GAME ART: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S MAPS (2019)
A new machinima work by Eddie Lohmeyer:
Maps is an experimental machinima film that uses composited gamespaces to generate seductive forms of abstraction. Created through appropriated game footage of map walkthroughs, the film produces colorful swirling and gyrating game fragments by blending the dynamic motion of avatars as they traverse giant gameworlds. Here, color mixing each game overlaid upon the other creates vibrant rhythms of pixels that continuously explode and swallow themselves. These psychedelic sequences are accompanied by a warped recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4, F Minor, Op.36 resulting in a visual symphony; a synesthesia of fractured spaces with the changing pitches and echoes of orchestral movements. Following in the traditions of avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Tony Conrad, Maps explores the material contours of game engines and the 3D environments they render by transforming familiar gamespaces into a kaleidoscope of ever-changing polygons. (Eddie Lohmeyer)
Lohmeyer’s work explores the intersections among body and technology, particularly in how interactivity can open participants to novel sensory and perceptual experiences. Through installation, sculpture, and video these media interventions prompt a politics of the body that reconsider our habitual encounters with technologies through new avenues of play and engaging with unfamiliar and uncanny interfaces. These works upend and play with the media we have grown up around and have a nostalgic affinity for, often through intentionally deconstructive approaches: glitch, physical modifications to hardware, and assemblage. The bizarre and playful encounters with these strange media unveil the normal attitudes and perceptions of technologies that have become a mundane extension of our bodies, while also questioning the knowledge frameworks through which we perceive and sense the world via media artifacts. Lohmeyer is also an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Nicholson School of Communication and Media at the University of Central Florida.