Life & Times of a Wannabe Popstar

Life & Times of a Wannabe Popstar is an interactive video / a video game with video art cutscenes, playable as an Apple Mac application and using a video game controller. Life & Times is a narrative piece that alternates between “live action” green screened video cutscenes, starring Clark Woods as the titular popstar Axel Flux (and all of their friends), and playable portions of the game where the player moves through the piece as Axel in various genres and styles. The piece is held together by the continuation of narrative, color palette, and the aesthetics of early 2000’s media and pop culture fused with a hint of queer world-making/futures. Life & Times explores the idea of living with doubt and anxiety, and not always being able to determine the boundaries between internal worlds and external realities. The piece itself is also existing in between realities, facilitating interactions between the real world and the internal world of the game. They exist in tandem, and the line between each world is as much in Axel’s hands as it is the player’s, and how much either is willing to put into each reality. The piece also features the song To the Max created by Melon Sprout, as well as other sounds sampled from Sprout’s album ‘Melon Patch’.