Archive for the ‘videogames’ tag
In the Name of Kernel! Lonely Record Session, Version I
Joan Leandre, In the Name of Kernel ! Lonely Record Session, Version I, 2009. HD video, 00:17:56. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.
Quante stanze ha un cubo?
Julian Oliver, LevelHead, 2008
Published in L’Unità, 18.01.2009, p. 43
Quante stanze ha un cubo?
L’artista Julian Oliver ha progettato un rompicapo alla Escher che unisce divertimento, architettura e arte
Non cercatelo sugli scaffali dei negozi: non lo trovereste. In rete potreste imbattervi in qualche video di presentazione, e nelle istruzioni per fabbricarvelo da voi, se avete le competenze necessarie (è open source). Per ora, se avete voglia di giocarci, non potete far altro che inseguirlo nei numerosi festival di arte elettronica in cui, da qualche mese, ha fatto impazzire migliaia di visitatori. Assicurato: ne vale la pena.
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Pixelstyle
Celebrating the aesthetics of pixel, whether from games, demos, original artwork or anything else.
A wonderful blog mantained by Alex Bond / enso.
Art and Videogames. Enclosures and border crossings
© Jim Murray 2005
Domenico Quaranta, “Art and Videogames. Enclosures and border crossings”, in Debora Ferrari, Luca Traini, The Art of Games. Nuove frontiere tra gioco e bellezza, exhibition catalogue, Aosta, Centro Saint Bénin, May 28 – November 8, 2009, pp. 99 – 117.
Prologue
1949: Andrew Warhola, the son of a factory worker of Rusyn origin in Pittsburgh, arrives in New York. He had studied art, and his blotted line drawings, which made an uncertain, wavering line on the paper, attracted the attention of the art director of Glamour, who commissioned a series of drawings of shoes for the magazine. In the space of a few years Andrew became “the most sought-after illustrator of women’s accessories in New York”, as Calvin Tomkins wrote1. He changed his name to Andy Warhol, met Truman Capote, had his nose redone, founded a company and started making a lot of money, yet he was not satisfied. The art world kept him on the margin, despite his various attempts to make inroads. Paradoxically, his refined blotted line drawings of food, shoes and other consumer items looked too personal, too subtle and too nonchalant to carve a niche in the avant-garde art scene of the day –divided as it was between the macho heroism of Abstract Expressionism, and the impersonality of Pop Art.2 It was attending Leo Castelli’s gallery, where he saw the work of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, that Andy found the path that would lead him to success: instead of depicting consumer goods, he began serial reproductions, first using a cold, impersonal style of painting, then a mechanical process (silkscreen printing). From elegant shoes decorated with gold-leaf he passed to giant, brutal cans of Campbell’s soup. In 1963 he confessed: “[When I was doing advertising] I’d have to invent and now I don’t; those commercial drawings would have feelings, they would have a style… the attitude had feeling to it.”
What he did from that moment on changed the course of contemporary art. As for the drawings, they remained at the bottom of a drawer for years before being discovered. We now see them as engaging works of art: our idea of art has changed, making room for something that was not admitted in the past.
A GAME FOR PLEASURE. Interview with Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey
A GAME FOR PLEASURE. Interview with Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey
by Domenico Quaranta
© A Minima. All rights reserved
“We are trying to make a game that does not have any of the conventions that we dislike so much and which, in our opinion, ruin a lot of the joy that can be found in games.” With these words, Michael Samyn & Auriea Harvey are introducing 8, that should be published in January 2007. Samyn and Harvey, at first independently (as zuper! and entropy8), then together (as entropy8zuper) developed during the Nineties a double career of artists and multimedia designers. In 2002 they founded Tale of Tales, a games development studio. This name is the title of a famous collection of Italian fairy tales, Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile (1634): but it gets also all the heritage of the frame stories (from The Arabian Nights to Boccaccio’s Decameron) and it links them to the open and non-linear narratives of the time of multimedia.
