surrealism stuff
not remotely qualified to write it but sometimes i still fantasize abt the idea of a surrealism primer for gamedevs, just bc i think it's one of those things that can almost feel too familiar for us to bother investigating further. in highschool i encountered "surreal" as a descriptor for a bunch of dissimilar things i liked (goofy cartoons and videogames, captain beefheart and david lynch) but "surrealism" itself felt like a letdown, a set of mummified art tics and Iconic Works and practices it was easy to imagine yourself getting tired of over the course of an afternoon. it was only later that i found i kept running into kind of tangential, wayward pieces of the original surrealist explosion that were still exciting to me: dorothea tanning, unica zurn, henri michaux, paul delvaux, monkton house, max ernst's collage novels, bunuel and bataille, a galaxy of proto- and pseudo-surrealists like roussel, lautreamont, de chirico.. the history of the organization itself and their wistful efforts to become a sister organization to the communist party (who sent breton to write statistical reports on the italian economy), facets that tended to be left out of the official history like marcel duchamp's drag persona. lots of stuff that even when dumb or unsympathetic, like the appeals to "oriental mystery", at least break open the word as a set of competing and sometimes incompatable desires and tendencies that had and still have the potential to spin off in their own strange directions rather than just being buried beneath a single house style. but maybe videogames need "surreal" to continue just meaning "floating platforms" bc the format itself remains uncomfortable enough about its own dreamlike psychic aspects not to want to dig into them further. when lautreamont talked about the chance intersection of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table he was talking about Doom.
