GAME ART: NICK CROCKETT'S FIRE UNDERGROUND (2019)
FIRE UNDERGROUND presents a speculative fantasy of the story of coal, tracing a pan-historical route from the first vertebrate amniotes to crawl onto land in the Carboniferous, through the coal mines and hollows of a fictionalized 1920s Appalachia, to the Museum at the End of History. The project is built in a game engine and combines physical crafts captured with photogrammetry with game-like logic and real-time physics simulation. It features original music by Sarah Louise Henson, Rime, courtesy Thrill Jockey Records. This project was funded in part by a FRFAF grant from the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.
Nick Crockett was born in a former gold mining town in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, and make experimental games and animation. Features include cursed treasures, fake armor, software that relies on people behind curtains, and hardware that runs on masking tape and hope. Nick holds a BA in Design | Media Art from the University of California Los Angeles and recently completed an MFA at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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