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Music can become grounded, plucked out of the air and tied to a place. It can be as recognisable as a landmark, and it can dredge up memory and inspire nostalgia just as easily as a photo. Music can permeate a space, until the sight of it conjures up the tune just as clearly as if it was being played right next to your ear. Fract OSC has a sense of place that is mired in its music, but it's gone a step further and completely erased the lines separating the two."I always wanted it to be pretty big in terms of the scale and size of the space." Richard E Flanagan has been making Fract OSC since Fract, the original prototype, won the Student IGF prize in 2011. What was then a sprawling, unfocused expanse of fractured geometry and primary colours has become something altogether more beautiful and evocative. There's more than a little Tron in Fract's visual heritage, filled as it is with giant beams of light lancing the stratosphere, huge monoliths ringed with neon fluorescence and a consistent line of geometry in every piece of architecture.
It's steeped in grandeur, every structure tightly packed to the next so that they loom over you. Or, conversely, they're fixed to the horizon, visible through cave entrances or the openings in the dilapidated buildings that house Fract's puzzles. Everything seems constructed with the sole purpose of making you feel more than a little overwhelmed. Each room and puzzle plugged into a wider picture to act as cogs in some grand machine.
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