Musical Accompaniment
A multi-media experience so expansive and revolutionary it had to be put on TWO tapes.
In all seriousness though, I think most descriptions of this draw a weird line of comparison with trying to match it to one specific medium. You'll see the odd person say that this is an "interactive music video" or an "interactive movie" — I don't think either of those completely make this make sense.
Deus Ex Machina primarily consists of various scenes you can interact with set to an accompanying album which features vocal and musical accompaniment, loosely putting together a story reminiscent of the Shakespearean 'As You Like It'. The seven stages of a 'defect' in an allegorical science-fiction world woefully painted with the fantastical and broad strokes you would expect in British popular media, complete with theatrical music and story beats you'd expect from mainland Britain post-The Wall.
For the most part, you are a bystander without much agency towards the situation at hand, a single square bunch of pixels only goading other pixels to bounce off you or simply waiting idly by as a percentage meter ever so slowly drains from 100% until 0%. Perhaps a lump of molecules that sees existence as a recycled cell, interacting with new parts of the body. One moment a simple muscle cell in the neck so the newborn can let out its first roaring cry, the other a brain cell for coordinating jumps across barbed wire while connecting your physical efforts to political motivation.
In this sense, the protagonist of Deus Ex Machina is equal to most fleshed human. We are born, we live for a belief, we evolve it over time, and we die having moved and changed to the point of sheer unrecognizability. Even the traumatic probing and prodding by police and military commanders echo the lived experiences of minorities who never got to live a 'normal life', one unhampered by brutality. The only thing that truly changes is how we, the audience, view it. To us, we simply see numbers ticking down on a screen. To the protagonist, it is years gone by in an instant.
'Imagine if this were nothing but an electronic game. Your life is expressed as a percentage score. Observe the percentage. Your score changes.'
A multi-media experience so expansive and revolutionary it had to be put on TWO tapes.
In all seriousness though, I think most descriptions of this draw a weird line of comparison with trying to match it to one specific medium. You'll see the odd person say that this is an "interactive music video" or an "interactive movie" — I don't think either of those completely make this make sense.
Deus Ex Machina primarily consists of various scenes you can interact with set to an accompanying album which features vocal and musical accompaniment, loosely putting together a story reminiscent of the Shakespearean 'As You Like It'. The seven stages of a 'defect' in an allegorical science-fiction world woefully painted with the fantastical and broad strokes you would expect in British popular media, complete with theatrical music and story beats you'd expect from mainland Britain post-The Wall.
For the most part, you are a bystander without much agency towards the situation at hand, a single square bunch of pixels only goading other pixels to bounce off you or simply waiting idly by as a percentage meter ever so slowly drains from 100% until 0%. Perhaps a lump of molecules that sees existence as a recycled cell, interacting with new parts of the body. One moment a simple muscle cell in the neck so the newborn can let out its first roaring cry, the other a brain cell for coordinating jumps across barbed wire while connecting your physical efforts to political motivation.
In this sense, the protagonist of Deus Ex Machina is equal to most fleshed human. We are born, we live for a belief, we evolve it over time, and we die having moved and changed to the point of sheer unrecognizability. Even the traumatic probing and prodding by police and military commanders echo the lived experiences of minorities who never got to live a 'normal life', one unhampered by brutality. The only thing that truly changes is how we, the audience, view it. To us, we simply see numbers ticking down on a screen. To the protagonist, it is years gone by in an instant.
'Imagine if this were nothing but an electronic game. Your life is expressed as a percentage score. Observe the percentage. Your score changes.'