Bad Milk

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact:
Mick Skolnick 718-340-8201 mick@dreamingmedia.com
Ted Skolnick 718-729-3923 ted@dreamingmedia.com
http://dreamingmedia.com    ;

BAD MILK

Long Island City, New York October 3, 2000-
Don't drink it, play it. "Bad Milk" is your passage into the Skolnick
brothers' purgatory of unsettling images and confounding puzzles. To begin
this interactive video art game, take a virtual sip of coffee tainted with
spoiled milk and slip into a dark abyss populated by haunting characters.
That dismembered bald head? It's the unwitting gamester's only escape to a
new life. Along the way, meet a disembodied voice, a drowning man, and
chronic smokers who provide hints to beat mystifying challenges.

Bad Milk is the first production of DREAMING MEDIA LLC, a company formed by
Mick and Ted Skolnick in November 1999 to promote their vision of a new kind
of entertainment. To be released in CD rom October 12, 2000, the game
loosely falls into the "wander and wonder" genre popularized by Myst. It's
also an exhibit of interactive, avante guarde video art.

"We wanted to create video installation art but couldn't afford loft space
in New York City. So instead we built virtual installations and worked out
of our apartments in Queens," says Ted, a software veteran who gave up his
job at a major financial website to pursue his dream.

The game involves solving a series of interactive video puzzles, sometimes
in complete darkness with only hearing and virtual touch as guides, and at
other times by pushing, pulling and exploring pieces of the video art until
another part of the puzzle is solved. The game player controls the
revolutions of the bald head, as well as its facial hair growth; and uses
innovative technology to manipulate the video and, for example, move a live
person as if that person were a
puppet. It's a difficult passage, but the prize makes it all worthwhile:
virtual rebirth, peering into to the eyes of two obstetricians that welcome
the newborn player back into the world.

"We weren't sure what the reward for solving bad milk should be," says Mick,
a graduate of Yale's MFA program who has earned his keep in recent years
creating realities as distorted as Bad Milk'sóbut not as interestingóby
retouching fashion photos. "So we thought if the piece starts with death,
the best gift we could give would be life with unconditional love, at least
for the first few minutes. Hence the birth sequence as a finale."

Bill Violas' video art installations inspired Bad Milk, as did Monty Python,
and Coney Island's haunted house. The game's square of video screens
floating in blackness hearkens to Violas, while the journey from one bizarre
scene to the next was shaped in part by Mick's memories of rundown amusement
parks.

"We wanted to have the viewer move from room to room through darkness,
making connections between the pieces and deciphering the game's clues. We
were also thinking a lot of about those fun houses in places like Coney
Island. Especially the kind where you rode in a rickety rollercoaster car
and each room had a different exhibit, a lot like a museum but always creepy
and macabre," Mick says. He adds that Ernie Kovack's experiments with video
and TV are echoed in Bad Milk's gags where the game player's can manipulate
video on the computer.

And so far, response to the game has been good. "I found Bad Milk to be
artfully done and entertaining. The techniques you used in the game were
unique and extremely fun. I thought Bad Milk was a great game," beta tester
Pat Schroeder told Mick and Ted.

If you don't just believe Pat, the CD rom will be available for purchase
online at dreamingmedia.com.
Advance copies are available for members of the press.
Mick and Ted can be reached at (718) 340-8201 and (718) 729-3923 or email at
mick@dreaingmedia.com and ted@dreamingmedia.com, respectively.
Dreamingmedia's
web site is http://www.dreamingmedia.com