Extrapolated Gamers

 

 

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Pippa Stalker/Tshabalala Telling Death (2006-)
Death plays a major theme in life, art and videogames. In Telling Death Pippa Stalker/Tshabalala has combined this elements into a new art project. It began in 2006 when she exhibited a series of photographs at The Parking Gallery in Johannesburg. The serie was entitled Simulation and consisted of approximately 1000 photographs of “people” she had killed in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Now Pippa has taking the next step with the project: “And now comes the next step – telling your own version of their death. I want YOU to get involved in making something interesting and public by telling your own stories – stories of how these “people” died… Be creative, be weird, be out there, as long as you’re original – anything goes.” (quote from Pippa’s blog). On her blog, you can choose a picture and contribute with your own story.

 

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Ashley Blackman Marco Van Ginkel Study (2016)
Using a contemplative pace and minimal editing, Blackman’s work exemplifies the slow, ruminative machinima movement.

 

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Nabil Mir C-Art (2015)
C-Art is a video game that uses art education to cultivate interest of contemporary art. It teaches art by experiencing it. The game consists of a virtual gallery with doors that lead to galleries based on art movements of the 20th to early 21st centuries. The artworks featured in the game are virtual representations of the original works. The game was created in Unity 3D.

 

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UBERMORGEN CHINESE GOLD (2004)
It mixes up the real “virtual” (the game) with the virtually “real” (money). In China there are over 2000 Online-Gaming Workshops that hire people (over 500.000) to play online games such as World of Warcraft (WoW) day and night. The gaming workers produce in-game currency, equipments, and whole characters that are sold to American and European Gamers via Ebay. These people are called „Chinese Gold Farmers”. The future is now! In Warcraft, it’s the currency itself that’s being overproduced, not just any product. That means it’ll take more units of that currency to exchange for any product. Inflation. The price of everything goes up. Everything you worked so hard to save up suddenly becomes worth so much less. The Warcraft economy appears to be on the lip of this plunge and administrators are taking steps to curb inflation. When they find a career farmer, they ban the character. Now the farming company has to re-buy the game and set up a new account. This makes the process of creating these goods overseas more expensive, and functions similar to a tariff (which is a protective tax). There is a balance, which in the real world, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve, and International Organizations try to maintain. And by maintain, I mean getting as much cheap shit for themselves as possible without throwing the system completely out of whack. (In the finance industry, human rights is a footnote, if anything.) What lies ahead for the Warcraft economy? Let’s keep watching it in the future.

 

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Dan Pinchbeck Dear Esther (2008)
A deserted island… a lost man… memories of a fatal crash… a book written by a dying explorer. Dear Esther is a ghost story told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional gameplay, the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly triggered by moving around the environments, making every telling unique. Features a stunning, specially commissioned soundtrack. Forget the normal rules of play; if nothing seems real here, it’s because it may just be all a delusion. What is the significance of the aerial – What happened on the motorway – is the island real or imagined – who is Esther and why has she chosen to summon you here? The answers are out there, on the lost beach and the tunnels under the island. Or then again, they may just not be, after all…

 

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Georgie Roxby Smith The Fall Girl (2012)
Placed as prop, non player, damsel in distress or sub-hero, the gaming female character is rarely a ‘player’ of any importance. Where female character heroes are in place, they are often overtly sexualized, such as the hyper real soft pornography of Lara Croft’s female form. The male gaze manifests itself bi-fold in an immersive environment populated by young men invested in hours of play and character’s own digital peers. The Fall Girl is a recreated death glitch which occurred whilst playing Skyrim. This death loop magnifies and distorts the violence against the female body and, in its relentlessness, begins to blur between the lines between intention – suicide, murder, accident or perpetual punishment. By removing the game play in between scenes, which when isolated are disturbing in their sharp focus, the viewer becomes critically aware of the hyper- representation of the character and the violence enacted against her. The protagonist is eternally and perpetually punished in an inescapable digital loop.

 

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Janek Simon Carpet Invaders (2002)
Carpet Invaders is an interactive installation. A computer game is projected onto the floor. The game’s graphic is taken from a 19th century Caucasians prayer rug. The game is a clone of an early arcade classic – Space Invaders. Ornaments found on the rug turned out to be almost identical as the original graphics of the game. The game can be played with a gamepad hanging next to the projection The sound resembles that of early consoles and eight bit computers.

 

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Riley Harmon What it is Without the Hand That Wields it (2008)
Violence is an inevitable, mechanical function of the human brain, hard-coded down through time by culture, genetics, and evolution. Mediated experiences of killing change our perception of violence and death. As players die in a public video game server for Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, the electronic solenoid valves spray a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of nebulous kills. In simple terms it is about manifesting experiences that are purely virtual, or only ‘real’ in a psychological sense, into the physical world – physical computing.

