Dead Man in the Bag is a 3D model of a body bag with a body in it. Toes, thighs, stomach, chest, chin, and nose push up the black plastic. A closed zipper across the top makes sure you can’t see inside, keeping the the dead man a mystery. He’s made of 961 vertices and 4 textures.
I’ve never used him in a game, it’s not really the sort of thing I go for. I browsed his page many times on the Unity Asset Store, always wanting to buy him but never going through with it. Until I finally did the other day. You can find him in the 3D Industrial category. He’s from the 19th of January 2017. In that bag all that time. He has three five star ratings.
Now that I own him he feels like a piece of art I have filed away on my computer, or maybe he’s in the cloud. Most of all he reminds me of Gregor Schneider’s Toter Mann from 2001, another dead man in another bag, this time a black garbage bag with a pair of legs sticking out wearing pants and socks. Another mystery. Who is that guy?
The information about Schneider’s dead man says he’s made of silicone, clothing and a garbage bag. Not dead flesh and blood, then, but if you see him in a gallery there’s always that heart-skipping question: is there someone in there?
If you saw the digital Dead Man in the Bag in a game it would be a different heart-skip of certainty: there’s someone in there. Someone dead. Are you seeing him in a game right now? Or are you somewhere else?
Here in the real world, I know there’s not a real person in there, this isn’t Tron or The Matrix. But is there anything in there? Most 3D models are filled with emptiness, they don’t even have a texture on the inside. Did Maksim Bugrimov, who made this model, put a body inside the body bag to make that body shape? Or not?
Now that I own him, I can investigate. I can import him into Unity and drop him into a scene and I can float inside the bag with my ghostly camera.
Even if there’s nobody in there, Who is the Dead Man in the Bag? Whose shape is he taking?
I’m looking inside the bag right now as I write this.