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The Killscreen Podcast

The Killscreen Podcast

By: Jamin Warren
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Join host Jamin Warren on conversations with someone of the most unique and experimental artists, designers, and thinkers in the worlds of games, play and culture Jamin Warren founded Killscreen and has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.© 2025 The Killscreen Podcast Art
Episodes
  • The Backrooms Were Always About Games

    The Backrooms Were Always About Games
    Jun 13 2026
    Something a little different! We're focusing on the newsletter now and in a conversational way!This week, I sat down with Danny Snelson, a writer and professor at UCLA who spends his days thinking about the eerie. We start with a strange admission from this year's Venice Biennale, where the Chinese pavilion exhibited a video game you weren't allowed to play, and use it to chase a bigger idea: that games have quietly become a shared grammar, and once you notice it, you can't stop seeing where it has leaked. Into a sculptor's hooded figures pulled from DOOM and recast as the accused at the Salem witch trials. Into a painter who walks you inside his own canvases. Into a flesh-pink office shooter, and into the Backrooms, that empty image of damp carpet and fluorescent hum that turns out to be one of the clearest things our culture has made about infinity after the exhaustion of grandeur. We get into all of it, plus an auto-rickshaw in Goa in 1992, and whether a game is allowed to refuse to be fun. ReferencesMitchell Chan's talk at DEMOPeter Nichols' Crude OilMy interview with Leo Castañeda / Talk at DEMOCamofluxAdrian MM AbelaFalse.Work Maltese PavillionChinese Pavillion's Black Myth: WukongDamjan Jovanovic's essay on The BackroomsMy feature on CatmilkCatmilkGossamer MatrixKalp Studio's Rahi Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA. His online editorial work can be found at PennSound, Eclipse, UbuWeb, Jacket2, and the EPC. Published books include Elden Poem (Hysterically Real, 2022), Apocalypse Reliquary: 1984-2000 (Monoskop, 2018), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). His most recently published book, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), examines the networked afterlives of media-reflexive works of art and letters in search of contingent methods for reading ordinary digital collections. He's just wrapped teaching "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a UCLA Creative Writing Seminar: Isekai x Experiment" this spring at UCLA. Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • The Pink Game About Corporate Violence

    The Pink Game About Corporate Violence
    Jun 9 2026

    Catmilk is a digital artist and solo developer who has been building a game called Gossamer Matrix for about four years. It's a first-person shooter set inside a corporate tower in a climate-flooded future, where cities have condensed vertically, and private militaries defend shareholder value floor by floor. The premise is deliberately hyperviolent. The color palette is, improbably, pink.

    What caught my attention was the texture. The game looks stitched. Woven. Like something pulled together one color at a time. Catmilk cites the Impressionists and Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish painter behind a generation of heavy metal album covers, as visual touchstones. You can feel both.


    We talked about designing for something other than fun, about how working an IT job in a university basement quietly shaped the game's level design, and about what it means to make something you're calling a "digital object" that exists as itself, optimized for nothing.


    • (00:00) - Pink Corporate Violence
    • (01:35) - Beach Town Origins
    • (04:38) - From Painter to Games
    • (08:15) - Impressionists and Metal Dreams
    • (10:42) - Playtest Push and Unfun Design
    • (17:04) - Building the Corporate Tower World
    • (26:41) - Office Job Level Design

    Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    31 mins
  • Your Body Is Being Compressed—Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body

    Your Body Is Being Compressed—Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body
    Jun 2 2026

    Lisa Jamhoury is an artist and performer working at the intersection of the physical body and computation. Her Capture Series—five years in the making—investigates what it means to live through digital representations of ourselves. Lossy, the newest piece in the series, had its world premiere at South by Southwest 2025.

    In this episode, I talk with Lisa about how a traumatic car accident sent her from circus performance into software design, a 1940s sculpture called Norma that explains everything wrong with how we build technology today, what it actually feels like to walk through Lossy, and why she reached for Kurt Vonnegut to write through grief.


    This is the main feed cut. Gaming Club members get the extended version—including Lisa's full breakdown of the Norma sculpture, her reflections on motion capture as an ethical practice, and more of our conversation about digital death and the right to be forgotten.


    Join the Gaming Club at killscreen.com—$6/month gets you extended episodes, monthly game selections, creator interviews, and the editorial layer that makes it all make sense.


    Read more at killscreen.com.


    • (00:00) - What Lossy Means
    • (00:20) - Meet Lisa Giammori
    • (03:02) - Trauma To Tech Critique
    • (10:26) - Naming The Capture Series
    • (14:20) - Norma And The Perfect Body Myth
    • (15:59) - Wrap Up and Where Next

    Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    16 mins
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