- Related event: Mikael Vesavuori's "It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Blows Their Brains Out", an exhibition taking place in gallery Rotor2 at Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg between January 17th-21st. Open hours 3 pm – 8 pm. Finissage is on Saturday 21st of January at 7 pm.
"I like GAMERZ because it's eclectic, because it makes me discover plenty of artists i had never heard about before but also because it reminds me that festivals should be left more often in the hands of artists. They take risk, follow their whim, trust other artists barely out of the academy, and care little about sticking to genres and formulas." (Regine Debatty)
"In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved. But art lawyers say that legal challenges are now coming at a faster pace, perhaps in part because the art market has become a much bigger business and because of the extent of the borrowing ethos." (Randy Kennedy)
In the related illustration collage, several Cory Arcangel's artworks are mentioned as "borderline" cases, including “Japanese Driving Game,” 2004, “Nipod v.2,” 2004, and “Beat theChamp,” 2011.
"Geraud Soulhiol's extraordinary drawings. His Arena series portrays existing football stadium that are not only decaying and crumbling but have also been colonized by more traditional icons of architectures such as cathedrals, local monuments, skyscrapers designed by starchitects, fortresses, factories, etc. The feeling of desolation is increased by the fact that the hybrid structures are presented in the middle of an empty white page, like carcasses abandoned in the desert." (read more)
Parc des Princes stadium, Paris (detail)
"Aram Bartholl’s work explores the power structures, the social systems, the cultural innovations, the inner dynamics, the languages, and the products that are shaping our age. This first comprehensive monograph offers entry to an oeuvre in which space and cyberspace mingle and mangle each other, a realm that uses as little technology as possible while still speaking a digital language.
Aram Bartholl: The Speed Book features savvy experiments with transitions from the virtual to the physical: USB sticks embedded into walls, buildings, and curbs; giant real-life versions of Google’s red map markers positioned in public spaces; portraits generated from search results. An introduction by critic and curator Domenico Quaranta as well as essays by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, art critics, and fellow artists guide readers through a wonderfully skewed version of reality under the influence of the internet, something Sterling refers to as Bartholl’s “self-created twilight zone.” (gestalten)
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
More Game Art Links Around The Web: 09/17/2011, 09/01/2011, 08/28/2011
"Beyond that, though, it's just the simple capriciousness and inconsistency of how they deign what's acceptable and what's not, either by ignorance or by choice. I obviously don't want to list out by name the number of indie game developers that they've apparently overlooked or chosen to ignore because it doesn't, what, feel as videogame-y as the rest? But, by taking a quick stroll through their staff picks, you can spot just how ridiculous their singling-out is." (Brandon Boyer, Kotaku)
Brandon is not the only one complaining about Vimeo's overt cultural racism. Remember Marquee Cornblatt's article "Censorship as Criticism: Performance Art and Fair Use in Virtual Territory" published on the Journal of Visual Culture April 2011vol. 10 no. 1 74-79? Here's the abstract
"The author discusses the removal of his machinima-based performance artwork from the popular online video sharing site Vimeo, based on the accusation that it violated the service’s terms of use. The artist challenged the validity of Vimeo’s administrators via a series of emails, without much success. By examining this particular case, the author raises a series of important questions related to copyright, e.g. who owns virtual space and who is responsible for policing it? Are multi-user games a territory or a tool? Can a creative act transform a videogame from private property into a public art site? And perhaps most appropriate in the author’s situation: can copyright censors distinguish their personal criticism of an artwork from that work’s legal status?"
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
- Keith Stuart talks to Jason Nelson:
"Operating somewhere in between all of those is digital poet and artist Jason Nelson. Born in Oklahoma but now based on the East coast of Australia, Nelson has been producing thought-provoking and anger-baiting interactive works for years, the best known examples being Flash-based titles Game, Game, Game And Again Game and its sequel, I made this. You play this. We are Enemies.
Recently, he has produced two new, and typically messy, strange and unsettling works, Six-Sided Strange and Scrape Scraperteeth, the latter commissioned by the San Francisco Gallery of Modern Art. They bear all of Nelson's trademarks – seemingly stream-of-consciousness text clips, hectic presentation and guarded messaging – and they push at the boundaries of what can be called a game." (Keith Stuart, The Guardian, Sept 13 2011)
- Keith Stuart talks to painter John Clar:
Jon Car, "Sense of Detachment", oilon canvas, 2010
"For 15 years John Clark worked as an artist in the video games industry, rising to the position of Art Director at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and working on leading titles like Killzone and Little Big Planet. But before his lengthy stint in the interactive entertainment industry, he'd studied at Oxford University's Ruskin school of Fine Art and Drawing, later moving to Scotland to help found the Glasgow Sculpture Studios and to lecture at Grey's School of Art in Aberdeen.
