Two things of interest to William Burroughs aficionados are looking for funding this month. The Burroughs Century is an event being planned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Burroughs birth next year in Bloomington, Indiana:
We are calling this event the Burroughs Century, but we are not looking backward; rather, we believe that the Burroughs Century is ongoing, that we are in the midst of it, and we intend to stage an event that indicates the full range of that continuing influence, including a film series, art and literature exhibits, speakers and panels, musical performances, and more.
There’s more detail at Indiegogo. The organiser of the event, Charles Cannon, has expressed an interest in showing some of the Wild Boys portfolio which I keep tinkering with. Having a deadline to work towards may compel me to finish some of those pieces.
I’ve already mentioned Alex Harvey’s computer game-in-progress, Tangiers, but the game now has a Kickstarter fund which Harvey and co. are hoping will push their work to completion. The Burroughs influence here is more oblique since this is an original creation but it’s still a promising development in a medium with a tendency to rely on Hollywood and genre stereotypes for its scenarios:
You play an outsider to the world, an entity with a singular, enigmatic goal – to find and dispose of five other beings. Your arrival here has fractured the world; the city that these other beings resided in is now broken into shards across a broken, bleak landscape.
You must infiltrate these cities, searching to discover your marks – investigating both precisely who, and where. Keeping to the shadows is to be encouraged – reality here is a fragile place. Your interactions with the world cause it to fall apart. In homage to Burrough’s cut-up technique, the world collapses and rebuilds itself the more you interact with it – future areas rebuilt with the fragments and personality of places you mistreated. From this every play-through will, subtly or drastically, be unique to you.
Find out more at the game’s Kickstarter page.
