Yesterday was my birthday so I asked for legs to run away

In the machinima YESTERDAY WAS MY BIRTHDAY SO I ASKED FOR LEGS TO RUN AWAY (2024) by Yannis Mohand Briki, screened at the latest edition of the Milan Machinima Festival, a character from the video game The Sims 2 (Electronic Arts, 2004) laments being abandoned by the one who once created and played with him. It is a lost pastand, above all, a lost future that continues to haunt the present.

These are the unfulfilled promises of the early 2000s, evoked through that internet aesthetic dubbed Frutiger Aero by researcher Sofi Lee of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute and referenced by Briki. It was the dream of a technology capable of harmonizing with natural forms, producing clean energy, meeting human needs, as Valentina Tanni writes in Exit Reality (Nero, Aksioma. 2024). Going back into The Sims 2 was, for me, returning to the stage where that kind of optimistic euphoria about life was shaped, Briki told us. It wasnt about nostalgia in a sentimental sense, it was about investigation. Where was the crack I didnt see? What signs were already there that it was false? What signs can I see now, in this euphoric capitalist vivarium, of the limits of digital utopias?

For Briki, its an investigation that must nevertheless serve a forward-looking purpose. What happened between the Frutiger Aero aesthetic and the rise of modern fascism in Western societies? Briki continued. How did we go from inclusive utopian branding to genocide complacency and the destruction of nature and culture? The avatar is also a potentially lost future of Briki himself, as the director shared with us. In these avatars, we projected a part of ourselves and when we lose them, we lose those projections too. […] They become time capsules for dreams that were never fulfilled and opening them years later means confronting both the past and the unrealized versions of ourselves we left behind.

MATTEO LUPETTI

Matteo Lupetti writes about art criticism, digital art and video games in publications such as Artribune and Il Manifesto and abroad. He has been on the editorial board of the radical magazine menelique and the artistic direction of the reality narrations festival Cretecon. His first book is UDO. Guida ai videogiochi nellAntropocene (Nuove Sido, Genoa, 2023), a reinterpretation of the video game medium in the age of climate change and within the new multidisciplinary paths that foreground the non-human and its agency.