Massacre Endeavor

Massacre Endeavor is a game created in 2006 by Vivian Puxian in collaboration with Fabio FON, for the digital magazine Nóisgrande, in Brazil. 

The visionary digital magazine not only presents itself as a CD instead of paper, it also comes inside a handcrafted sculpture of a nutshell (that also resembles a brain shape), featuring artwork from different avant-garde Brazilian artists: Vivian Puxian, Paulo Miranda, Omar Khouri, Fábio FON, Daniele Gomes, Diniz Gonçalvez Júnior, Edgar Franco, Josiel Vieira, Letícia Tonon, Peter de Brito.   

Massacre Endeavor was developed using Macromedia Flash. Acording to the book "Ctrl+Art+Del", written by the multimedia artist and Doctor of Arts Fabio Oliveira Nunes, who placed Puxian's game in the book chapter about cyborgs, this "is a subversive game based on the simple act of clicking. When the game starts, the mouse pointer turns into a bull's-eye, indicating to the players that their mission is to shoot (click) on the strange figure (with a mischievous look), like so many other games, but with an important difference: for each shot, three more individuals to be shot appear, configuring a game in which the player can never eliminate their opponents. There is no victory. Clicking becomes an increasingly innocuous act, once the opponents fill the screen, making the participant a mindless automated clicker. MACHADO (2002, p.149), when quoting the legacy of Flusser, speaks of a "stereotype" coming from machines, in which repetition inevitably leads to uniformity and predictability of results. The multiplication of pre-made templates, the homogenization that comes from commercial software - which produces images often impersonal, presented in design events - are elements that must be overcome when trying to produce symbolic images. This predictable mechanical behavior spreads far beyond the machine, shaping also homogeneous human behavior.

According to Haraway (1994, p.243-283), the concept is far beyond this mechanical behavior: in fact, the cyborg would be to subvert the dualisms present in the Western culture as self x other, reality x appearance, male x female, culture x nature, truth x illusion, God x man. The cyborg represents the dissolution of boundaries, empowered from facts that range from "it is not clear who does or is done on the man-machine interface" to our symbiosis with communication technologies, biotechnology and simulation. Its origin lies in the dissolution of three borders: the human-animal distinction, the differentiation between organism (human beings) and machine and the distinction between physical and non-physical. The first disappears when human goes from the category of an animal who is different from the others by the act of thinking. The evolutionary theory contributes to this. On another side, the animal is humanized - now there are movements to protect animal rights which contain that which was only restricted to humans before. The second boundary between organism and machine is broken when machines start to have some autonomy - a quality that belonged previously only to organic beings - like organisms take characteristics of machines, with automatisms. The last boundary is the lack of accuracy between that which is physical and what is non-physical, unfolded from the second boundary. The advances in nanotechnology and virtual reality systems lead us to the difficulty of identifying reality and presence, visibility and ubiquity."