Players are Artists Too
An absolutely incredible talk by Henry Lowood, curator for the history of science and technology collections and film and media collections at Stanford University, at the Art History of Games Symposium on February 5, 2010.
This talk is basically what I’m all about.
(Source: youtube.com, via post-nerdism)
I’ve been keeping this news largely under wraps for the last while, but now that the big day is nearing, I’d like to tell everyone about it. If you click on the picture above, you’ll be able to get a little more infor on the project. I’ll be doing a series of rom-hacks for the NES as visual…
manwitha.mov
My submission for the ‘Run Computer Run’ AR show exhibition ‘Economics + The Immaterial’: avant-guard film classic ‘Man With A Movie Camera’ meets 8-Bit aesthetics of computers which had an impact in Russia.
Apologies for gratuitous self-promotion - video and synopsis below:
manwitha.mov from Rich Oglesby on Vimeo.
Created for the ‘Economics + The Immaterial’ exhibition, part of the ‘Run Computer Run’ show at the Rua Red Gallery from May 25 to 13 July.
runcomputerrun.com/?page_id=8313A visual experiment of curiosity and theoretical connections, of culture and technology (in particular, Russia), information transference and reproduction through media, analogue and digital.
The project aims to be a combination of two Russian cultural artifacts, a visualization of the results. First, “Man With A Movie Camera”, an avant-guard film directed by Dziga Vertov, demonstrated the creative use of filming, employing techniques developed and practiced for years by the director. In the context of this piece, the original film could be considered a “demoscene production”, exploring and pushing the creative possibilities of a technology. Second, the growth of ZX Spectrum clones in Russia during the 1980′s, in which colour and cheap digital computing grew from reverse-engineering and redevelopment. The availability of these various computer clones evolved a homebrew creative scene around the former Soviet bloc. There is still a strong creative demoscene around these machines in Russia today.
The whole of the ‘Man With A Movie Camera’ film has been converted into a representational format within the ZX Spectrum graphics protocol, reduced to 256 by 192 pixels, with each 8 by 8 pixel area represented by just two colours available from the system. The original file was downloaded from the internet (in .mov format) – it is worth bearing in mind that this file of information itself has travelled to and from various technological formats itself: without even taking into consideration the editing and filming or the original film, the information has been transferred to video tape, then a digital video file, and then on a video hosting site, each stage which has it’s own technical protocols which would effect the fidelity of visual representation.
The film has been converted to ZX Spectrum visual protocol manually on a shot by shot basis to produce the best representation of the film as much as possible.
(Source: movementcast, via -clu-)
Open Call: Written Works for Vector Annual
Deadline: September 1, 2013
In February of 2013, Team Vector launched the inaugual Vector Game + Art Convergence, a four day Game Art Festival and Symposium centred around digital games as tools and inspiration for contemporary art making….
Featured work from the Rhizome Artbase: Data Diaries, Cory Archangel (2002)
Every so often an artist makes a work of art by doing almost nothing. No hours of torturous labor, no deep emotional expression, just a simple discovery and out it pops. What did Cory Arcangel do in this piece? Next to nothing. The computer did the work, and he just gave it a form. His discovery was this: take a huge data file—in this case his computer’s memory file—and fool Quicktime into thinking it’s a video file. Then press play. Your computer’s memory is now video art. Quicktime plays right through, not knowing that the squiggles and shards on the screen are actually the bits and bytes of the computer’s own brain. The data was always right in front of your nose. Now you can watch it.
In college Cory used to slip into the public computer clusters, saddle up to a machine and pull what’s called a “core dump.” …
(via lawnmall)
I’ve been doing a fair bit of research of newer stories or stories from the edges of gaming culture that.. Some of them rediculous; some of them down right creepy.But I’ve also beeningI thinking about some of the more enduring myths, of games whose existence has never truly been confirmed. I think about these stories as gaming culture’s bloody mary or the munchkin hanging himself in the background of a scene in the Wizard of Oz. Stories that stand the test of time, and some of these, we likely could never truly investigate their origins. I’m thinking of one in particular, one which is probably gaming cultures oldest creepy legend.. and that is the story of a game named after an Ancient Greek Historian. It is a tale of madness and government conspiracy, with a storied history of hoaxes and false claims, and yet it endures. Friends, I give you .. the story of ..
