Article: Robert Nashak's "Eddo Stern and the Art of Games" (2013)

A fantastic piece on Eddo Stern, one of the giants of Game Art, was published on September 10 on Artbound magazine (part of KCET). The author is Robert Nashak, who teaches in the Interactive Media & Games Division in the USC School of Cinematic Arts.Here's an excerpt:

"Much of Stern's work is about the tensions that exist around technology as a form of simulation that lies in contrast to realism, authenticity, and objectivity. In his early work, Stern was a pioneer of what became known as machinima, short form videos created from real-time footage captured from video games. Today the company Machinima.com in West Hollywood has the second most popular channel on YouTube, but when Stern was doing machinima the term had barely even been coined. In "Sheik Attack" (1999/2000), he used footage from computer games created in the mid-to-late 90s to recreate and critique his experience serving for the military in Israel where he grew up. He used military simulation games created in the U.S. -- Command and Conquer, Soldier of Fortune -- to make what amounts to both a documentary piece and a piece of appropriation art. In "Sheik Attack" he seems to critique Israeli ideology on the one hand, while exposing the games industry on the other. "A real problem for games and the games industry is that they want to capitalize on political tension and fantasies of war while never being held accountable for a specific point of view since everything is abstracted into fantastical versions of reality," he says." (Robert Nashak)

: "Eddo Stern and the Art of Games"

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti