Until this Thursday, an arcade of interactive artistic video games is up at Postmaster’s Gallery in Chelsea. This mix of lo-fi and hi-res graphics, raw exposed circuit boards and games with clever gotcha moments, was a jolt of quirky joy on a cold Saturday afternoon.
Video Games
Posted inArt
The Artist Is Present Game Creator Talks Marina Mania, Video Games & the Rules
Pippin Barr works and teaches at the Center for Computer Game Research at IT University in Copenhagen, and readers of Hyperallergic will know him as the guy who created “The Artist Is Present” video game, which has already become an online sensation. I caught up with Barr online to ask him about “The Artist Is Present,” the popular fascination with Abramović and how the experience mimics some aspects of the real thing.
Posted inOpinion
The Museum In Your Video Game
Since 8-bit everything is so in nowadays, it should be no surprise that the geeks (I admit, I can be one) are combing over vintage (and more recent) video games to find glimpses of art and other visual treats. Here are some screenshots that would make the art set look twice when they partake in video gamery.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading features mashed-up video games, a lost e.e. cummings poem, an indie arcade review and a museum just for you.
Posted inArt
Cory Arcangel’s (Al)ready-mades
Remember Oakley M-Frame sunglasses? They’re supposed to look like the future, with gradient lenses in a variety of neon colors and knotted frames that bear a resemblance to tensed muscle and ligaments. What they actually look like is a future imagined from the 1980s, in which some mixture of cyberpunk fashion, steroidal athlete aesthetic and Gatorade-style visual punch is totally au courant. New media prankster Cory Arcangel has turned these glasses into monuments, casting them in bronze and immortalizing them in a series of readymades called “Sports Products” (2011). Are you ready for 80s nostalgia? You better be, because it’s ready for you.
Posted inArt
Photo Preview of Cory Arcangel at the Whitney
Tomorrow marks the opening of Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, a full floor of new and recent work by the artist at the Whitney Museum. Lucky you, you get to see it a day early! I previewed the exhibition and came back with a photo essay featuring bowling video games, photoshop gradients, bad golfers and epic sunglasses.
Posted inOpinion
Cory Arcangel’s Surrealist Super Mario
New media and internet artist Cory Arcangel often appropriates artifacts from earlier digital times for his artwork. In a series of videos, Arcangel hacks cartridges of the original Nintendo game Super Mario Bros., twisting the game’s graphics into surreal reinterpretations.
Posted inNews
NEA Now Funds Video Games
The National Endowment for the Arts now funds a hotly-debated form of art: video games. With the newly designated “Arts in Media” program, $10,000 to $200,000 grants from the organization can now be used to fund the production of digital games, multimedia art work and interactive applications.
Posted inOpinion
What’s Wrong With the Smithsonian’s Crowd-Sourced Video Game History?
After a two-month-long public vote, the Smithsonian has released the results of its poll to determine the most important video games in history, for their upcoming The Art of Video Game exhibition. The selection attempts to provide a comprehensive canon of historical video games, but there are a few things wrong here.
Posted inArt
Play a Giorgio de Chirico-Inspired Surrealist Video Game
Artist Patrick Smith’s Windosill, a Flash-based video game that’s playable in your internet browser, is a fascinating work both for its slow, subtle game play and its visual inspirations, namely proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s empty landscapes and Philip Guston’s still-life paintings.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
Every Sunday, we bring you a list of links from around the web. This is all the stuff we’re reading when we’re not writing stuff on the blog for you to read! Got that? This week pulls together video game criticizin’, magazine illustratin’, apartment decoratin’ and wine makin’. No matter what the topic, we’ve got you covered for weekend web hits.
Posted inArt
Digital Nostalgia
Sometime around February 14, an internet phenomenon erupted as Charles Hoey and Pete Smith announced they had found a lost game cartridge for the original Nintendo video game system (NES). This cartridge was an unlabeled video game version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famed novel The Great Gatsby. Depicted in chunky 8-bit pixels, a boomerang-hatted Nick Carraway dashes through a game world of flappers, bellhops and gangsters. It even came with a vintage advertisement and a game manual that looked straight out of the 80s. The trick? This game wasn’t found; it was made in 2010. Thus we are rushed into an era of digital nostalgia.
