telexDope: Tetsuya Mizuguchi

Take your first look through our constellation interface’s newest plugin: telexDope.

TelexDope is a highly sensitive tool for observing far-out, zoomed-in patches of xD SPACE. We’ll point it at another part of xD SPACE periodically, and at times we’ll revisit familiar parts to see what’s new.

Keep an eye on these for our most potent selection of anything from contemporary history to the ancient past that interlocks with our goal of connecting to technological systems and building infrastructure for sensemaking.

To test the machinery, we’ve pointed telexDope at Tetsuya Mizuguchi, an interactive media designer famous for the hypnotic, cybernetic rail shooter Rez from 2001 where sound and light meld into one continuous digital dreamscape, a process Mizuguchi refers to as “digital synesthesia.” This orchestration of various sensory inputs into a totalizing, boundary-free experience founded his interest in designing interactive digital media.

One of his first and most enlightening encounters with the possibilities of nascent digital media experiences was with a massive, mechanized arcade cabinet featuring a 360-degree gyroscope rotation mechanism that physically inverted the player in response to their in-game actions: the SEGA R360 in 1990. After years designing arcade games, he made the music video game Space Channel 5 in 1999 on Dreamcast. This was the first in a series of console video games embodying his drive to induce digital synesthesia in users, followed by Rez in 2001, and a series of games since then, including Lumines, Child of Eden, and Tetris Effect.

And yes, that is Michael Jackson starring as Space Michael.