A Funny Lol, for example
No surprise that I picked a videogame reference. Your princess is in another castle.
Archive for October, 2007
Lolspace
Sara and I have been working on a piece that we’re calling Lolspace, which will eventually live on the web at lolspace.org and hopefully will have a temporary installation as a blog in the Myhren Gallery here at DU. We’ve both been spending some time looking at old space music LP covers and have become interested in a subversive critique of the “space fuck” imagery (check out the Vonnegut story) that ranges from nude women laying across the cosmos to men riding rockets into the void of space. A parallel interest has been the Lolcats, or Caturday phenomenon, in which Internet users take cute pictures of cats (and other animals), which have a history of polluting Internet space in the minds of some people, and create simple parody of the pictures by attaching meaning to them through lolspeak.
Here’s one example. We hope to have a set of 16 in the end, but that could change depending on how we feel once we start posting to our blog.
Live Cinema/VJ Project
From last year; a mix of public domain footage, footage recorded from my car and backyard, and a soundtrack remixed from Air, Aphex Twin, Broken Social Scene, and Sigur Ros. I composed footage of cars and traffic with the natural traffic and movement of wind.
Featured in Water Cooler Games
Ian Bogost is one of my favorite writers/theorists/makers on games, and we’ve had some group conversations over email along with several people in the games network in Denver and elsewhere. He was in Denver earlier this year and came to give a talk to the Colorado Game Developers Association meeting. The email conversations are often started by Devin Monnens (a fellow eMAD student) and we usually get some interesting back and forth discussion from them. I recently found that a couple of these conversations made Water Cooler Games, Ian and Gonzalo Frasca’s game-related blog. First, a reaction to a game used to test the racial bias of Denver Police Department officers. Second, a comment I made about the similarity of disaster attacks you can invoke in SimCity to real-life terrorist disasters.
Ian’s new book, Persuasive Games, is partly a discussion of the rhetorical qualities of the games (and their rule systems).
Finally, he’s the only game designer that I know of (besides Will Wright) to have appeared as a guest on Colbert Report (video here).
Live Scoring Performance
Here’s video footage of a performance I did last year with the group of Advanced Audio Production students. It was more of a proof of concept of the technology, which took a long time to get configured and just working, so the quality of the audio and the performance in general were not what I had hoped. The Wii remote triggers audio, while the video is simply a capture of gameplay from the classic Nintendo game Metroid. I’m interested in experimenting with the way that sound influences the formation of images in our minds, and especially in the immediate reception of sound vs. the iterative process of imaging. There are video images on the screen, but there is also the image of the player using a game controller to trigger the sounds. I’m thinking of working more on this piece to submit it as an installation for the upcoming student/alumni show in the Myhren Gallery.
Monday’s Presentation
I’m presenting my project plan for this quarter in class tomorrow and wanted to post a rough outline and collection of links to guide me, and to let everyone know what I’m up to.
The video piece (available here and embedded in the previous post) is a combination of machinima (footage from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, and Shadow of the Colossus) and live-action, public domain US Military footage. I’m really concerned with the propagation of the message that war is simulation, and with recruitment based on this premise. The US Army and Navy both promote games on their websites, and both actually have a dedicated videogame (America’s Army being far more popular and robust than the Navy’s Strike & Retrieve Navy Training Exercise).
Where does “the other” fit into the stories told by America’s Army, and by the media construction of war in general? One project, Dead in Iraq, is one response to this question (for which “the other” is actually the dead US soldier, whose face and body has become invisible). Joseph DeLappe logs onto the game and simply reads the names of US Soldiers killed in the current war in Iraq, to various reactions from players in the game.
For those who don’t seek out the games, there is always recruiting. Here’s a story about the Air Force recruiting with the popular first-person shooter Halo 2. Halo 3 is being used to recruit for an entirely different army.
The piece is called Layers in order to address the visual layers of indirection involved in modern, distance, “smart” warfare. Other questions I’d like to address with the final piece:
- What is Machinima? Is it simply re-enactment of movies in a virtual environment? Here’s one example, in which the military re-enactment simply refers to “the enemy” as he is comically killed in the game engine.
- Who controls the images captured from videogames? What are the “fair use” rights of producers?
- Can part of play be a critique when it comes to videogames?
- Finally, where is the propaganda to recruit volunteers for local, humanitarian service to those who need it? How can games be used for these ends?
I would like to make a series of video pieces along similar formal lines and exhibit them together in a show, as well as online. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, so any feedback here would be very helpful.
Layers Video Project
This is a project I worked on last year for a digital cinema course. It also played as an honorable mention in the ADAPT festival, but I’m at the point where I’d like to rework it and also to work more on integration of “virtual” and “real” footage. I think this will be a larger project for me this quarter. In general, I’m looking to examine games critically, and in this case stealth videogames as they relate to the depersonalization of war. I captured all the game footage within and found the military footage on archive.org. This was some of my first work in video, so I think the intro text should be redone, but I am also concerned that the soundtrack is sensational. Some of this fits into machinima, but I don’t know if there’s a term to describe the positioning of machinima-like footage with real footage to form a narrative. I’m also aware that Real and Virtual are problematic; the particular footage I use is all simulacrum. I welcome (in fact am looking for) feedback on this.
I’ll be posting more video work soon.
Built with Processing
An interesting interview with Matt Wade and Karsten Schmidt of Moving Brands about their use of Processing, featuring footage of some really cool installation projects that use Processing.
Some notes on the title
We humans run on something; depending on your frame it’s chemicals, energy, biology, electricity. My frame is that we run on electricity, and that the connections forged by the human imagination are electric. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we are computers (even if we share some of the characteristics), but among all of it’s organic matter, the brain does act like a very dynamic circuit. So, we are electric.
Music of Guitar Hero, Part 1
[audio:guitarHeroMusic1.mp3]
Here’s an audio piece that I recorded and mixed as a meme. On a previous post I tried to identify my meme and came up with this: “my meme really has to do with the feedback between critical and cultural reception of games as rhetoric and the creation of intentionally rhetorical (through the rules of their systems) games.” While this piece doesn’t exactly do that, it does deal with another of my interests, which is to find ways to engage creatively with the environments, interfaces, and rules that make up the games we play.
I stumbled upon an idea that I had been discussing with a friend that represented this and took it a step further by critiquing so-called “rhythm” games. This genre of videogames usually involves trying to match visual cues on the screen that correspond to the beat or melodic parts of a song. It is impossible to play the game Guitar Hero without hearing the clickity-click of the specialized guitar controller that comes with the game, but most of the time you don’t listen to it. It occurred to me that it is making it’s own music; this is my first attempt at recording and arranging this sound.