 

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Ollie Ma Open World (2016)
A young artist from Buckinghamshire, Ollie Ma is currently studying Photography at Nottingham Trent University. His practice deals “with feelings of dislocation and disconnection and has been informed by the theatrical conventions of epic theatre, as well as the form of storytelling pioneered by John Wyndham called logical fantasy”. Ma’s latest project is titled Open World and juxtaposes/integrates photographs taken in Grand Theft Auto V with views and portraits shot IRL, inviting the viewer to play a comparative game.

 

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Hunter Jonakin Jeff Koons Must Die (2011)
The game invites players to obliterate Koons’ artworks in a point-of-view style shooting game. Jonakin’s 2011 game is set in a Koons retrospective in which the player destroys Koons’ sculptures. Eventually, the player is attacked by curators, guards and lawyers beforing coming to a fatal end.

 

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Paolo Pedercini Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2006)
Welcome to the Desert of the Real is a rather straightforward appropriation and remix of two sources: footage taken in America’s Army and text from the “Post-traumatic stress disorder checklist (military version)”. The first is the successful first person shooter created by the US Army for recruitment and PR purposes; the latter is a self-diagnosis questionnaire for veterans potentially affected by PTSD. Both elements come from military institutions, but by juxtaposing them I hoped to challenge their order of discourse. America’s Army is a propagandistic representation of war, because it’s an action packed game that presents an ideal battlefield with no civilian or social fabric, where two symmetrical and clearly distinct teams fight each other in a paintball game fashion. And worst of all, this is presented as a realistic approximation of the military experience. You don’t need to be deployed in Iraq to detect the multiple levels of mystification here.

 

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Anders Visti PONGdrian v1.0 (2007)
Anders Visti’s PONGdrian v1.0 is a game that mixes the videogame PONG with the art of Piet Mondrian. Two players can play against each other, and the game has four levels. In every level there is a painting by Piet Mondrian in the middle. When the ball hits the painting it starts to crumble into small pieces of squares and rectangles and creating new abstract patterns based on the players performance. PONGdrian was first exhibited at the Møstings Hus, København in May 2007.

 

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David Borawski burn out and erased by the first rain (2010)
Borawski shot this video in/with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This machinima illustrates the notion of “going around in circles”. As the artist explains, “The virtual biker does an extended circular burn out, using the motorcycle’s image of freedom and rebellion as a starting point. The video alternates normal speed and slo-mo, with a cross dissolve that expands and then reverts.

 

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Yuichiro Katsumoto Amagatana (2009)
The ordinary umbrella, a common weapon against the dreary weather, becomes an imaginative device for solo augmented- reality gaming. In an attempt to brighten everyday commutes through the city, the player swings the umbrella to hit an invisible opponent’s blade. A self-contained performance, the piece turns jousting into an endlessly entertaining form of independent gameplay.

 

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Hugo Arcier Ghost City (2016)
In Hugo Arcier’s new installation, the architecture of Grand Theft Auto becomes a reflective and ruminative experience. Inspired by Lucrece’s De rerum natura, Ghost City immerses the viewer in a phantasmatic urban environment, devoid of (artificial) life. The atmospheric score by Bernard Szajner makes the experience eerie and haunting.

 

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foci + loci Flotonium Snowdrift and Moonfield (2010)
Treating the map editors in video games as virtual sound stages, foci + loci create immersive electro-acoustic spaces with virtual instruments and timed audiovisual events. Saving and replaying digital game data, camera movement in space can be disassociated from time, changing traditional filmic relationships. We are interested in exploring the topological treatment of time and space afforded by game engines.

 

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Workspace Unlimited THEY WATCH (2009)
They Watch is an immersive art installation with virtual characters literally watching visitors. Several duplicates of the virtual characters – one man, one woman, and both portraits of the artists – surround and interact with visitors, who are tracked as they move about the physical space, and even projected into the virtual space. Years of research and development with game-technology have resulted in a 360° audio-visual environment, exploiting a 15-meter-wide panoramic screen and a 32-channel sound system. The subtle collaboration of the real and virtual agents and environments conflate to engender a hybrid space where the observer becomes the observed. Figuratively wearing a virtual camera causes the on-screen characters to approach and to retreat, analogously altering the soundtrack; characters that, as visitors will come to discover, are aware of their presence. They watch. Visitors’ movements activate visual cues and affect the characters’ spontaneous, unscripted behaviors, so that the installation’s visual and sonic compositions are uniquely influenced by the visit. The piece becomes a composition in movement whereby non-linear blends of real and virtual force visitors to consider perspective, agency, and the distinction between authentic and imagined as They Watch.

