Machinima as a record and exorcism: Carson Lynn's turned Xbox Live's homophobic insults into a powerful narrative. A meditation on language, violence, and art. As Lynn writes,
In 2004, Halo 2 was the first game I played online with a public voice chat, and with that my first encounters with homophobic language. These outbursts, most often due to rage, always centered around the body: physical harm, rape, and death. My real body was never in peril, but my developing queer self was under attack through the internalization of this homophobia. This queer self had to heal, and the only way was to find cover and wait. Oddball is a short machinima film with all footage taken directly from Halo 2, with the help of the modification Project Cartographer. All text is appropriated from real conversations between players in various Halo games, taken from YouTube videos uploaded between 2006 - 2010.
Carson Lynn is an artist based out of Southern California who through the usage of digital materials, sublime landscapes, and exploration within gamespaces, creates artworks as a queering of heterocentric photographic conventions and game systems. He is working towards receiving his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design with a projected graduation in April, 2020. He received his BFA in Photography and Imaging, also from ArtCenter, in 2015.
LINK: Carlson Lynn