VIOLENCE at the End of the World

This is a poem I wrote for  Noise Jam 2's theme of, "FUNGI, ROT, & FLOWERS." It's a meditation on the ethics of naturalistic versus ideological violence, as well as the predestiny of cellular life. The style I chose to write with is purposefully disjointed, but I hope it makes enough sense that you find enjoyment in reading it. I've been working on finding my own voice for awhile now, and I am still tuning it, so any feedback or thoughts are always appreciated.

This is a full audio-visual experience, so I recommend putting on some headphones before diving in. I illustrated this poem in Videotome using (mostly) images from Wikimedia Commons. Depending on how fast you read, I'd say this will take you 5-10 minutes to get through.

---

Project Inspirations

• Alejandro Jodorowsky's take on violence in media.
• The works of my friends in the HOUDINI Magazine collective, especially Mindape, FiveStarCrest, and Shem Shelley.
• The works of Edgar Allen Poe.
• The surrealist writings of Andre Breton.
• Fallout (1997) and Fallout 2 (1998)
• Movies: 12 Monkeys (1995), A History of Violence (2005), The Happening (2008), Annihilation (2018), The City of Lost Children (1995)
• Music: HVL's mind-boggling IDM records Deviate and Nonlinear, Mark Morgan's ambient soundtracks for Fallout 1/2, and Harper Rush's beat tape As the Crow Flies.

---

Sources

Assets

• Screenshots from "The Dark Eye" retrieved via MobyGames. I highly recommend playing this Edgar Allen Poe-themed point-and-click from 1995; link for a Win10/11 compatible version here.
• VHS Overlays from Mindape's DEGRADED! asset pack.
• 3D rendered head by Cyrus Crashtest.
• Various shareware CDs I have lying around my computer room, not sure of the names (sorry!). Many of them are uploaded on my Internet Archive profile.
• Occult Images CD-ROM collection retrieved via the Internet Archive.
• All other images pulled from Wikimedia Commons and edited in Photoshop.

The font used in this Videotome is called Montsegur, designed by Mehmet Reha Tuğcu, which I purchased via this bundle on his website.

Sounds

Many sounds were sourced from various video game dumps I've performed:

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
• Half-Life 2
• Silent Hill 1/2
• American McGee's Alice

All other ambient loops were pulled from my copy of Pizza Doggy's Echoes: Audio Super Kit, which is well worth your dollars!

Tools

• Videotome - game engine.
• EZGif - image optimization.
• Dither it! - for dithering images.
• FFaudioConverter - for an easy, GUI-based conversion of .wav files to .mp3s. This is a great tool if you're lazy (like me) and/or not familiar with ffmpeg's CLI.
• Audacity - for equalizing sound byte volume, modifying pitch, and adding effects.
• Photoshop (very legal copy)