HOUDINI Magazine sat down with OXY, the 22-year-old French artist cooking pure cold crack in the Decker engine. The interview pairs with an exclusive HOUDINI original, "Is It Fentanyl?" — a pharmacological roulette of static, decay, and brutalist intimacy that demands you navigate the collapse.
Is It Fentanyl? by OXY
A Decker original by OXY — made exclusively for HOUDINI.
Spin the wheel. Buy the dope. Try to survive. Welcome to the pharmacological Russian roulette of late-stage empire.
OXY's work isn't safe. It's not market-tested. It's not even sane. It's avant-garde, and cracked cold — the kind of thing no one else can make, should make, or would survive making.
Best experienced on desktop. Click here to open the piece.
An interview with OXY
> The gallery is not a gallery. There are no white walls. No soft cheese cubes. No white wine condensation rings left behind on disposable paper napkins. This isn't Soho. It's a back room wall at 3:14 a.m. under fluorescent hum of a burnt out lightbulb in a run down trap house, chemical smell clinging to sheetrock. Welcome to HOUDINI, where the art isn't hung—it's embedded in the only space we can afford, the digital one, like a sigil scratched into the monitor's glass with a boxcutter. We live in the age of bombs, there's nothing minimalistic about a bomb. > > This is STACK ONE of DOUBLE DECKER // A Fire Side with OXY
I was at a small gallery outside of Austin with a friend, talking about this feeling in 2020s art—this rough, haunted texture in contemporary underground work. She called it "cold crack." That term stuck with me. There's something about the grain, the intentional noise, the way the image feels eroded. Like you're digging through sandstone, uncovering fossilized dreams. There's elements of collage, yet devolved.
Cold crack, like Musique concrète, thrives noise as disruption. It's the visual equivalent of found sounds, these are images torn apart, reassembled, and textured to the point of collapse. Like photographing ruins—but the ruins are virtual. And cold crack isn't limited to digital artists. It includes poets, painters, graffiti writers, performance artists—anyone pulling sigils from the outside static. Some artists master composition. Others master collapse, cold crack, like any chemical, is cooked with a bit of both.
Decker itself is the marble for the sculptures. its very limitations fostering a kind of brutalist intimacy, a scarcity that sharpens the edges of the art. On the surface, it mimics HyperCard, Apple's 90s pre-internet experiment in hyperlinking, but that comparison is spectral. The two share no codeba, no compatibility. What they share is something deeper: an ethos of stack-based storytelling and a quiet revolt against the polished infinite scroll.
Recommended listening: Matière Arrachée by Tourette.
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WHO ARE YOU, WHERE ARE YOU FROM, AND HOW DID YOU START MAKING WORK IN DECKER?
OXY: I'm OXY, from Annecy, France.
I started using Decker during my final year of Game Design. I hated working with my team on our end-of-year project, and I needed a small side project to decompress. While browsing for alternative game engines on itch.io, I came across Decker. Although Decker is an homage to HyperCard games, its black-and-white 1-bit aesthetic reminded me at the time of one of my favorite games, Critters for Sale. My first Decker game, Collage Advertisement, ended up being quite similar to it, but with more personal references.
The game did well and became the first Decker game to be featured in the Indiepocalypse compilation. Earning a bit of money from Collage Advertisement and getting some attention on my work motivated me to keep going.
WHY DECKER? WHAT ABOUT ITS CONSTRAINTS MAKES IT THE RIGHT WEAPON FOR YOUR WORK?
OXY: The fact that we have a greater artistic awareness than what existed in the '80s and '90s allows us to play with the constraints of a tool as simple as Decker, and to bring ideas that are very different from the HyperCard games of that era.
The game that best expresses this idea is Quatre d'Épée, a project of mine inspired by 3D games like L.S.D and 0°N 0°W, which invites players to explore a series of increasingly abstract cards. The game was very well received, and I'm extremely proud to say that it even inspired other artists to create new titles on Decker—like MAZEION by HSP99 and Champ Contrechamp by Homerduc.
I'm also passionate about the concept of choice in video games. Some of my favorite titles explore this, like How Fish Is Made, Kentucky Route Zero, Critters For Sale, and for the blockbusters, Fallout New Vegas. Decker allows for easy play with this gameplay element, similar to something like Twine, for example.
gallbladder | propaganda | amrisforamour | episode13 berlin
YOUR DECKS FEEL LIKE THEY'RE STITCHED FROM STATIC, MEMORY, AND DECAY—WHAT ARE YOU REALLY LAYERING IN THERE?
OXY: I think it's partly due to my hyperactivity, curiosity, and certain obsessions. There's never a fixed logic, everything can be turned upside down with a flick of the hand. This allows me to express my ideas and desires without worrying about an established form, a storyline, or a gameplay loop... I do what I want.
As for the feelings you mentioned, I think the disparate nature of my work is the main cause.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO MAKE UNDERGROUND ART RIGHT NOW, WHEN EVERYTHING'S EITHER CONTENT OR SOUL-DRAINED BY THE ALGORITHM?
OXY: I don't think everything on the mainstream scene should be discarded, and certainly not for video games. We get a lot of great AAA games every year. However, making underground games, in my opinion, carries a deeper artistic and cultural interest. Realizing that video games are a valid artistic medium, for me, is linked to underground video games. It's also a relative concept; for most players, Killer 7, Cruelty Squad, or Bully are very underground. Just wait until they discover the games from Blueberry Soft, Danielle Bunten Berry, or Jonathan Coryn!
WHAT TOOLS, MEDIA, OR INFLUENCES DO YOU KEEP COMING BACK TO?
OXY: I'm young, which means I'm lucky enough to have a constantly renewing pool of inspirations. A lot of my ideas come from the most recent musicians, filmmakers, and game creators who've left a strong impression on me. Some ideas can just emerge on their own, but they inevitably reflect who I am—my references, my culture...
If I had to name a few, I'm very influenced by collage—whether it's in film, like the excellent It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve – Masao Adachi by Philippe Grandrieux, which I saw recently; in music, like Leroy's Dariacore trilogy; or directly in games, with the work of Hatimb00 and GURN GROUP.
Among the artists I feel like referencing, you'll find—somewhat haphazardly—Christ Dillinger, Lingua Ignota, Ethel Cain, Famille Nombreuse, MC Jean Gab1, Santos Santana, Benoît Magimel, Leos Carax, Dreyer, Varda, Frédérick Maheux...
My tools are Unity, Decker, Photoshop, and Audacity—that's it (for now).
HOW MUCH OF WHAT YOU MAKE IS ABOUT CONTROL, AND HOW MUCH IS ABOUT LETTING IT ROT?
OXY: I don't think any of my work is about control—almost everything is improvised. The goal is often to provoke, to surprise, to raise questions. Eliciting a reaction is something I relieve, and I hope that comes through in my work.
WHAT'S MISSING FROM THE SCENE RIGHT NOW?
OXY: More provocative content, and a broader range of political perspectives, I'd say. I believe supporting the emergence of ideas that differ from what we currently have will help push the medium toward greater intellectual depth.
> More provocative content, and a broader range of political perspectives, I'd say.
DO YOU THINK PEOPLE UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE DOING, OR ARE THEY JUST REACTING TO THE SURFACE DAMAGE?
OXY: I don't think there's anything to understand—but rather something to feel. A large part of cinema, music, video games, painting, and art in general is built on that, and that's what I try to convey in my games. Judging by the reactions I get, my player base seems to understand that, and that makes me very happy!
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