Art Game: Christina "Phazero" Curlee's Art Games
Artist and game developer Christina Curlee is creating a series of art games based on philosophical concepts, psychological ideas, and artistic theory. Nicknamed "Phazero", Christine began her career as an installation artist, setting up complex immersive scenes and environments, but like several other young artists, became more and more interested in digital technology and gaming.
Above is a video of Maslow (2016), an art game developed by Curlee in two weeks for a Game Jam. Maslow is "an existentialist game about the absurdity of life". Abraham Maslow was a celebrated psychologist who developed the so-called hierarchy of needs informing human behavior. Proposed by Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in Psychological Review, it explains the drivers and trigger underneath most human actions. Curlee is still developing the game. A work-in-progress version debuted last in February 2016. More information about the project can be
found here.Below is Symposium, a game-based adaptation of Plato's famous dialogue,
Symposium, which centers on the story of Eros. The game can be downloaded here. As she explains on her blog,"Symposium is an art game based off of Plato’s Symposium and Diotima’s account of Love as a demon and intermediary between humans and the gods. Symposium in its natural environment is a 4 channel interactive piece composed of 3 videos and a game-like interactive component. The 3 videos are respectively representative of the ID, Ego, and Superego. This move is a homologizing of the far past, plato’s era, the near effects of Freudian theory on current critical theory, and the language of video games namely the “game map”. The videos are as maps are in a video game, but instead of telling you where to go they instead explain where you are in terms of being."is interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring relationships and building bridges between the virtual (game), external and internal worlds. She is currently researching Art games, digital fine arts, Art and tech, Art theory and interdisciplinary Art game design at University of Texas at Austin. In November 2015, she read the
Futurists' Manifesto (1909) while playing/streaming Grand Theft Auto V.LINK: Christina Curlee