*Control Club*
“Immersive Audio Visual Theatre / Expanded Animation”, 2025
「控制俱樂部」
CONTROL CLUB is a real-time CGI animation work staged as immersive audiovisual theatre, driven by a game engine and presented inside a circular matrix screen space. The audience enters standing, inside a world of digital landscapes where information highways and algorithmic factories sit side by side, reflecting everyday life as bright, smooth, and constantly running.
Here, control and desire coexist. Technology is not only the stage image. It acts like a quiet order that reshapes how people move, where they look, and how decisions take form. Bodies and consciousness are drawn into data flows, becoming easier to route and to shape.
”Loading...Access 3“ Exhibition in UFO Terminal Shanghai
Curator： Sen Send
The work treats the engine as both metaphor and working model. It translates movement and feedback into cues, so watching is no longer passive. Screen switching and rotation turn viewing into a bodily act, pulling the audience to turn, reorient, and step closer in search of details. Rather than a single frontal frame, CONTROL CLUB expands animation into a circular screen architecture, where switching, rhythm, and embodied reorientation act like editing.
CONTROL CLUB uses engagement as a trap. Through pacing, dense imagery, and immediate gratification, it creates a sealed yet fluid immersion that is difficult to step outside of. Viewers are pulled by shifting focal points and continually repositioned as the screen space changes. Even when movement feels self-directed, bodies, gaze, and attention are held on predetermined paths. Simulation and modeling are repurposed to echo a softer form of discipline: dazzling yet hollow spectacle, quantifiable goals, and carefully timed rewards.
Within this order, what stands out most is not a prohibition, but a gap: the absence of an exit toward autonomy. CONTROL CLUB stages that absence as its most concrete fact, asking the audience to feel, between pleasure and discomfort, how guidance and shaping can happen quietly.
Original artwork by: Murphy Nile
Programming and CGI Art by: Murphy Nile
Music and Sound Design by: Ewan Peng
Video by: ©UFO Terminal
Control: The Uptime Protocol is a machinima that extends the immersive project Control Club, unfolding within the same virtual-digital universe.
Control：The Uptime Protocol is a machinima film made as an Unreal Engine machinima, structured like a trilogy of connected levels. The engine is treated as an occupied habitat rather than a neutral tool. Prompts, cursors, HUDs, and reward loops are not decoration, but platform-like infrastructure that quietly scripts how we move, watch, and consent.
Set in a future built around uptime, “continue” has slipped from an option into a reflex. Chapter one opens on velocity and constant throughput, driving, streaming, swiping, with attention accelerated beyond refusal. Chapter two drops into competitive loops and financialized feedback. Small wins calibrate desire, while losses are delayed, softened, and returned as something replayable. Chapter three enters the system itself, where control no longer looks like an external rule. Prediction replaces prohibition, frictionless access replaces boundaries, and the body becomes an addressable endpoint.
Shot with the cool tone of a machine documentary, the film follows one repeated gesture: pressing Continue. It is the smallest action and an endlessly renewed form of consent. The work asks what freedom means inside always-on systems, where the interface does not force, but quietly keeps you moving.
