Hugo Montembeault has just started a new postdoctoral game design research-creation project at the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) laboratory of Concordia University, Canada, funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FRQSC). Montembeault's project is entitled Bug Hunter. Mapping Glitches Trajectories in Game Design Space: From the Poetical to the Political (2020-2022). His goal is to study the aesthetic and rhetorical potential of video game glitches. Montembeault has recently launched a dedicated website to document, share, and discuss his research-creation activities. There, you’ll find his art manifesto, the game design document, a design journal in the form of a blog, and an archive of glitches captured in the wild, which is accompanied by several social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and GitHub. Here's an excerpt from the manifesto:
Bug Hunter qualifies itself as a media-archaeological videoludic experimentation devoted to gaming glitches. The object of study is understood as neglected and repressed ontological parts of the video game art form. The goal is to proceed to the gamification of a materialist and historiographical investigation of the poetic and politic of glitches. In that context, glitchy aesthetic, mechanics, and gameplay become the engines that drive players to playfully engage with this research-creation through their senses, body, and intellect.
