Born in Osaka, Japan in 1980 and raised on a healthy diet of 8-bit classics like Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong, Shinji Murakami does not hide his fascination for the aesthetics of early videogames. He produced an impressive number of black & white drawings, paintings and wood sculptures and panels using icons and characters from seminal GameBoy games under the umbrella term of "Final Quest", a fictional RPG that combines elements from Final Fantasy and Dragon's Quest. His passion for retrogaming can be also seen in a series of works created between 2008 - 2009 and 2003 - 2004. He also incorporates manga (eg a Doraemon strip) and toys (eg Rubik's Cube) into his art. Lately, Murakami has been reconstructing "real" spaces with videogame elements, like in "Central Park, 2009" (above). His first solo exhibition, "Final Quest", took place in Kyoto in 2004.
"A deserted island... a lost man... memories of a fatal crash... a book written by a dying explorer. Dear Esther is a ghost story told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional gameplay, the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly triggered by moving around the environments, making every telling unique. Features a stunning, specially commissioned soundtrack. Forget the normal rules of play; if nothing seems real here, it's because it may just be all a delusion. What is the significance of the aerial - What happened on the motorway - is the island real or imagined - who is Esther and why has she chosen to summon you here? The answers are out there, on the lost beach and the tunnels under the island. Or then again, they may just not be, after all...
Dear Esther was launched in June 2008 and has been downloaded over 25,000 times. It has been selected for exhibition at E3 (Los Angeles), GameCity (Nottingham, UK) and the presitgious Ars Electronica exhibition 2008 (Linz, Austria). The music was selected for an honary mention at the 2008 international Machinima awards, and the mod made ModDB's 2008 Mod of the Year Top 100.
Dear Esther was created as part of thechineseroom's ongoing development-led research into first-person gaming, originally funded through the Arts & Humanities Research Council's speculative research grant programme." (Dan Pinchbeck)
Dan Pinchbeck'mod for Half-Life 2 is currently being updated by Robert Briscoe, a game artist who also worked on Mirror's Edge for the PS3.
Anders Visti’s PONGdrian v1.0 is a game that mixes the videogame PONG with the art of Piet Mondrian. Two players can play against each other, and the game has four levels. In every level there is a painting by Piet Mondrian in the middle. When the ball hits the painting it starts to crumble into small pieces of squares and rectangles and creating new abstract patterns based on the players performance. PONGdrian was first exhibited at the Møstings Hus, København in May 2007.
Piet Mondrian meets Pac-Man in the game Pac-Mondrian created by the group Price Budget Boys from Canada. The first version of Pac-Mondrian is from 2002 and is based on Piet Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Mondrian was inspired by the city grid of Manhattan and the Boogie Woogie music when he made the painting. You play Pac-Mondrian as an ordinary Pac-Man game, but the labyrinth is made of the grids in Mondrian’s painting.
Price Budget Boys did three more versions of Pac-Mondrian (Detroit Techno (2005), Tokyo Techno (2006) and Toronto Techno (2006)). In these games the labyrinth are made up from maps of Toronto, Tokyo, and Detroit in the style of Piet Mondrian. Another difference is that you play as Ms. Pac-Man.
“The hand-painted Pac-Mondrian Artcade cabinet reduces the sacred gallery to the funhouse arcade, and transforms worship into play by inviting the viewer to touch it. Rather than asking when a video game is good enough to be art, by declaring "Let's Play Art!!!!" Pac-Mondrian asks why can't art be as fun as a video game?” (from the homepage). (Mathias Jansson)
Jude Buffum is an illustrator and designer from Philadelphia. He graduated from the Tyler School of Art in 2001 with a BFA in Graphic Arts and Design. In the Spring of 2009 he created an installation at the Nerotitan Gallery in Berlin called “Ich Bin 8-bit installation”. With help of post-it notes in different colors Jude created pixel characters on the gallery walls.
Buffum has also created other art projects that evoke the Pixel Art style of the Eighties. One example is “Rainbow Bloodbath”, showed at the “80s pop show” in Philadelphia and “Mushroom Recession” for the exhibition “8 bit and beyond” also in Philadelphia.
