Developed by the elusive collective 2girls1comp - a tragic pun on the infamous 2girls1cup meme - "Every Thing" is a modification for Grand Theft Auto V "that sequentially spawns every object from the game's prop database until the program ultimately crashes under the weight of every thing". Basically, it's a reverse Katamari Damacy. The antithesis of Jenga. Also: this Every Thing is not to be confused with David O'Reilly's Everything. The video above shows Every Thing in action and it's a trip.
As usual, 2girls1comp documented the process with a series of making-of videos. Here are two:
You may remember 2girls1comp's previous exploits, including the hilarious Towards a Philosophy of the Photodaddy, a mod inspired by Vilém Flusser and boomer photographers, and the equally meta Piano of the Dead, all released in 2023.
For the record, users of GTA5-Mods are going insane in the membrane. Here are some comments: "This must be most weird mod in the site :D", "Contemporary Art", "One must be fully drowned in LSD to make such a script." and "I want to smoke what you're smoking".
Learn how to take great photographs inside video games in this online workshop with exhibiting artist Roc Herms
What is in-game photography? How can photography document the interactions that happen in online games and digital realms?
Description
Enjoy a one-day workshop with How to Win at Photography exhibiting artist Roc Herms. We’ll start with a theoretical introduction to in-game photography and quickly move on to a series of practical activities and exercises. Using Roblox to play with composition, colour and perspective, develop a new portfolio of images while also socialising with other players and engaging with more traditional concepts of photography. By the end of the session, participants will have co-produced a digital publication of the day's experiences.
This workshop is suitable for photographers, artists and others interested in photography's relationship to game worlds, as well as those interested in exploring new approaches to landscape and portrait photography.
This event is part of How to Win at Photography, an exhibition currently on display at The Photographer's Gallery.
Schedule
10.30 Introduction (on Zoom) 10.35 Presentation on in-game photography/on-line games/multiverses 11.30 Dive into Roblox: Playing different online games to learn the mechanics of in-game photography 12.30 Break 13.00 Roblox photoshoot activities and exercises 13.30 Roblox in-game photoshoot 15.00 Design of the publication (group exercise) 16.00 Workshop end
Details on how to access the workshop will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place.
Biography
In 1978 Gary Thurek and his assistant Carl Gartley sent the first mass email with advertising purposes, reaching 393 users at the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (called the ARPANET), unaware that they just sent the first example of what would later be known as SPAM. That same year, over 9000 kilometers away, Roc Herms was born in Spain. 28 years later he discovers photography as a tool to learn, and he manages to combine it with his interest in the Internet, video games and parallel realities: showing his passion for technology and the need to take a step further in photographic practice. Postcards From Home and “ ”, his two long term projects published in book form, try to shed some light on the life we live inside the computer. “Hacer Pantallazo” is an intimate diary made with screenshots, a capture process that he ends up understanding as the ultimate step on photography’s digitalisation. His work has been exhibited in “From Here On”, Centre d’Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona and “Photography 2.0”, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid both curated by Joan Fontcuberta, as well as in the Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands; Platine Festival, Germany; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Hammer Museum, USA; CCCB, Barcelona and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France.
"a statement of purpose and consultation for curators, producers and institutions that are either working with video games or want to get into the field. Over 25 writers and editors have worked together sharing our experiences of exhibiting games, spanning the practical to the political, the ethical to the esthetic. The Game Arts Curator Kit will have a printed version produced and published by VGAReader and it will also be available in the wiki form open to the community.
For those interested in knowing more about the project there will be a round table on its creation as a part of Society of Literature, Science and Arts 2021 on October 1st 2021." (Ma. Luján Oulton)
A new platform, Art Space, created at Vidzeme University in Latvia is available as a download here for Windows.
