Game Art: Arno Coenen's "Virtual Fairytale” (2003)
Output: 62.500 Materialized Pixels (2000)
Virtual Fairytale (2003)
Virtual Fairytale 2.0 (2007)
[All images courtesy of the artist]
If you visited the exhibition Alien Intelligence (2000), right at the entrance to the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, you could literally walk right over Lara Croft. The Dutch artist Arno Coenen (1972) created a huge mosaic on the floor, 5.25x5.25 meters with help of 62,500 pieces, and motif from a low-resolution Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, " a madonna from the techno age.". Since then Coenen has created mosaics featuring videogame characters and aesthetics in public spaces. In 2003, he turned the walls in a tunnel, leading to a primary school in Amsterdam, into a “Virtual Fairytale” using characters and themes from Space Invaders to Pokemon. In 2007 updated his previous work with version 2.0 of “Virtual Fairytale” for a school square in Utrecht, Holland. The mosaic was made of concrete street tiles in 16 different colours and measured 68x19 meters. Coenen is one of many contemporary artists using mosaics to build pictures with pixel-feeling, mixing the old handicraft of mosaic with the digital iconography of videogames. (Mathias Jansson)