yamantaka // sonic titan (montreal)

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konami komando

03/07/08 - 07/08/08

Window exhibition

 

Konami Konando is an installation that parodies a cultural death-and-birth cycle of the artistsÕ own, personal Asian identity in North America. The intention is to create a fully crafted pop-up cartoon universe that confronts the viewer with a re-imagined videogamescape and a fractured narrative derived from pop-culture Asian references.

 

1953.
Blastro was our love child. Unfortunately we were slowly running out of money. We sent him to summer space camp for a "space mission", thinking it would be good for the kid. He would be out there in the great beyond, having real-life experiences, and we could stay on Earth to work full-time. However, an entourage of Sun-Ra expatriates, working closely with an Asian gang, hijacked the summer space-camp program.
From what I could recall, Blastro was excited for his first space voyage. The training was grueling, since he had to do it in his sleep. As his toon dreams cycled through death and re-entry into the game, he heroically burnt his last free-octane in a videogamescape, rising into space again. He could one-up and up and up, forever, because he had the code that made him invincible. Overcome with the joy of flying, he self-destructed in the name of experimentation. After a few weeks of legalities and interrogations, it came out that the "mission" was really a crooked enquiry to be used get someone out of jail.
Blastro had described his dreams as adventures in which he was the tester*, and the camp technicians said he mumbled the code while he slept through his last days. What really happened during that mission will remain a mystery, but soon after his brain-unit replacement I was allowed to view a still from the last transmission.

 

* Konami Komando is a key code for infinite "lives" in Konami video games, debuting with the 1986 release of Gradius, for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The code was popularized in North America via the NES version of Contra, in which the upper levels were so difficult, the game tester had to use this cheat code to finish the game.

 

 

The orphan child of the disbanded noise music project Lesbian Fight Club, YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN (b. 2049, Outer Space), was pre-born in 2008.The two core members, Alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood, have been performingart and music under different names since they met and collaborated in a Concordia Interdisciplinary Studies class in 2005. Following a brief hiatus, they continued to evoke thespirit of psychedelic, prog, metal and opera through homemade Asian folk instruments and paper theatre sets, dazzling audiences and creating cesspools of cultural product across Montreal. Ruby lives and works as an illustrator, artist and musician in Montreal and Alaska is preparing for stardom.