Art is a virus–I only now recognized how much Blue Velvet has influenced me, although Mayakovsky’s ear falling off in Pelin Kirca’s wonderful animation in our first interactive narrative Reconstructing Mayakovsky was inspired by a combination of the opening scene of Blue Velvet (I put it in a slide show I made to show Pelin when we started collaborating on the animation) and Mayakovsky’s own play, with the characters missing body parts, Vladimir Mayakovsky: a Tragedy.
“All my life I have been looking for a place. Home. Sometimes, I’d see it in passing, driving down a street or jogging on the beach in Malibu. Sometimes I’d dream about it.
Sometimes it was a mansion and sometimes just a cabin in the woods. Though, I don’t think I have ever found it, I have found places where, at least for a time, I was loved.” Sebastian A.
I wrote Queerskins: a novel as a gay man living in Missouri. The purpose was not to fool anyone, it was to kind of succeed and kind of fail, and in doing so, explore and transcend my own boundaries. It was a way of being at home in my own skin in a way that I never felt in real life. Many of the diary entries deal with painful parts and relationships from my “real” life remade and approached through the eyes of another.
Having recently found VRChat, I feel I have found my place in social VR. It’s like a Japanese anime world come to life. Imagine Toy Story + Faulkneresque stream of consciousness + many 12 year olds. I love it. It’s absolutely mad. Here is when I decided that who I really wanted to be was a donut man. Stay tuned–we are planning something special for Queerskins: ARK…More soon..
Illya Szilak 