In “The Super Keyboard Cat Bros” Buffum created a pixelized, 8-bit style, version of the (jn)famous YouTube playing cat and mixed it with Super Mario Bros. Chiptune artist Doctor Octoroc have contribut by making an 8-bit composition of the music in the orginal video. (Mathias Jansson)
Australian artist Antoinette J. Citizen created an art installation of an interactive Super Mario Brothers Level 1-1 Room with working question mark boxes and bricks that would make sounds from the game
Last June GameScenes wrote about Jose Olivares graduating work at Tisch School of Art, New York. “Ancient Pixel” was a merge of lo-resolution videogame graphics and Andean textile art into a multi-channel interactive video work. Mixing ancient carpets and 8-bit videogames is not a new idea in Game Art. In 2002, Polish artist Janek Simon created Carpet Invaders, a simple computer game whose board was an image of a carpet projected on he floor. Within the limits marked by the edging in the style of Eastern carpets, a spaceship controlled by the viewer shoots at elements of the oriental ornament. Carpet Invaders debuted at the collective festival Novart.pl in Cracow, Poland and was subsequently exhibited in 2004 at the 2020 Home Gallery in Bucharest, Romania. The artwork merged geometric designs of Caucasian and Armenian carpets with the low-resolution abstractness of the Space Invaders. Curator Maria Anna Potacka wrote:
“Carpet Invaders is an interactive installation. A computer game is projected onto the floor. The game’s graphic is taken from a 19th century Caucasians prayer rug. The game is a clone of an early arcade classic - Space Invaders. Ornaments found on the rug turned out to be almost identical as the original graphics of the game. The game can be played with a gamepad hanging next to the projection The sound resembles that of early consoles and eight bit computers. “ (Maria Anna Potock)
They Watch is an immersive art installation with virtual characters literally watching visitors. Several duplicates of the virtual characters – one man, one woman, and both portraits of the artists – surround and interact with visitors, who are tracked as they move about the physical space, and even projected into the virtual space. Years of research and development with game-technology have resulted in a 360° audio-visual environment, exploiting a 15-meter-wide panoramic screen and a 32-channel sound system. The subtle collaboration of the real and virtual agents and environments conflate to engender a hybrid space where the observer becomes the observed. Figuratively wearing a virtual camera causes the on-screen characters to approach and to retreat, analogously altering the soundtrack; characters that, as visitors will come to discover, are aware of their presence. They watch. Visitors’ movements activate visual cues and affect the characters’ spontaneous, unscripted behaviors, so that the installation’s visual and sonic compositions are uniquely influenced by the visit. The piece becomes a composition in movement whereby non-linear blends of real and virtual force visitors to consider perspective, agency, and the distinction between authentic and imagined as They Watch." (Empac website)
Workspace Unlimited:
Workspace Unlimited (2001) founded in Belgium by Thomas Soetens (1972) and Kora Van den Bulcke (1972) is an international collective that is at the forefront of media art, creating some of today’s most compelling virtual worlds and interactive installations. The collective’s projects engage with the territories that emerge when physical spaces intersect with the enlarged public sphere of electronic networks and immersive technologies. Workspace Unlimited is frequently invited for lectures and presentation and has been commissioned to create original large-scale works and site-specific installations by leading media art institutions and festivals such as the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), the new center for Experimental Media and Performance Art Center (New York), the V2_Institute for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón, Spain), the Society for Arts and Technology (Montreal) and Elektra. The collective’s work has been highlighted in numerous publications, including Space Time Play (Birkhauser 2007) and Interact or Die! (V2_publications 2007). In addition to the artistic practice Workspace Unlimited also initiates research projects and workshops in collaboration with an international network of researchers, art institutions and universities.
Death plays a major theme in life, art and videogames. In “Telling Death” Pippa Stalker/Tshabalala has combined this elements into a new art project. It began in 2006 when she exhibited a series of photographs at The Parking Gallery in Johannesburg. The serie was entitled Simulation and consisted of approximately 1000 photographs of "people" she had killed in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Now Pippa has taking the next step with the project:
“And now comes the next step - telling your own version of their death. I want YOU to get involved in making something interesting and public by telling your own stories - stories of how these "people" died... Be creative, be weird, be out there, as long as you're original - anything goes.” (quote from Pippa's blog).
On her blog, you can choose a picture and contribute with your own story. Maybe “Telling Death” will become the new videogame version of Edgar Lee Masters' famous poem collection Spoon River Anthology (1915), where the dead citizen from Spoon River tell their own stories (Mathias Jansson).
It has been called the world’s longest art exhibition. Stockholm subway was built in the fifties and in every one of the 91 stations you can find some form of art installations. The Swedish artist Lars Arrhenius made his contribution in 2008 with a new artwork at Thorildsplan station. “Playtime” is inspired by early arcade games from the seventies and eighties. Instead of pixels Arrhenius has used Italian clinker on the concrete walls. On a light blue background you will find familiar characters and symbols from classic videogames as Pac-Man, Super Mario and Space Invaders. Arrhenius got the inspiration to the artwork from the stations architecture which consist of bridges, platforms and elevators elements you can find in videogames as for an example Donkey Kong and Super Mario. (Matias Jansson).
Recent Comments