Game Art: Tabor Robak's "Dog Park" (2015)

A former graphic designer who used to design the billboards in Times Square, Tabor Robak has elevated videogame aesthetics into a new visual language that is, at once, proudly one-dimensional and shiny-slick. Dog Park remediates the computer screen saver iconography of the early Nineties with the added logic of puzzle games (replete with pipes, levers, wires and several mechanical devices), all shown in mesmerizing 4K definition. I saw this piece in Turin, last year. Installed in a gloriously decadent 17th century palazzo, Dog Park produced a fascinating anachronism. Tabor Robak was born in 1986 in Portland, Oregon, and graduated with a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2010. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work explores the symbiotic relationship between humanity and technology using an arsenal of software-based tools traditionally used in the production of video games, special effects, and motion graphics. Recent exhibitions include Smart New World (curated by Elodie Evers and Magdalena Holzhey) at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany, 2014, and the 2013 La Biennale de Lyon (curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran) in Lyon, France.