«Writing as pollinating», a conversation with Alice Bucknell

I love speculative fiction like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin 's, which creates alternative versions of reality based on enormous documentary research and invents the foundations of another present, improbable and credible. I'm also constantly on the lookout for situations where reality is surreal, a kind of "magical realism". As a writer of fi... See more

I love hiking in LA, which is quite ironic when I think that this nature is completely artificial. All the icons of the Angeleno landscape are imported, which creates a paradox, a discomfort: the unconditional love of the locals for an absolutely fake landscape.

In this human-made apocalyptic context, it seemed to me that interactive participation by the viewer made the more sense, by putting them in a situation of urgency rather than passively absorbing content. The game forces you to make choices and decisions. That's how the world works. This need for real, urgent action is just as true in reality as it... See more

Los Angeles, for example, has already been fully modeled by others. I didn't need to recreate it. Ditto for the desert or the puma. You go to this 3-D images supermarket and choose a palm tree pack, a piece of desert to download. This perfectly matches the mix between reality and artificiality in my projects. It's thanks to these virtual supermarke... See more

What appears to us today as the end of the world is in fact a new phase in his life.

So all you need to do is understand the mechanics of the software, and the rest is pretty much collage. You don't have to actually build anything. All you have to do is paint the landscape in your own colors. It's perfectly possible to make a very professional game with an army of one. I simply call on a friend and collaborator who knows how to mod... See more

she uses the language of gaming to produce a profound and together mind-blowing reflection of the new contemporary climate condition. In her hands, the video-game becomes the most radical and powerful form of ecological speculation

I don't write linear script with a plot, a climax and a conclusion. I build a world, a context in which different characters explore and tell stories. This invites the viewer to understand that there's always another world, another way of life possible. It's often rich and optimistic. It opens up avenues for building a new reality.

I love this mix of drama where life is lost, erosion is sad, mass extinction is terrifying; there's a creative beauty in this process of death and rebirth where the present becomes the compost of the future.