gamescenes

Game. Art.

Game Art, unlimited. 

Background info: Originally, a videoludica's channel, GameScenes.

Now, a full-fledged blog (!).

Edited by Matteo Bittanti.

Would you like to play? Drop me a line. 

Game Art: Rizki R. Utama (oQ)' "Me Vs. the Argots" (2006)

"Me Vs. The Argots" (2006) is a single channel video (5:33 mins) created by Indonesian artist Ritzki R. Utama (oQ) (1982-) and exhibited at the Singapore Biennale in 2008. Here's the curator's statement:

"The game ends when the screen flashes: Insert More Coins. The game is, however, being played on the dangerous streets of Indonesia. And the artist Rizki R. Utama (oQ), weaves his work through the city, with the metropolis as backdrop and subject for his photographic and video experiments. A member of the artists’ group and alternative space Buton Kultur 21 in Bandung, Utama has created amusing and playful artworks with pointed allusions to Indonesia’s way of life. In the video projection, Me vs The Angkots (2006), Utama has produced a video that has been the fantasy of irate drivers the world over. Without pushing it to the imaginable violence that the video brings to mind, it allows us to enter that space of seeing the chaos of street traffic as a game where we drive as daredevils and receive points for doing so. Transportation in Indonesia is a jumble of cars, motorcycles, becaks (cycle rickshaws) and angkots (a minibus/taxi, which takes in several passengers). Angkots, like becaks, can be flagged at any point and stop anywhere at the passenger’s request." (Joselina Cruz, Nafas)

Game Art: Susy Oliveira's sculptures

Susy Oliveira, "Time is never wasted", 2006, c-prints and foamcore, 144 x 58 x 15 inches (Images courtesy of the artist)

Susy Oliveira's artwork is not directly inspired by videogames. Moreover, the Canadian artist does not use digital entertainment as a means of expression, as a subject or even as a pretest. However, several of her sculptures - especially "Time is Never Wasted" (above) - display obvious game-like influences. In a pataphysical play of unintended correspondences, the sleeping/dead character evokes the look and poses of corpses in first-person shooters or simplistic 3D action games. The polygon-nature of these sculpture cannot but remind the gamer in all of us of the outcome of our expeditions in virtual domains. Additionally, one is inevitably reminded of Brody Condon's seminal "650 Polygon John Carmack" (2004), "an appropriated portrait of Carmack from the game Quake III, CNC milled in polyurethane, and textured with hundreds of hand placed inket decals". Granted: Oliveira's foam sculptures have an higher-resolution, a higher polygon-count. But the connection is clear. And what if Oliveira's cadaver were a victim of Carmack's rage?

Brody Condon, "650 Polygon John Carmack" (2004), Version 2.0, CNC Milled Polyurethane, Archival Inkjet Prints 108cm x 56cm x 65cm, Edition of 1 + 1AP 650 (Image courtesy of the artist)

Related: Adri Wichert

Game Art: Adri Wichert's "Let's Play A Little Game I Like To Call "Spatula Murderer.." (2007))

(Images courtesy of the artist)

Artist Adri Wichert' creates amazing scultpures using the medium of photography. These images belong to her 2007 BFA final project at The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH. The title is "Let's Play A Little Game I Like to Call 'Spatula Murder'". Impressive.

"Adri Wichert's sculpture/photography focuses on everyday life and events, and the surfaces that surround and preoccupy both the human eye and the digitized lens of her digital camera. At last year's BFA exhibits at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Wichert installed the group of three-dimensional, close-to-life-size figures now on view at Front Room. At first glance these appear to have stepped out of a cubist painting, but in fact they were patched together from hundreds of glossy digital prints. Her basically lighthearted subjects remembering family events have a slight edge of drama" (Douglas Max Utter, Free Times, 2007)

Game Art: Jaygo Bloom's "Tao Joystick" (2006)

(Image courtesy of Jim Slips)

"Tao Joystick (2006) is an interactive audiovisual games enhancement. It works in unison with any games console and translates audible gameplay expressions into random sound and video composition with realtime manipulation.  Each system consists of a gaming environment/installation including two monitors, a laptop running the required software and a games console." (read more)