In early 2010, he quit games and went back to painting, earlier this year appearing in BBC2's 'Show Me The Monet' series. Interested in the jostling relationships that exist between competing men in corporate environments, his paintings revolve around bizarre office bust-ups and futile workplace aggression. He says his style was once described by a visitor to his studio as, "a mixture of Goya, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and Muybridge." (Keith Stuart, The Guardian, Sept 13 2011)
- Tetris installation controlled by DDR Mats.
Color Kinetic LEDs in laser cut acrylic tubes set in chip-board matrix. Credit Leah Alpert & Russell Cohen. Hardware Design Credit Andrew Carlson.
More Game Art Links Around The Web: 09/01/2011, 08/28/2011
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
BLOG POST: Nullpointer: "How to make an infinite world" (August 31)
"The other aspect of the engine that has been both fascinating and frustrating is the fact that we are generating every world as an infinite plane. You can travel in any direction and the engine will keep making geometry until you reach the compuational limit of your machine. To accomplish this the world is split into regular chunks that are generated when your character moves and are discarded when they go out of range (or rather cached)."
STORY: WIRED on Jason Rohrer (pretty much, the story of the year)
Don't miss Jason Fagone's "Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War" (WIRED, August 2011). Excerpt:
"Twenty minutes after the challenge, Ji happened to see a Goldilocks-haired woman named Jane McGonigal descending an escalator at the convention center. McGonigal is the foremost evangelist of gamification; she wrote the best seller Reality Is Broken about the world-changing power of games and promoted it on The Colbert Report. A vague idea occurred to Ji, a new purpose for Chain World. He asked McGonigal if she would play the game at some future date, for a good cause. She readily agreed. Now in “fund-raising mode,” Ji says he extracted a similar promise from Will Wright. In Ji’s conception for Chain World, an “amateur” would bid for the chance to get the USB stick next, then pass it to a celebrity world-builder, who would pass it to the next amateur to place a winning bid. In this way, the amateurs and pros would be playing on the same turf, “almost like charity golf outings,” Ji says."
STORY: Hemispheres (!) on Jason Rohrer
Don't miss Matt Thompson's "Playing God" (July 2011). Excerpt:
"If Rohrer seems overly invested in how I do in a 15-minute playthrough of a video game, it should be noted that the game is one that he designed and built from scratch. In the past hours, he has shown me stacks of papers from the planning phases — notes about cognition and epistemology, aborted alternate designs — pen and paper versions played through at the kitchen table with his wife and kids. He references magazine stories about conflict diamonds, rattles off obscure game theory terms and explicates the tortured process he’s undergone to distribute his creation after parting ways with its original backer, a large game developer called Majesco Entertainment." (Matt Thompson, Hemispheers, July 2011)
HACK: Benjamin Bergman's NES-chuck
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
Essay: [Virtual] Relational Aesthetics by Dorothy Santos, Zero1 Blog, August 25, 2011. Excerpt:
"Joseph DeLappe’s piece, ‘dead-in-Iraq’, utilizes the virtual environment of ‘America’s Army’, which is the United States Army’s recruiting game. The virtual role playing game is open to anyone interested in establishing an online account and perhaps possesses a profound interest and curiosity for the military. The game itself simulates the actions and consequences of war. Allowing for fantastical play where the player has endless lives and has the ability to kill enemies and, perhaps, even soldiers in their own platoons with the absence of admonishment, the end user’s thoughts and emotions translate and weave themselves into a collection of memories that are both real and imagined. A simple game and task at hand, yet, the underlying message remains the same, and you are a machine." (Dorothy Santos)
Article: Mathias Jansson, Videogame Appropriation in Contemporary Art: Racing Games, Furtherfield.org. August 19. 2011. Excerpt:
"Pole Position, Outrun, F1 Racer and Need for Speed are some of the countless racing games that have attracted artists to explore a world of speed and burning rubber. In 2004 Cory Arcangel hacked the old Japanese Famicom driving game F1 Racer and removed, in the same way as he did in Super Mario Clouds, cars and other objects so that the only thing that remained of the game was the road and the landscape rushing toward the viewer." (Mathias Jansson)
Artist Profile: Ian Glover's talks to Aram Bartholl, Rhizome. August 24, 2011. Excerpt:
"In the early-mid 2000s I started building objects like the Counterstrike crates de_dust. It seemed like the next logical step. Will it look like this when virtuality bleeds into real life?! A lot of the works from that time inherit this question. Later this gesture of reenacting/rebuilding computer space became sort of a cultural 'mainstream' on the web. Just search for IRL Super Mario on Youtube. I’m not exactly sure how to put it but it feels like this was an era where we needed to reprocess the digitalization of society, a way to achieve 'post digital consciousness'. The gaming community was one of the first ones to go through this phase of awareness but for a big part of society the process is still going on." (Aram Bartholl)
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti