GUT REACTION, interactive media, 2026
GUT REACTION, interactive media, 2026
Unzip and keep files together. Play the executable file.
If your OS flags the file as suspicious, go ahead and tell it to run anyway.
GUT REACTION is an interactive digital space and a poem generator structured as a single-player game, staged inside a living digestive tract. The space is filled with floating cardboard masks depicting political and cultural figures. The player, armed with a stretchy worm-like arm, is tasked with chasing and eliminating the masks in order to restore balance in the system. As the masks are eliminated, the body reacts: veins transform, particles and sound intensify and the remaining masks accelerate, making the chase increasingly harder. When the 30th mask is purged, their collected words are recomposed as a short poem, shaped by the player’s route and order of capture. To deepen the game's lore and provide some instruction and bonuses, the game space features 3 "bowel oracles" inspired by John Waters, Marina Abramovic and Slavoj Žižek, who offer advice, jokes and special speed bonuses.
GUT REACTION uses the familiar mechanics of first-person action games to create an immersive, digestive allegory of culture wars and media saturation. The public face functions as both armor and lure: the antagonists are paper masks that shield them, while also amplifying their voices. Capturing a mask does not erase its rhetoric, but once enough are captured, the system can process and transform it into poetry. Each playthrough produces a different rhythm of encounters, and thus a different text. The purge depends on escalating pursuit. By making completion depend on the handling of antagonistic speech, rather than the elimination of the antagonists, this game suggests strategies for what bodies or communities can do with discourse it cannot ignore: absorb, quote, metabolize, parody, or excrete. Its grotesque comedy, tactile pursuit, reactive environment, and generated poems bring interactive digital storytelling to the level of embodied action.
The work is currently a functional playable prototype, in active polish. An exhibition-ready Windows build and complete documentation package will be prepared before the conference.
THEME
For ICIDS 2026, Soft Armour and Mutable Bodies, with an undercurrent of Beautiful Endurance. The antagonists literally wear public masks, while the player’s appendix-interface and a reactive intestinal ecology adapt through pursuit, capture, and disposal; the body survives not by quietly absorbing harm, but by metabolizing weaponized rhetoric into a player-authored poem.
TECHNICAL RIDER / INSTALLATION NOTES
GUT REACTION is a self-contained, offline, interactive digital space made in Godot 4. It can be presented on a monitor, or a projector. The details of the installation are flexible.
For an immersive experience, the ideal installation is a large projection in a room with dim lighting, with the game running on a Windows 10/11 computer connected to the projector, a pair of speakers and an Xbox-compatible controller, accessible from a comfortable seat for the player. If the venue requires, the installation can scale down to a laptop-and-headphones station on a table; if an Xbox-compatible gamepad is not available, the game can also be played with keyboard & mouse.
The game returns to the title screen after completion and is suitable for self-paced individual sessions. Playthrough duration can be as short as a few minutes and as long as the player desires.
ARTIST BIO
Zé Kielwagen is a Brazilian artist based in the United States and an Assistant Professor of Art at Oberlin College. Working across media, he develops research-based projects that bring together politics, spirituality and play. His practice often uses humor, ritual, worldbuilding and collective action to turn institutions, beliefs, and social structures into whimsical systems that others can enter, play with, question and transform. Kielwagen is the founder and organizer of Museu da Umbanda, an artist-led museum focused on the intersections of art, religion, and magic, and the editor of CCCPUSA, an independent magazine linking spirituality, U.S. folk culture and Marxist studies. His work has been presented at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Một Bảo Tàng Queer in Hanoi, Vietnam, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Open Source Gallery in New York, and others.
CREDITS AND RIGHTS
Concept, creative direction, writing, game design, and production by Zé Kielwagen. Built with open-source Godot Engine, open-source Blender for digital 3D modeling, and OpenAI/Codex for coding.
AI DISCLOSURE
AI was used throughout the development of the game for: coding and synthetic voice generation. The artist revised and adjusted all outputs and remains responsible for all final creative and technical decisions.