For more information about Jaygo Bloom please see gabba.tv and newfuturenow.org

Game Art: Adam Welker's "Xbox Wall" (2008)

(Images courtesy of the artist)

"My recent repetition project on the failure rate of the Xbox360. I'm citing an article saying that at one time, the failure rate was has high as 68%. So here we have 68 "RRoD" and 32 functional Xbox360s. I made the technical drawing on my computer and colored the light rings with crayon." (Adam Welker)

The Red Ring of Death as a wall instalation by Adam Welker, a 21 year old student of Art and Italian at The Ohio State University. (more artworks on DeviantArt)

Game Art: Jeremy Bailey's WarMail

"WarMail" (2008) is a live, collaborative software performance, led by British artist Jeremy Bailey, commissioned by HTTP Gallery in London, UK. Warmail uses the audience's latent song and dance potential to write and send an email to my mother while simultaneously directing a space war campaign. (part 1, part 2 available via YouTube). 

Photos here. 

Additional information. (Thank you, Corrado!)

 

Event: Aram Bartholl's WOW Workshop

Note: This event is part of the WOW: Emergent Media Phenomenon exhibition which is taking place at the Laguna Art Museum, in California [official website]

Saturday, July 11 at 1:00 PM: Aram Bartholl's WoW workshop will be held the day before his lecture. Bartholl will extend the project shown in the exhibition out onto the streets of Laguna Beach. Everyone is welcome to participate and enjoy an afternoon of art making and have the opportunity to be involved in a collaborative performance. The workshop and performance will be documented on video, and the edited version will be shown in the exhibition.

Space for this workshop is limited! Contact Jackie at jbunge@lagunaartmuseum.comor 949.494.8971 x 207 to reserve your spot in the workshop!

Sunday, July 12 at 1:00 PM: Aram Bartholl, based in Berlin, is interested in the way network data manifests into the everyday world. Bartholl investigates this in the physical space through performance, installation, and video. With World of Warcraft, Bartholl investigates this manifestation through the one of the most popular online role-playing games.

Aram Bartholl's Wow Workshop (2006)

WoW Performance 2006 Gent - Movie 4min: Vimeo oder YouTube Berlin - Movie 1min: YouTube WoW Do-It-Yourself-set: PDF download (All images courtesy of the artist) Related news

Game Art: Luca Lumaca

Luca Lumaca "yyyyyyy", print on pvc, 50x40cm, 2005 

Luca Lumaca "Game over - Insert coin", print on pvc, 50x40cm, 2005

Luca Lumaca "Democratic export", print on pvc, 50x40cm, 2005 

Born in 1978, artist and videomaker Luca Lumaca uses retro-game aesthetics to make points, not simply to reach checkpoints. Thus, Pac-Man becomes a statement about the McDonaldization of Society. The high-score menu is a symbol of US imperialism. Ditto for "Democratic Export", where "democracy" is a bomb and "export" is aggression in the reinvention (or subversion) of a classic 8-bit game. In "Game Over", Pitfall is reinvented as a cemetery for unknown, dismembered soldiers. Lumaca exhibited his fascinating artworks at the Galleria San Salvatore (Modena, Italy) in 2005 as part of a retrospective titled "Something Must Have Happened in the 80s" curated by Fabiola Naldi. Simply brilliant. 

(all images courtesy of the artist)

Game Art: Andrew Kleindolph

Andrew Kleindolph, "Mission to Nowhere" (2006), Mixed Media Scultpure (courtesy of the artist)

Artist's statement: "This is a wall hanging game that's VERY difficult to play."

Click here for the video. 

Currently on display at "Tools of the Trade: Contemporary New Media Art" (de Saisset, Santa Clara, April 17 - June 28, 2009)

Event: Pixxelpoint 2009 - once upon a time in the west

Entry form (PDF): click here; rules and conditions
Deadline: September 30th 2009, arrival date.
Website: Pixxellpoint

"Once Upon a Time in the West

We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there's no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don't look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university's warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!

Domenico Quaranta, curator"

Link: Pixxellpoint