 

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Akihito Taniguchi 浅草クレイジーホース倶楽部♯2 / BROADJ♯1832 (2016)
Akihiko Taniguchi is an artist working and living in Japan. He teaches at Musashino Art Univ and Joshibi University of Art and Design. He creates installations, performances and video works using self-built devices and software. In recent years, he concentrates on net art work. and sometimes VJing. Main exhibitions include “dangling media” (“emergencies! 004” at “Open Space 2007,” ICC, Tokyo, 2007), “Space of Imperception” (Radiator Festival, UK, 2009), “redundant web” (Internet, 2010) “[Internet Art Future?]” (ICC, Tokyo, 2012) and more.

 

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Michiel van der Zanden Pwned Paintings #1 & Pwned Paintings #2 (2008)
Michiel van der Zanden is a visual artist fascinated by the language of games and 3D graphics. Growing up playing playing first-person shooters and looking at virtual environments through the eyes of a painter, van der Zanden realized that digital media artists use techniques similar to those applied by traditional artists to generate illusions. Van der Zanden is not simply fascinated by games. He sees in gaming an attempt to recreate daily life phenomena through simulation. This desire can also be found in children’s toys and amusement parks, model making, and advertising. Van der Zanden’s practice combines realistic painting and computer generated imagery. His work is characterized by a constant interaction between the real and virtual, between classical painting and digital imaging. The outcome is a painting style that looks like it was produced by a computer program, but also overly synthetic sculptures and software-based videos.

 

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Mark Essen Booloid (2009)
Mark Essen aka messhof has always been known for making unconventional, not to mention tough, games. Booloid (a sequel to Bool) is one of his earlier works and plays out like one big balancing act – you control a ship and must rescue stranded Boolians with your tractor beam, as well as sucking up purple liquid (when you see a pool of it) to keep your ship cool so that you may keep on flying. You must also try and make sure you do not touch the landscape, which will bring your energy down significantly, although it will recharge after a certain period. Ship parts can be found (also sucked up with your handy tractor beam) and later used to upgrade your ship. You get three lives but fortunately there are save spots throughout the game. Graphically, the game takes a sharp-lined, minimalist approach, using only a few bright colours to illustrate surroundings. It works.

 

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Feng Mengbo The Long March: Restart (2009)
With “Q4U” the Chinese New Media Artist Feng Mengbo introduced Game Art to the international art scene at Documenta 11. His latest work is a videogame called Restart based on the “Long March: Game Over”, a series of 42 oil paintings made in 1994, which links the Long March, (a famous Chinese military campaign, from 1934 to 1936, led by which Mao Zedong) with signs of popular entertainment as videogames. The paintings resemble screen shots from early home gaming system, with digitized Red Army solider who hurls cans of Coca-Cola at his enemies, with a cast of characters that range from Street Fighters to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The videogame is an interactive installation based on the paintings.

 

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Jason Rohrer Passage (2007)
Passage, created by Jason Rohrer, is an exercise in gaming minimalism. Made for korokomi’s gamma 256 competition, It’s only five minutes long, it weighs in at less than 500kb, it takes place on a 100×16 field of pixels, and it only requires the arrow keys. It’s also one of the most clever, meaningful, affecting, and memorable games ever made. To say too much about Passage before you’ve played it — to describe how I played through it, and how it affected me — is to spoil it. Passage is about life: what it feels like, how we live it, and how we find happiness. There is no true “right” or “wrong” way the play the game, and much of Passage’s brilliance can only be understood through completing it yourself. Let it be known, however, that whatever emotions you feel, whatever symbolism you notice, or whatever meaning you derive from the game’s movement and visual mechanics, were all totally intentional. The “games as art” debate is officially over.

 

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Pippin Barr The Artist is Present (2011)
Computer game research professor and author of the upcoming book How To Play A Video Game Pippin Barr has made a subversively boring game called The Artist is Present. It simulates the experience of waiting in line to see contemporary artist Marina Abramović, who held an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010. Her show, also titled “The Artist is Present,” created a frenzy of media attention and hours-long waits for the chance to sit across from Abramović and look into her eyes for as long as you wanted. “I wanted to make a video game about art, [and] few works of contemporary art have that kind of famousness and stature that this [exhibit did],” Barr told me in a phone interview from Copenhagen this morning. “At first I just thought a game about this would be hilarious, but then I realized there could be some seriousness to it as well. No one has ever really made a video game about the experience of contemporary art.” He was unconcerned that the game might seem outdated, seeing as it came to life over a year after the show closed. “I don’t really think of it as that tied to the actual exhibit. It’s more about art in general.” Barr’s game, designed in delightfully old-fashioned graphics, compels you to—spoiler alert—go to the museum, pay for a ticket, walk through a couple of galleries (bedecked with 8-bit versions of such paintings as Starry Night) and then get at the back of a long line of 8-bit people. The game itself is set to the museum’s hours, so players can only enjoy it when MoMA is open (Eastern Standard Time, of course). “It’s also closed on Tuesdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas,” Barr adds.

