Event: Phil Solomon's screening of "Empire" (October 8 2012, New York)
One of the most exciting Game Art events of the Fall: Phil Solomon's screening of Empire (2008-2012) at the New York Film Festival in the Free Views from the Avant-Garde section. Solomon will be on the scene to present and discuss his work.
"A re-make of Andy Warhol’s Empire from high atop the Manhattan Island of Grand Theft Auto IV (“Liberty City”), far from the madding crowd of thieves, cops, prostitutes and murderers down below. I hijacked a copter, leaped onto the rooftop of an adjacent building, spawned a scooter out of the thin air and then gingerly drove it to the very edge of the precipice in order to roughly approximate that familiar view from July 25-26, 1964. And then I put the controller aside and did exactly nothing for 24 hours (48 minutes in our world). A day of rest and bordered inaction." (Phil Solomon)
Additional details (e.g. location and time) are available here. And here's Chris Stults illuminating review from 2008. Here's an excerpt:
"One key difference between Solomon’s installation and other Empire protégésis that, while the work is as conceptually rigorous as the others, it’s actually a joy to watch. No work that has come after Warhol’s has been able to maintain that balance of existing somewhere between a film, a painting, and a photograph. And Solomon wisely skirts the purely formalist approach that Warhol exhausted with his thrillingly exhaustive film. (Solomon also inverts the attenuated passing of time in Warhol’s film.) “EMPIRE” is not to be mistaken for a minimalist work. While it leaves the “action” of GTA far below, there are a dazzling number of events that occur continually that create a sensation somewhere between meditation and entertainment. " (Chris Stults, 2008)LINK:
And here's an excertp from a more recent - but equally brilliant - essay written by Nick Hamlyn:
"To deploy an over used and much-adapted term, the scene could be said to evoke the “industrial-sublime”, although this is tinged with an urbanite nostalgia for nature, evoked by the big, dramatic sky, to which we are constantly drawn by the left to right movement of passenger jets, which disappear behind the central building, never to reappear. This is one example of the numerous anomalies that animate the scene, and of which we only become aware because we are watching a game’s setting, that is, experiencing it in a way probably not anticipated or intended by its creators. This is perhaps the most interesting thing about Empire: it gets us thinking about what watching is in a variety of ways. The game’s creators have built a plausible-enough world within which the action can take place. To this extent they follow a movie-making ethos, in that there’s no point in lavishing time and money on details that no one is going to notice, as their attention will be elsewhere. The landscape is riddled with looping events, the plane-passings being the most conspicuous, because they are silhouetted against the sky, clear of any visual clutter that would render them less obvious." (Nick Hamlyn)
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti