Game Art: Gavin Baily, Tom Corby and Jonathan Mackenzie's "gameboy_ultraF_uk" (1997-1999)

gameboy_ultraF_uk was created by Baily, Corby and Mackenzie who have been working together for over 10 years, through an art practice that explores the intersections of complex systems, technology and information.

"The work consists of a Free Software Game Boy emulator whose rendering system has been (pathologically) rewritten to degenerate over time. Game entities mutate into background and interface elements, or appear as fragments of the games binary code. Text begins to emerge as a jumble of characters, sprites and binary data. Scanline bytes are miscopied, transformed and duplicated. Memory is blitted into sections of the screen, as the inside of the game seeps to the outside. Variations in the rendering behaviour are triggered by user interactions implicit in the game play and are manipulated by a Cellular Automata 'metabolism' giving rise to inter-related rendering symptoms. The emulator displays an unpredictable agency that injects a subjectifying process into the rendering of the software instructions it executes." (Gavin Baily, Tom Corby and Jonathan Mackenzie, 1997-1999)

Link: Baily, Corby and Mackenzie

Submitted by Mathias Jansson