts” described by Deleuze and Guattari:

[Nomad thought] is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation, x = x not y (I = I = not you) with an open equation:… +y + z + a… (Deleuze, xiii)

Since the clips in Catharsis Commander, “self-force” their own real motion through space they are (partially) “freed” from the narrative, temporal and spatial forces of their original context. The amount in which they are freed is the slack in which the player can conceptually play with them. If they were not moving in space there would be less conceptual slack because their lack of context would be more palpable.

What do we really want from Youtube?

In the introduction I mentioned that Catharsis Commander is a gestalt commentary on what we want from Youtube. It affords immediate access to a sprawling array of bite-sized content this is textured and satisfying in conceptually configurable ways. The agency of the player is expanded and freed from many of the usual handicapping conventions of streaming video websites. This augmented agency is evidenced by the fact that it’s a slippery slope to create an ear-splitting cacophony (if the volume is moderately high) by clicking one or two dozen clips. Part of the pleasure of playing Catharsis Commander is in fact playing with how much of this agency you will use at a time, in effect playing you’re your own limits of cognition and creativity. (However, since it is just a prototype and not an extendable and reconfigurable system, the clips are pre-selected for the player. In this vein the player’s agency is quite limited. Ideally, the system inspired by this prototype would allow broad and deep live and off-line reconfiguration and use meta-tags parsable by search engines, etc.) Many video database interfaces separate each video into its own page, as in Youtube. There are other images of videos on the page, but when clicked they will simply open another page. This handicap prevents instant random access (no loading time) and combination that could be allowed if an array of videos were simultaneously available with the poignant moments pre-selected. Ideally, all the extended original footage from which the clips were extracted would also be available in various ways.

Do we want Soma?

Is Youtube, which Catharsis Commander caricaturizes, a developmental step toward a new media version of Huxley’s Soma? First let’s examine the significance of Soma in Huxley’s distopian future. Soma operates as a nefarious means of oppression in Brave New World:

In small doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses it made you see visions and, if you took three tablets, you would sink in a few minutes into a refreshing sleep. And all at no physiological or mental cost. The Brave New Worlders could take holidays from their black moods, or from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their health or permanently reducing their efficiency. (Huxley, 69-70)

Soma short circuits our drives that would otherwise endanger the homeostasis of the political power structure. Soma subverts our struggles that would lead to self-actuation by satisfying them virtually through sensations, visions and sleep. Our desire to continually redefine and better ourselves, to help others and positively change our environment, are siphoned off and drained by Soma. Is Youtube (and its rendering through Catharsis Commander) actual blissful enlightenment or a Soma-like diversion? The traditional vehicle of catharsis, drama which usually requires a more extended narrative, is gutted and rarified into something even more effective: cathartic climax on demand. And according to some, such as Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, the catharsis of Aristotelian drama is already crippling to society:

Empathy is the most dangerous weapon in the entire arsenal of the theater and related arts (movies and TV)… [M]an relinquishes power of decision to the image... Since the character resembles us (as Aristotle indicates), we live vicariously all his stage experiences. Without acting, we feel we are acting… (Boal, 113, 34)

From Boal’s perspective, imagine the damage that can occur if we are acting but only virtually so as new media allows! From his perspective the farce becomes sealed and we become a ghost in the machine. Fiction seems more real because the causalities are real. Espen Aarseth draws a parallel for us in interactive fiction:

Such interactive fiction as an adventure game is even less fictive than a staged drama, since the user can explore the simulated world and establish causal relationships between the encountered objects in a way denied to the readers of Moby Dick or the audience of Ghosts. (Aarseth, 50)

This is why the telos of Aristotelian drama and catharsis is found in new media. It is the reduction of drama and catharsis into a purgative mouse click, a blissful button press or a feverish joystick manipulation to deliver the effective Somatic dosage. For example, many of us salivate in disgust at the socially abject. We feel better about ourselves when we witness white politicians (George Allen), talking/radio heads (Don Imus), or anyone really (Michael Richards) of moderate social status, saying racially incendiary remarks. We cringe at Hillary Clinton's accent as she panders to southern blacks. We don’t care why these things happen just that they are happening and that they seem more real because, like circus monkeys, we can isolate them, make them perform on command and repeat as desired. But as "the Youtube phenomenon" offers us these inane and socially parasitic usages of new media, it also offers us critical and creative usages as well.

Which Soma do we want?

Huxley’s Soma has a historical antecedent that is much more ambivalent than its debilitating form in Brave New World. Huxley describes the Soma of antiquity:

In the Vedic hymns we are told that the drinkers of Soma were blessed in many ways. There bodies were strengthened, their hearts were filled with courage, joy and enthusiasm, their minds were enlightened and in an immediate experience of eternal life they received the assurance of their immortality. But the sacred juice had its drawbacks. Soma was a dangerous drug… (Huxley, 69)

This Soma actually is enlightenment, rather than the snare of false enlightenment of Brave New World. But what were those drawbacks and dangers? In the later Vedas Soma began to be described differently. The early sacredness of Soma in the earlier hymns fades rapidly into profane inebriation. As quoted from the Vedas:

“The swollen men urinate the on-flowing Soma…When wilt thou do away with the urine of drunkenness with which the priests delude the people…” (Smith, 57, 63)

We have two diverging perspectives on Soma: is it enlightenment or diversion? Are new media phenomena like Youtube and Catharsis Commander “alcoholic piss” or tools to cleave through distraction? They are both. As I’ve iterated before, and tried to exemplify in the videogame artifact Catharsis Commander, we are in control of how we use these video clips and which Soma we are really after.

Works Cited:

Aarseth, Espen J. (1997). Cybertext : Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Boal, A. (1985). Theater of the oppressed. New York, Theatre Communications Group.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Huxley, A. (2000). Brave new world revisited. New York, Perennial Classics.

Smith, H. (2003). Cleansing the doors of perception : the religious significance of entheogenic plants and chemicals. Boulder, CO, Sentient Publications.