An exhibition of historic and contemporary artists' computer games.
Jorge Luis Borges' 1941 short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" predates the Internet but its notions of non-linearity, the storyline surrounding an infinite, labyrinthine book that realises multiple paths and futures are echoed in the information age with hypertext, the World Wide Web and the form and structure of computer games.
Just as Borges and his contemporaries pushed the envelope of the narrative form, so too artists have been creating and modifying computer games, experimenting with the notions of what a game is and exploring alternate approaches to interaction and play methodologies. This exhibition draws together notable historic and contemporary examples of games created by artists that push the bounds of the genre and break the orthodox set of rules.
http://www.dlux.org.au/
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Artists
Laurie Anderson (USA) with Hsin-Chien Huang (Taiwan)
Andy Deck (USA)
Anita Fontaine (Australia) and Mike Pelletier (Canada)
Jaron Lanier (USA)
Michael Nyman (UK)
Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie (UK)
Tale of Tales (Belgium)
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Curator
Neil Jenkins
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Opening hours
3rd - 24th October 2009
Thursday & Friday 12pm-5pm
Saturday 11am-4pm
Loop Space. 109 Hunter Street, Newcastle, NSW
www.loopoz.com
Puppet Motel Laurie Anderson (USA) with Hsin-Chien Huang (Taiwan) 1995 Laurie Anderson's interactive CD ROM Puppet Motel is an imaginary universe made up of the interplay between light and darkness, mystery and poetry. This universe is populated by puppets and, of course, its creator, the artist herself. The three dimensional virtual spaces are crammed with ghosts and secrets: the visitor is constantly taken by surprise. Watch out for the electric sockets - they will take you back to the hall of time. If you get stuck or lost, press the \u2018esc' key to go to the motel basement where you can access all of the rooms. http://www.laurieanderson.com -- Space Invaders Act 1732 Andy Deck (USA) 1995 Space Invaders Act 1732 is a response to the Space Advertising Prohibitions Act of 1993, legislation against giant advertising billboards in space that plays with the symbolism of the arcade classic. Andy Deck makes public art for the Internet that resists generic categorisation: collaborative drawing spaces, game-like search engines, problematic interfaces, informative art. An avid critic of corporate culture and militarism, Deck's hybrid news-art projects have addressed a variety of issues that are regularly misrepresented in the mass media. In the interest of preserving this available alternative media, and sensing the drift of the Internet toward a marketing and entertainment medium, he has allied himself with open source software developers, optimising his work for use with the Linux operating system, and publishing source code for much of his software. http://www.artcontext.net -- CuteXDoom II Anita Fontaine (Australia) & Mike Pelletier (Canada) 2008 CuteXDoom II is psychedelic video-game mod that takes a violent shoot em up and converts it into an experience of popular cultures obsession cuteness. Your character has joined a supermodern religious cult which believes that the worship of cute material objects will lead to happiness and enlightenment (or nasty experience!!). Once granted access to the cult; thus completing level one, the character then finds themselves awoken from a paroxysm to a now hauntingly surreal landscape: the once hyper-cute characters have been altered to appear malevolent, predatory. The protagonist has essentially been \u201cpoisoned\u201d by the cult, and the objective undergoes a paradigm shift to escape the cult. The character must then mediate a psychedelic hyperspectra of disorientating hallucinogenic optical effects. Fontaine draws the parallels between the \u201cpoison\u201d of vapid materialism allowed to run rampant, and literally peels back the façade of \u201ccuteness\u201d to reveal a problematized cultural landscape. http://www.anitafontaine.com -- Moondust Jaron Lanier (USA) 1983 Moondust is a generative music video game created for the Commodore 64 by virtual reality pioneer, Jaron Lanier and is widely considered the first art video game, it is also considered to be the first interactive music publication. Lanier formed VPL which would later go on to create the DataGlove and to become one of the primary innovators of virtual-reality research and development throughout the 1980s. Moondust's gameplay is characterized by graphical complexity, and the game features an abstract ambient score. The goal of the game is to guide a spaceman around the screen creating strange patterns and getting bullet-shaped spaceships to pass through the trails that the spaceman creates. In in-game scoring system assigns point-values according to an algorithm. http://www.well.com/~jaron/ -- Frame Game Michael Nyman (UK) 2003 Frame Game is a video taken form the series Distractions, shot by artist Michael Nyman in various parts of the world during the past fifteen years. To Nyman, there seemed no point in filming static monuments, so in Frame Game when he found him self at the ancient site of Persepolis, the length of each shot of the static ruins is dictated by the time it takes the frame to clear itself of tourists. In post-production Nyman enters into a competition with those tourists who choose not to move out of frame. Experimentation with the medium of video, its limits and its ability to allow an infinite range of possibilities and random coincidences, remains a focal point in Nyman's work. In Frame Game, Nyman appropriates the recording of an ordinary scene depicting a historical site visited by a group of tourists. Shot with a hand-held camera and altered with digital intervention, the footage is then distorted and turned into a fictitious set of video games, seemingly inviting the viewer to engage with the work, much in the same manner a player would engage with a video game. Nyman's manipulation of his own imagery is an attempt to communicate an alternative scenario of the mundane and the monotonous, instantly transformed into a plot of unfolding events and unexpected results. Consequently, the medium becomes part of the message it conveys, contributing to the very aesthetics it purports to describe. www.michaelnyman.com -- An Artists Impression (of a Text Based Environment) Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie (UK) 1999 An Artists' Impression was a long-term project originating in Pope and Guthrie's fascination with the \u2018soft underbelly' of the WWW! Researching a number of live online \u2018games' and concentrating on those where simple role-playing and social activities happened, and where the characters, landscapes and activities occurred constantly (in text only) and in realtime. These text-based worlds - the most visually impoverished corners of the web - are nevertheless compelling. Both banal / workaday and fantastical in content, the artists were also impressed by the volume of regular players in these MUSHes and MOOs, and the absence of anything more than a \u2018code of honour' in most of these that delineated the players' conduct. They developed their own social online game or MUSH, Island - which you can still visit. An open-ended experiment, it's a live, interactive space which during the piece's most lively time - when the project was first exhibited and toured - has hosted many players and seen many events and buildings... Shortly after the work went online they decided to undertake the making of a physical \u2018impression' of this space which would still somehow articulate the impossibility of mirroring an online space. The online MUSH culture seemed intuitively to link to the aesthetic of the model railway, and so the island was developed using these modelling techniques and aesthetics. When the project was finally exhibited (first at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London) the visitor was met with a vast model island (8m x 4m) and us (the artists) at work in corner workshops, constantly trying to update the model with the online \u2018game' changes. A parallel audience experienced the project solely online. www.somewhere.org.uk -- The Path Tale of Tales (Belgium) 2009 The Path is a darkly seductive horror game inspired by older versions of little Red Riding Hood. Six sisters live in an apartment in the city. One by one their mother sends them on an errand to their grandmother, who is sick and bedridden. The teenagers are instructed to go to grandmother's house deep in the forest and, by all means, to stay on the path! Wolves are hiding in the woods, just waiting for little girls to stray. But young women are not exactly known for their obedience, are they? Will they be able to resist the temptations of the forest? Will they stay clear of danger? Can they prevent the ancient tale from being retold? http://www.tale-of-tales.com