Video/Game Art Playlist
Here’s a collection of videos related to game art, machinima, and remediated games. I’ll be incorporating this into my artist presentation in a few weeks for my Seminar class.
Archive for meme
Mario Mashups
A couple interesting game universe mashups – Mario & Halo and Mario & MegaMan. Both of the games were done with Game Maker.
Update on Lolspace
The four pieces that I showed you a picture of in my last post sold! I went to check out the closing show and met Kym, the woman who bought all four because they made her laugh. She is a member of the Kanon Art Collective, a gallery in the art district on Santa Fe. I’m hoping at some point to do some larger prints of these.
Lolspace in Real Space
A few prints from Lolspace are going to be a part of the 4x4x400 exhibit running from December 7th to December 13th at Orange Cat Studios in Denver. It should be a neat show – four hundred pieces of art, the only requirement that they measure 4 inches by 4 inches.
The opening party is tonight from 5-11PM. The space is open from 5-9PM on Saturday, December 8th to Thursday, December 13 (Thursday will also be a closing party).
Ours are high-quality prints mounted on foamcore. There’s a low-quality shot below.
Lolspace Update
I’ve recently been researching Internet memes and am finding some really interesting parallels with works I’ve read on the topic of Détournement. Guy Debord’s Methods of Détournement, for example, talks specifically about combining “two worlds of feeling,” which I take as representing the modern notion of the meme as a template for creation. Here’s the full quote:
“The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.”
The idea of using two memes allows for a powerful juxtaposition that culturally noisier work might prevent, or at least complicate. The lolspace project is really interested in making almost-parody using the lolcat Internet meme and the template of space as virgin and space exploration as phallic as represented on so many space music records from the sixties. While obvious on the album covers, the motivations and cultural implications are far-reaching and emblematic of imperialism. Our full artist statement is below:
In the past year, the internet meme Lolcats has exploded into the particpatory culture’s consciousness. By mixing humorous sayings and adorable images of cats and other pets, Internet users created détournement which critiqued this most despised Internet content (see cuteoverload.com). Blogs such as icanhascheezburger.com and lolsecretz.blogspot.com quickly created infectious content, establishing communities around the Lolcat internet meme and propagating its form.
By utilizing the Lolcats meme frameworks we aim to establish critical dialogue around the representations of space as virgin and space exploration as phallic. Space pop album covers often illustrate this dialog, representing women as sexual objects, men as debonaire explorers/conquerers and space as other. The innocent tone of the “lolspeak” text allows for subversive messages. By displaying these images in an interactive weblog (up soon at lolspace.org) similar to their inspirations, we also challenge the space of the gallery.
A Funny Lol, for example
No surprise that I picked a videogame reference. Your princess is in another castle.
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.