Its purpose is to present the history of artistic styles in modern gaming in an innovative and interactive way. The authors of the game are researcher Ieva Gintere and new media artists Kristaps Biters & Ieva Vīksne (Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Art Academy of Latvia, Liepāja University, Latvia). Art Space is a sophisticated new digital media prototype based on research results into modern art theory. The game can function as a model for similar games in the future that would show the results of artistic research and transfer knowledge gained in research. Art Space reflects the ideas of game theorists who contend that in order to raise curiosity concerning cultural heritage in games, one should invite the player to individually form artifacts or customized characters. This approach can effectively attract people to educational games since creation is a powerful key in eliciting emotions. Objects that the player of Art Space will individually form, are linked to aesthetics, and the game is designed as a story that reveals the historical background of the styles and effects chosen by the player.
Art Space functions in the intersection of educational games, serious games, and art games. The game has several tasks. It incorporates and explains the artistic codes of modern art, and functions as an informative platform for the player. It is intended to marry the activities of the general public of players with the heritage of modern art and its historical keys.
Art Space is innovative since there are no research-based games of modern aesthetics that incorporate the historical context of digital art and transfer the knowledge of contemporary art to players in a systematic and comprehensive way. Art Space is an educational instrument with the aim of capturing specific knowledge from contemporary art that is otherwise difficult to transfer to the general public.
The project will develop knowledge of modern artifacts and their appreciation as well as awareness of cultural capital. The strategy of knowledge transfer in the project will develop the audience’s ability to evaluate the artifacts and cultivate their aesthetic taste. The project expects that by expanding a society’s collective consciousness people will be able to better coexist with artistic styles which are a natural part of contemporary culture.
Prototype of the virtual environment (Windows version) is available here
For additional information, please contact
Ieva Gintere Dr.art., Researcher, Assistant Professor Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Cēsu iela 4, Valmiera, LV 4201, Latvia
This project was supported by a grant from the European Regional Development Fund project “Leveraging ICT product innovations by enhancing codes of modern art” No. 1.1.1.2/VIAA/1/16/106 within the Activity 1.1.1.2 “Post-doctoral Research Aid”.
As part of our ongoing series of conversations with practitioners using game-based technology to make art, we chatted with Eduard Tucaković, a 25 year old artist from Croatia who has been using the Source Filmmaker in unexpected ways, because "the street finds its own uses for things". The Source Filmmaker is the movie-making tool built and used by Valve to make movies inside the Source game engine. Because the Source Filmmaker uses the same assets as a Source-engine game, what goes into the game can be used in the movie, and vice versa. However, Tucaković does not use this tool to make machinima, but for scenebuilding purposes. Scenebuilding consists of creating virtual dioramas - static, hyper detailed images - using a video game engine. In fact, there's a vibrant community of scenebuildiers online and Tucaković is one of the most active and prolific members. He creates scenes imbued with a sense of melancholy and loss for a future that never materialized. They depict dystopian futures that are part cyberpunk and part 1950s techno-utopia gone sour, often with a sense of peaceful resignation. These images are built on the very notion of intertextuality: pop culture - Star Wars, Blade Runner, Jurassic Park,2001: A Space Odyssey, although some references are less explicit - is used as an infinite archive. What follows is our conversation, edited for clarity, which took place via email in March 2021.
Matteo Bittanti: Can you introduce yourself? When did you begin using Source Filmmaker to create virtual dioramas?
Eduard Tucaković: I am a 25 year old artist from Croatia, in the community I'm more known as Atlas. I'm a full time photographer and when I am not shooting photos around mountains I'm probably home sitting at my desk scenebuilding in Source Filmmaker. I originally started using Source Filmmaker in late 2014, early 2015 as a software to make machinima movies, but as I got the grip of the software itself I became more interested in building dioramas, that eventually led me to rendering only 1 frame of a scene and later editing that frame to make it a full fledged artwork.
Eduard Tucaković, Delivery Man
Matteo Bittanti: How long have you been making these virtual dioramas? How would you describe the process? And how visible is the community on the cultural sphere?
Eduard Tucaković: I have been actively scenebuilding for around 5 years I believe. As I mentioned earlier, first it was scenebuilds for machinimas rather than for artworks. You can look at scenebuilding as set dressing, some people make their sets for animations while some make it for artworks. The community is slowly but surely becoming bigger, our artworks are reaching people beyond the community, and at this point even Valve is somewhat aware of what we're doing. That's all thanks to sites like your own, that lets us speak of our craft, and we as a community are really grateful for that.
Eduard Tucaković, The Scenebuilding process.
Matteo Bittanti: What tools do you use to create your scenes?
Eduard Tucaković: I primarily use Source Filmmaker and Photoshop. I also use Lightroom to retouch the colours and contrast of some of my renders: this is something I have borrowed from photography and that workflow has suited me for a long time now.
Matteo Bittanti: Do you also make machinima?
Eduard Tucaković: Yes, machinima has been a big part of my life, I originally got introduced to this medium through Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, that eventually led to Source Filmmaker. Nowadays I am only using Source Filmmaker for scenebuilding and rendering pictures, but I am also helping scenebuild environments for a couple of famous Source Filmmaker series such as The Reinstated or Exile/Vilify a Half Life/Portal series. In the past, I used Source Filmmaker to make short commercials for names like ESL. And these days I've been even using it as a means to make concept art for feature films.
Eduard Tucaković, Haven
Matteo Bittanti: What makes or breaks a scene?
Eduard Tucaković: It's really hard to say, In my book it's all about the composition and the atmosphere. Lots of newcomers struggle with mastering the lighting, and that's something that takes a long time to fully understand. On the scenebuilding department, just like with any other art form, you have to understand the composition and the scale. You need to know where to add the detail, and where to sacrifice it for the benefit of the workflow, I think understanding all of that together makes for good artwork.
Eduard Tucaković, 1989
Matteo Bittanti: How long does it make to create a scene, on average?
Eduard Tucaković: It all depends on how big the scene is, but I would say it's around three days for me. I like taking pauses then coming back to my work with a fresh and empty mind. Here's a Scenebuild Breakdown. Here's a short video that illustrates the process:
Eduard Tucaković, scenebuilding breakdown
Matteo Bittanti: What are the key advantages of using Source Filmmaker over other tools?
Eduard Tucaković: Source Filmmaker compared to other big rendering power houses such as Blender these days is much easier to get into, due to its own limits. There is a whole lot of documentation from the community that can kickstart anyone to render their first scenes. We also have a workshop from where you can get various props and models you might need for a scene. However I would like to mention that Source Filmmaker is still a 32 bit software, and that can be a hustle since you have a memory limit and it's prone to crashes. Valve recently released Source Filmmaker 2 alongside Half-Life Alyx, but even though it comes with quite a bit of improvements, it's not standalone and it still lacks a workshop. We also need to port everything to s2fm, and source 2 itself still lacks some of the toolset. If anyone from Valve is reading this, we as a community would gladly help you out with the Source Filmmaker. Maybe even with our help Saxxy Awards could become a thing again.
Matteo Bittanti: What do you recommend for somebody who want to start using Source Filmmaker?
Eduard Tucaković: I'm sharing my latest artwork here with you along with the behind the scenes of how it looks in the engine. I'm also sharing a 50+ page Scenebuilding guide google doc guide I wrote with some of the friends from the community. If anyone wants to find me online, they can reach me on my Twitter page @AtlasRedLine, and if anyone is interested in more of my sfm artwork they can check it out on my Deviant Art page. I also hang out in our Source Filmmaker discord server, where there are whole lots of veterans from the community, you can grab an invite link on r/sfm.
NVIDIA is introducing a new app called Omniverse Machinima which "enables gamers across the world to easily master the art of storytelling by using 3D objects, animated by NVIDIA AI technologies."
Specifically,
Through NVIDIA Omniverse, creators can import assets from supported games or most 3rd party asset libraries into the platform. Creators can then automatically animate characters using an AI-based pose estimator and footage from their webcam. Characters' faces can come to life with only a voice recording using NVIDIA's new Audio2Face technology. Reality is effortlessly recreated with high-fidelity physics like particles and fluids, and physically accurate materials. After mixing, playing, and composing the scenes, path-traced rendering technology is enabled with one-click to final output with the highest fidelity using Omniverse RTX Renderer. [...] NVIDIA Omniverse is an open platform built for virtual collaboration and simulation. It provides a universal design tool asset exchange with a viewer based on real-time, photorealistic path-tracing. The engine is designed to be physically accurate - simulating light, physics, materials, and AI. With Omniverse, creators, designers, and engineers can accelerate their workflows with one-click interoperability between leading software tools, and seamless collaboration in an interactive, simulated world.
If you don't dig the marketing-speak (who does?), jump straight to the videos:
Photo modes are quickly becoming the most advanced feature of most video games. Aside from nVidia recent announcement about the instagrammification of gaming, Sony has now revealed Shadow of the Colossus' photo mode which will surely spawn a new kind of fantasy tourism. The upcoming PS4 remake will include, among other things, a versatile photo mode equipped with filters, color balancing, midtones and highlights, vignette, depth of field ranges and much more. As Mark Skelton, Art Director, Bluepoint Games explains
The thing that makes Photo Mode stand out is its power and flexibility. It’s an entire photo adjustment suite built into the game for you! [...] Adjusting the camera to get that perfect shot is super easy. Being able to switch the camera from the player to the horse offers up a ton of possibilities. Letting the team loose with it was incredible. The amount of different looks you can achieve is limitless. To top it off, being able to rotate the camera 90 degrees either way to generate portrait images means that lots of photos will be used as cell phone wallpapers! That’s not all: you’re able to leave some of the filters running as you play, giving you exciting degrees of control over how the game looks in motion.
I know, instagrammification is a terrible neologism, but bear with me for a sec. At CES 2018, nVidia introduced a feature called NVIDIA Freestyle for its GeForce Experience that basically adds instagram-like functionality to gaming practices, with obvious implications for both game photography and machinima. Specifically, right from the in-game overlay, gamers can apply post-processing filters on games during a match, tweaking color or saturation and apply dramatic post-process filters. At launch, nVidia is introducing a total of 15 filters with 38 different settings (some filters have multiple settings), including black & white, sepia, vignette, retro and many more. At the moment, there are 100+ games compatible.
What can you do with nVidia Freestyle? Well,
For example, you can create a retro war-themed filter for your favorite FPS or enhance color and contrast to make a game look more photorealistic.
It would be interesting to see how game photographers and machinimators will be using this new tool.
The company has also updated its Ansel photo mode, streamlining the user interface to make it more intuitive, adding eight new filters and the ability to combine multiple filters.
I predict that all the features of Adobe Premiere and Photoshop will soon be integrated into the ever expanding GeForce Experience.
We live in the age of post-post production. nVidia is a step ahead of Nicolas Bourriaud.
Development images (All images courtesy of the artist)
A while ago we spoke to Jay Zehngebot, an artist based in Providence, Rhode Island, who is creating some of the most exciting game-related projets today. Consider his latest experiment, Bitcoin Statcraft (BTCSC), a dynamic Minecraft environment generated using realtime bitcoin market information. The project was developed by Zehngebot with MineCraft1.6.4, Bukkit, Scriptcraft, Arduino, Processing 2, and MineCrift, inspired, among others, by Scott Patterson's Dark Pools and Joshua Davis' 2011 essay in TheNew Yorker, "The Crypto Currency".
This is as brilliant as Cory Arcangel's bots playing bowling. dekuNukem built a machine that finds and catches Pokemon creatures and it does not require any human input. Genius. This is Game Art at its best. Full description below:
"Fully automated shiny hunt, breeding, cloning, releasing, and more. Achieved by a single light sensor taped on the button screen, all the controller does is read the sensor and push buttons.
The source code is a complete mess, I tried to split the POM_master.c to multiple files, but that awful Arduino IDE just wasn't happy.
If you want to make one, I would suggest you look at the video/code and write your own, don't try do replicate what I did exactly, which probably won't work."
