Corpus Simsi

Julien Loquet is a 25 year-old electronica genius who also records as gel: and Dorine_Muraille. According to Kelkoo Loquet is an 'experimental Frenchman'. I love the idea that frenchmen can be divided into the typical and the prototypical. I imagine Loquet cooped up in a lab with electrodes clipped to his temples, a project for 'the frenchman of the future'. According to Sonomu the music Loquet makes is ketamine laptop folk. Here's some of his music:

Aux chiens ecrases
quand je le fais je suis une fille
meme pas pret
j'ai pas lu bataille mais j'ai gagne la guerre
narcissisme & paranoia
la capacite d'accueil des cedres



Loquet's titles are pretty good. Here are some, translated into English:

To run-over dogs
When I do it I'm a girl
I haven't read Bataille but I've won the war
The welcoming capacity of cedars
She will love him until the day a victim of septicemia contracted during secret practises...
From the top of a mound of dung Elise has vertigo when she thinks of your pretty little ass



The literary talent evidenced by these titles might be what drew Chloe Delaume to Loquet. Delaume is one of France's most talked-about new writers. If Loquet is laptoppist as poet, Delaume, who sings on the Dorine_Muraille album Mani, is author as software engineer. Since June 2002 she's been working on a project called Corpus Simsi.

'Video games,' Delaume writes, explaining the Corpus Simsi project, 'because of their populist and youthful image, are rarely seen for what they are: generators of fictions as well as singular technical tools. The Corpus Simsi project has developed in three phases. The starting point is a variation on the notion of autofiction. Chloe Delaume, a fictional character somewhat worse than any other, has refused to be incarnated in a book. In a previous novel, 'The Vanity of Sleepwalkers', she leaves the living quarters she shares with her fellow creations, the Sleepwalkery, to take possession of a human body, which she sets about taking over. Having pushed the pirated body to the point of implosion and being expelled from it, she finds herself nowhere, which isn't very useful. So she decides to take up residence in the game The Sims, knowing that this new habitation is particularly well adapted to her needs as a homeless fictional character. Using as avatar her old human body, she becomes a little character in a formatted video game, following rules different from those that apply in the real world. Faced with these rules, fiction doesn't seem so powerful any more. Pre-programmed actions, decrees, bugs and hiccups, loops and circles: for every similarity with the real world, there's a glitch that might swallow her up.'



Like software, Corpus Simsi is developing through versions, being extended and debugged. The beta version, in June 2002, was a collaboration with Loquet. Version 1.0 involved Foetus (Jim Thirlwell). 1.1 was a short story in an anthology. 1.2 was editorship of a magazine called Epok. Versions 1.3 and 1.4 were concerts at the Pulp in Paris featuring Dorine_Muraille and Jerome Schmidt. (Toog was also on the bill that night. Dorine_Muraille cut his set short because the sound was too shitty.) Versions 1.5 and 1.6 were also concerts featuring Loquet. Delaume's Sims avatar is keeping a blog, which you can read here. The culmination of all this, due to be published later this year, is the novel Corpus Simsi. The book will replace the skin and all the game's characters and sets, because in the meantime the game The Sims has itself evolved from Version 1 to Version 2, and they're incompatible. Delaume's character is a Sims 1 avatar.

Just as Loquet's Maxed-up MSP computer sounds contain the voices of dead folk singers, Delaume's books contain in their aspic characters from the video games of yesteryear. They prompt a startling thought. Maybe a time will come when all our computer software is unplayable, all our formats incompatible, all our machines useless. When that day comes, maybe the only remaining memory of the virtual worlds we created in the digital age will be encoded in books. The book, the original portable simulated world, might have a strange, phoenix-like destiny: to be electronic simulation's only enduring body. SimWorld's parent... and its child.