Interactive art title Linger in the Shadows hits the PSN; we sit down to discuss Plastic’s recent work with lead designer Michal Staniszewski.

When can we expect to see Linger in the Shadows available?

It’s already available. It was released on 9th of October both in Europe,
US and Australia. Currently we are finishing Japanese version.

What exactly is a demoscene?

That’s a good question. Normally I was always redirecting to the web based
knowledge bases like wikipedia or pasting my friend’s explanation to demoscene.
This time I’ll make an exception and will describe it in my own words.
Demoscene is an art community that creates real time production known as
demos or intros. Demoscene consists of groups. Plastic is one of them.
The history of the Demoscene is as long as the history of home computers is.
In the beginning it was mostly a sort of rivalry between groups to show
which one was better in exploiting the limits of specific hardware (Amiga C64, Amstrad,
Spectrum etc.). Currently the the digital art aspect is more important.

What was your inspiration? Games or otherwise.

I’ve got lot of inspirations which in this case are not games. I’m glad that
a lot of people compare “LiS” to “Shadow Of Colossus” which obviously was
something special. I’ve seen couple of screens from it, and I’ll have to
get my hands on it someday. My main inspirations are some books
and movies are other demoscene productions. I think that’s fair enough :) .

Your upcoming title “Linger in Shadows” is going to use the PS3. How will this work? Do you watch it, or can you interact with it?

You can watch it and you can also interact with it.
We call the interactivity mode “Linger” instead of “Watch”.
In this mode you have to use your controller to progress from
one part of our demo to another. The other interaction involves
finding hidden greetings to other Demoscene groups. For each
greeting you can earn a Trophy.

Do you ever see yourself working on something outside of the demoscene? What would it be like?

I was thinking about couple of different jobs. One of them was writting benchmarks for
GPUs. The other was writing tools for realtime graphics editing. But I must say
that I like to bring my ideas to life. In my future work I would like to continue
my experiments based on mixing animation with interactivity or generative
content. I would like to find a new form which something between a movie and a game.

Do you feel that games these days don’t have enough expression?

They have! But let’s say the whole industry is getting completely repetitive
and no one except couple of developers is trying to invest into the new
which is not tested and safe. So we basically have bunch of new fps games
which are going to nowhere. I believe that this year has brought us 3 good games
which are somehow very expressive. I’m talking about GTA4, MGS4 and LBP.
Except those, there are mostly soulless clones!

What kind of things do you expect to accomplish with your demos?

Like I said before, I’m still looking for a new form. A form that you could experience
each time you run it. I know that there’s still a lot to be done in this direction
and it will be extremely hard to find someone willing to release it. But we will
try to do it. Except the form I like to show open ended stories where
time and place does not matter too much. Maybe that’s too much
influence from David Lynch movies.

How responsive is the rest of the demoscene towards your work with high-end technology?

I must admit that I’m very suprised how well demoscene has reacted
when we had shown “LiS” for the first time. I’m also really happy that
lot of demosceners has helped me with this long journey. It only means
that this community is more that competition. It’s a big family that
wants to be on top of digital culture again.

After Linger in the Shadows, do you have any plans for future endeavors?

Well there are a lot of plans in my head. I don’t know thou which road I’ll take
this time. I’m glad that when I was near the same crossroad two years ago I’ve
chosen the right path.

You can currently download Plastic’s “Linger in the Shadows” from the Playstation Store on your Playstation 3 for $2.99. If you’d like to read further about Plastic, Linger in the Shadows, or their other work we encourage you to visit: http://www.plastic-demo.org