 

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Brent Watanabe San Andreas Deer Cam (2016)
Artist Brent Watanabe modified Grand Theft Auto V: San Andreas to create the San Andreas Deer Cam. In other words, it’s a deer wandering the world of GTA V. And that’s all. Watching this deer interact with the game world is mesmerizing, at times hilarious, and often soothing. As I watch the deer now, he’s wandering around a street at sunset, as passing cars honk and drivers curse at him. Earlier, he was wandering the beach. Before that, he wandered into a knife fight, then ran away.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Several people have now successfully broken through the Cloudflare bug and commented by setting their IP to Romania, so you might try that curious approach if you’re willing to. ** jay, Hi, jay. Very nice, appropriately eerie photo. It looked just real enough. Thank you. Awesome on the greatness around you of late. I’ll see if I can find a tumblr called something like tvrded. I’m curious now. ** Steve, Hey! You made it. Your comment appeared even if you didn’t see it. So sorry about your difficult week. I actually don’t have any interest in actually going through an extreme haunted house. I just like knowing they exist and thinking about them. Sort of like with my fiction, I guess. I will go to a kind of semi-extreme haunt in LA called The 17th Door, which is amazing and requires a waiver, but it’s more bark than bite. My weekend was just about starting to prepare for my NYC reading and the upcoming weeks in LA and trying to find a venue for the cast/crew screening of our film. Relatively uneventful. How was ‘The Substance’? I’m hoping to see ‘Megalopolis’ in the next days. It just opened here. I hope your Monday was an improvement. ** Tyler Ookami, Hi, Tyler. Thanks for actually finishing ‘Frisk’. I’ll look for that doc. It sounds way up my alley. Yeah, what’s up with Colorado not having a great amusement park? Kind of ridiculous. Glenwood Caverns isn’t fun? I’ve never been to a Meow Wolf thing, and I see Denver has one. They look really cheesy in pics. ** _Black_Acrylic, Haha, so true. Luckily for that post, the media seems to think that when crimes occur on Halloween, it gives them a certain charm. And I suppose they’re right. I love the chocolate croissant detail. Me? Hm … I never let myself smoke a cigarette in the morning until I’ve drunk one cup of coffee. That’s not very picturesque though. ** Cletus, Hail, Romania! Never thought I’d say those words. It’s great to see you, and whew, and all of that. I’m okay, busy with stuff good and bad. You scored a place to live and a presumably not demoralising job in one swoop. Congrats, pal. Yes, about SCAB, yes! As long as it’s a somewhat scary giant skeleton and not a goofy looking one, I agree. ** Misanthrope, And welcome back, buddy! It’s starting to feel almost like old times here. ** HaRpEr, I guess what I meant was that Le Duc doesn’t seem to be favored amongst the young literary types here at the current time. When I say I think she’s interesting, they make a disapproving face. Best of luck with the start of classes. 90 minute bus ride, yikes, assuming classes start early especially. I don’t think I’ve heard Porches, but you’ve steered me in their direction. I’ll end my ignorance. Sounds very alright, via your characterisation, to me. ** Justin D, I hope it knocks around productively somehow. Not sure how that would work, though. I’ll go participate auditorily with the new Clinic Stars. My weekend was mildly productive albeit in a way that isn’t very interesting to hear about. And it rained a lot and pleasantly. How’s your week looking? ** Lucas, Hi. My weekend wasn’t any great shakes, but sans drama, which was good enough. You’re sick? Like mildly and briefly, I hope. I think my ear is normal again. I never think about it, so I guess that constitutes normalcy. I hated ‘Crazy for Vincent’. I was a Guibert fan before I read that one, and now I’m deeply suspicious of his stuff. Which Guyotat? ‘Eden Eden Eden’? That’s my favorite. My week is mostly going to be getting for my reading and big, long US trip and sorting out film stuff as best I can. And having a b’day lunch with a friend of mine today. Ange: one of the ‘stars’ of ‘Room Temperature’. Anything looking especially bright between your now and Friday? ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey! Thanks! Things are moving along with lots of ups and downs. Things sure read as extremely nuts where you are if one is stuck with media representations only. Shit. Never drank yerba matte, no. ‘Mellow’ kind of scares me off a bit. I do like my jolts. Interesting about the strength in dance there. I used to go see dance things all time when I was hanging out with Gisele more often. September-October is a lovely time in Paris if you don’t mind the rain. Although I’m usually in LA for most of October, so I can’t speak to that end of the equation. Good to talk with you. ** Okay. I think the post today becomes self-explanatory at some point, I think? See you tomorrow.