Game Art: foci + loci's Ways of Sitting (in progress)
foci + loci's new project (in progress) is titled Ways Of Sitting and refers to interactive, virtual objects, modeled after Marcel Duchamp's readymades.
As Tamara and Chris explain,
The conceptual import of these art historical objects sitting in a gallery already deny any affordance usually associated with them, while re-contextualizing them in a responsive numerical space allows a new set of affordances to emerge. As a default state, these objects will 'flock' until the user figures out their own way of interacting with them. This is the first iteration of flocking behavior of the bottle rack object. Using audiovisual reactive objects, this video also demonstrates particle synthesis involving light, audio, microsound and water. These objects interact with each other and their environment, while a 'force chip' propels the objects into space adding chaos to order. The increasing complexity of these interactions reveals peculiarities in the underlying code, preventing us from predicting every response of this system. This is machine agency manifesting in patterns outside of the objects' programming (i.e. covalent bonding and looping behavior). For the symposium, we plan to extend this agency (i.e. covalent bonding) to the readymades, such as the bottle racks seen previously. In thinking of affordances as critical content beyond functionality, we aim to emphasize the validity of all player responses to objects demonstrating emergent behavior.