Mike Pelletier - who created, among other things, CuteXDoom (2009) with Anita Fontaine (an impressive series of art game mods based on Unreal Tournament 3) - has produced the most amazing Kinect-based art I have seen so far. These portraits make full use of the 3D scanning capabilities of Microsoft's cam.
LINK: Mike Pelletier
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
Image credit: Handmade Studios
"Space Maestro is an interactive Kinect experience that enables players to create their own musical universe through free-form movement in physical space. By spatially moving both hands like a maestro conducting an orchestra, players fuse gas clouds in space into stars. As new stars are born, collide, and die, they trigger musical stingers that compose a unique audio-visual experience"
Created by Jake Jonghwa Kim (a game designer from Korea studying Interactive Media at USC), Jasper Lee and other USC students at USC Interactive Labs. Space Maestro will be on display at USC, Los Angeles between 5/9 to 5/16 2013.
LINK: Space Maestro
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
Swedish 8-bit master-of-disaster Goto80 is about to unleash his book Computer Rooms to unsuspecting legions of geeks. Expect "A photo collection of private computer rooms, often featuring older machines. A rarely documented aspect of digital network culture. An homage to the material computer world. Reality, not archeology." (Click Festival). Computer Rooms will be released in a few weeks. Let's face it, happiness is juicy hardcover. Look at the above image with all its phallic symbolism (Palace's Barbarian II poster is quintessentially '80s), the vintage feeling, the retromaniac aesthetics, the trashy thropy, the cassette tape, the floppy disk, the boxy CRT monitor... Oh, boy. Goto80's project reminds me of Polish artist Bownik's fascinating ethnographic series Training Halls (2007/2009) - which we covered before:
"Each of the photographs of a room interior shows two realities overlaying in a single image. The rooms fulfill the role of a training site for everyday gaming practice, as well as a normal bedroom, where details and objects betray the history of growing up in this place" (Bownik)
LINK: Goto80
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (via Click Festival)
"Known as one of the key filmmakers of the American avant-garde, Phil Solomon is known for creating extraordinarily beautiful, deeply affecting film works that are often composed out of popular, abandoned or lost pieces of celluloid. In many cases, these works employ an optical printing process to further degrade, burn and amplify certain figurative elements, almost to the point of pure abstraction. And indeed, one could easily view each of Mr Solomon's films as great painterly efforts with pronounced sensual and dimensional qualities. Yet no matter what format he works in — including his recent foray into the most quotidian moments of Grand Theft Auto and other video games (many of which are included in the exhibition) — his work still manages to convey an almost overwhelming emotional effect, often via the careful orchestration of narrative elements. As critic Manohla Dargis writes, “The wow factor of Mr. Solomon's finest films can be as difficult to convey as the deep feeling they instill in the viewer. One of the pleasures of this sort of work is how it can loosen the grip that narrative traditionally has on the medium, inspiring different ways of seeing and feeling.”" (Young Projects)
If you read Italian, here's a book for you:
An edited collection of essays on machinima featuring a variety of contributions on topics ranging from art to performance, appropriation and subversions. This is part of the ongoing Ludologica books series.
Ttitle: Machinima! Teorie. Pratiche. Dialoghi.
Edited by: Matteo Bittanti & Henry Lowood.
Publisher: Edizioni Unicopli
Book Series: Ludologica. Game Theory
Volume: 21
Pages: 288
Release Date: April 18 2013
Price: 19 Euro
Language: Italian
Contributors: Matteo Bittanti, Matteo Bonvicino, Alessandro Cavaleri, Marque Cornblatt, Frank R. Dellario, Joshua Diltz, Jun Faklenstein, Douglas Gayeton, Friedrich Kirschner, Kate Fosk, Kari Kraus, Mathias Jansson, Robert Jones, Clint Hackleman, Hugh Hancock, Tracy Harwood, Paul Marino, Mizuko Ito, Henry Lowood, Mark Methenitis, Michael Nitsche, Paolo Pedercini, Ilaria Ravarino, Dan O'Reilly Rowe, Valerio Sillari, and Eddo Stern.
Related articles:
Chris Marker e il machinima (08/08/2012, Italian)
Il machinima tra evoluzione e rivoluzione (07/12/2012, Italian)
La Game Art di Eddo Stern (11/27/2012, Italian)
GameScenes is conducting a series of interviews with artists, critics, curators, and gallery owners operating in the field of Game Art, as part of an ongoing investigation of the social history of this fascinating artworld. Our goal is to illustrate the genesis and evolution of a phenomenon that changed the way game-based art is being created, experienced, and discussed today. The interview between David Blandy and Matteo Bittanti took place via email in April of 2013.
Installation view of the exhibition at Exeter Phoenix (Image credit: David Blandy)
GameScenes: David, in your work, the appropriation and reinvention of popular culture produces a performative masquerade. Manga, hip hop, and videogames are subsumed to construct alternative identities and personae, but also to create spatio-temporal disjunctures. I am specifically interested in your ongoing dialogue with digital games and arcades in particular. For the show Odyssey organized by Exeter Phoenix in 2011, you built an entire gaming arcade in a gallery. Are you stuck in time-loop, where nostalgia becomes a form of chronological currency? Or are you creating an alternative past, where David Blandy’s fantasies, e.g. the alter egos that inhabit your previous work (Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, the White and Black Minstrel, Child of the Atom and David Blandy himself), establish a parallel reality, like those that exist in fiction?
David Blandy: Just a small pedantic note- the show was "Odysseys" at Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, presented by Lighthouse Arts. The Exeter show was at a Phoenix too, but they have no relationship to one another, bizarrely.
I guess I was interested in several facets of the phenomenon of gaming in that show. My first intention was to camouflage the works I'd made, to put them in the context of games if a similar era so that it would take a few moments to realise which games were "found" and which were unique. And then I'm interested in identity and memory, how much we construct our ideas of ourselves from the things that we relate to in everyday life, in popular culture. Do I choose Ryu because I recognize myself in him, or because I want to be like him. Is an avatar a mirror or an idol? And I'm interested in cultural memory and the recycling of culture. I fell in love with Street Fighter II at an arcade in 1992, but the most popular fighting game right now is Street fighter IV, essentially the same game. You see it in films, children's TV, fast food- all the brands keep recycling themselves.
And then there was the opportunity to turn an art space into an arcade as an assault on the senses, like a cross between Nam June Paik and the arcades that I used to frequent, but instead of some of the games you can watch my videos or play my games which try to make the search for self, for meaning, just a bit more evident than in the games themselves, trying to show people who'd never attempt to experience games in that way what it is possible to experience through them, the possibilities for self-transformation, for existential contemplation. Duels and Dualities: Battle of the Soul is a work that functions in a way as purely an idea, the fragmented self, battling its various factions, but I think it only really makes sense when it is played. You feel the inadequacy of David Blandy, his impotence, with just a light and heavy punch to call upon, trying to play as cunningly as you can, and still losing. And the terrible power of Child of the Atom, utterly broken in fighting game terms, but with that power comes an emptiness, the pointlessness of playing the game when odds are so stacked in your favour. Power over others is a curse, far too easy to abuse.
Installation view of the exhibition at Exeter Phoenix (Image credit: David Blandy)
GameScenes: Customizing cabinets and decorating coin-op machines is, in a sense, the ultimate form of appropriation art. At the same time, this practice belongs to the vernacular, rather than the artworld. By legitimizing fandom practices you are effectively changing the rules of the game and engaging in the conversation with difference audiences at once: the gamer and the art conneisseur, which hardly/rarely overlap. How was the show received? Who walked into the gallery, and why, exactly?
David Blandy: I am always drawn to forms of creativity outside conventional fine art, whether that's hip-hop, car customization, fighting game prowess or arcade stick customization. Where does fandom stop and art begin? When I organise fighting game tournaments in galleries, I'm interested in how much this intense highly ritualized activity can be seen as a form of performance art, everyone playing their roles. I see the art in the everyday, and just try to frame it by placing it in a gallery context. I'm always trying to test the line of the point where something stops being art. But of course these things can be appreciated without those layers of meaning- people came to the show just to play Alpha 2, and I'm glad of that. The guys who loaned me the extra arcade cabinets, who've now set up Heart of Gaming in London, really appreciated the customization, even though it was totally antethical to what their aim generally is, which is to restore cabinets to their factory fresh condition. The documentation of the show has lead to some quizzical responses, like, "What's that game, I don't recognize that at all", which I guess shows its sort of working.
David Blandy, Son of the Atom, 2010
GameScenes: For the Duels and Dualities arcades, you worked with Stuart Witter, who remixed a Naomi 50 board. Could you explain the dynamics of this collaboration? Are you planning more game-based hacking/modding in the future?
David Blandy, Ruined Temple, 2013 (image credit: David Blandy)
GameScenes: One of your latest projects, Background (2013) is imbued with references to game aesthetics. In this animated video piece, your 16-bit representation converses with another character (Blandy Senior, John) while walking through scenarios that have a distinct gaming style (rainforest, abandoned citiscapes, snow-covered temples etc.). This work is both intimate and heavily mediated - are you suggesting that intimacy is possible only through the filters of popular culture - gaming/comics etc? Are games, comics, and cartoons the filter through which we make sense of reality?
GameScenes: What do you find particularly appealing about video games? Is there a specific genre, series, or style that inspires you? What are your gaming epiphanies?
Text & Editing: Matteo Bittanti
All images and videos courtesy of the artist
Archive: Interviews I, Interviews II
I tragically missed the UCLA Game Arts Festival 2013 this year, but the mighty Jonathan B. at Things to Do in LA has unleashed one of his killer reports. The first episode can be found here. The second is here. Can't wait to read more. Sneak preview:
"Packed with mini-games and set in an art gallery you could try out multiple creative titles as a LA Hipster, college student or someone who reads this site and decided to visit. The idea of UCLA Game Arts Festival 2013 is simple: college students and indie devs make games and you try them out with added stories about the different people who made them. There were some extras like some machinima to watch or a rock concert to listen too, something to get you in the mood to enjoy the art of play. This is the third game in the series with a totally new team behind the mini-games , but a lot of the old staff working from the previous years behind the scenes to keep the same format." (Jonathan B., TTDILA)
LINK: UCLA Game Arts Festival
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
