Robert Yang’s new game ‘Rainbows Are Carnivores‘ is about fishing and gay. Tap or click to cast your line. The camera fixes on ‘you’ a fisher of men, as you reel them in.
It follows a story for about 10 minutes as you adjust the water, trying to land on the perfect conditions for your 100% heartthrob. They dangle there on the line helpless and under scrutiny. Each with their shiny wetness and flopping dick under judgement of the heart. You can turn off dicks for the censors, a mode that responds to the overcensorship of penises, and adds questions in my mind, on the politics of visualising the body.
Robert Yang’s work has engaged with critiques of sexual censorship quite thoroughly and having talked with him about it, the way it presents is in playfully attempting to frustrate censorship and category. In this way I think that the absent penis, how it refers to vulva or the nullification of genitals by implication, plays by inferring a read of the men in that mode as being transmasculine in one particular way of being so, or intersex, or gender-queer. That the genital is the thing, rather than the nudity. In so doing I think this furthers the position of frustrating category, that a body may be however it may be, to appease the censor, and still refer to a person’s actual material real. That to truly ‘censor’ would be to not make the work about nudity in this way in the first place. Having absent penis rather than boxer shorts, there’s a point there.
Anyway… No perfect match? Throw them away. Plenty more. Until you find the one… and they throw you away all the same. It’s been like that in the world of online dating, that the fisherman scrolls his phone I imagine to engage in, for a decade or so. More probably, but that’s how long I’ve been on and off involved in it, seeking queer ‘connection’, but really many things. Friendship, love, sex. And feeling, sometimes sexy, sometimes inferior.
It plays in vertical aspect, designed for a phone, hooking in to the device it’s got these built in critiques of the function of.
In the notes for the game Robert Yang describes the influence in the environmental waste of fishing, its performative, gender aiding aspect for masculinity, and how these things combined to inspire the game.
It plays out with perhaps easy feeling metaphors to attach which those notes make reference to, that the point of an overspecified search and arrogance, ‘fishing’ during dating, is a self serving egotism. That being disconnected from awareness that you’re taking on this position leads to the comic heartbreak that takes place throughout, and that you see instead of people an endless supply of material (restocked behind your back by the never ending providers to the dating pool – a very funny military style drop by helicopters with progress pride decals on).
In this way it feels like a comic flash game, built around progression that pushes a joke. A title that puns on carnivorous trout and the at times deadly feeling gay dating world.
You adjust the water’s co², nitrates, the fish feed etc etc, guessing at what good gay aquaculture is. The joke being steeped in this precision did make me think about the state of pools of water where fish turn up dead. So many, choked out by water that has been diverted by people and then poorly maintained or overexploited. The cascading environmental failures we live in as a lingering humorous riff, there and yet. and yet.
The commitment to these themes, in Robert Yang’s work, of tying the gay romantic life in to the material processes of the world both human and environmental, people’s sexuality to ‘non-sexual’ activity, I really appreciate as an artist myself. Being able to see 10 years of sustained work in a field I work in that remains fun and able to provoke ideas, I can only hope to be making the same.
A final note, in the UK, if you try to see all of the works on Robert Yang’s itch page you get this image…
So instead, go to his website to see the rest of the games if you need to, links to specific itch projects still work without needing vpn (hence how i played the game).
GlitchOut 