Gameworld

The title GameWorld invokes three interrelated but distinct worlds. First is the designed world within a videogame, which includes both its perceptual attributes and the system of rules, behaviors and properties that provide its form. Second is the creative ecology composed of industry and academia that is emerging around videogames. The third world is the realm of contemporary culture, and the extent to which it is colored by videogames and their offshoot, virtual worlds. We hope to show the many points of intersection between videogames, art and culture through the presentation of work from over forty artists and game designers, and, in spite of their status as diversion, reveal games to be an expressive enterprise worthy of attention and study. Whether you play them or not, videogames matter.

• Exhibition: Gameworld
• Location: Laboral Centro de arte, Gijon, Spain
• Dates: 30 march, 2007 - 30 June, 2007
• Curator: Carl Goodman
• Associate Curator: Daphne Dragona
• Curatorial Advisors: Chris Burke, Alexander Galloway, Henry Lowood, Julian Oliver, Helen Stuckey
• Games: Spacewar (Graetz, Russell, Wiitanen); Star Raiders (Doug Neubauer); Zork (Marc Blank & Dave Lebling); Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov); Civilization I & II (Sid Meier): Sim City (Will Wright); Super Mario 3 (Shigeru Miyamoto - Nintendo); Warcraft series (Blizzard Entertainment); Doom (ID Software); Sensible World of Soccer (John Hare - Sensible Software)
• Experimental: Flow (Jenova Chen, Kellee Santiago); We Love Katamari (Keita Takahashi - Namco); Braid (Jonathan Blow et al - Number None); Border Games (El Fiambrera Obrera); Arcade Wire (Ian Bogost, Gonzalo Frasca); Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (Danny Ledone); 2nd Person Shooter (Julian Oliver); Darkgame (Eddo Stern); Once More With Feeling (Ken Perlin - NYU MRL); Facade (Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern); Invaders! (Douglas Edric Stanley); axbx (Brent Gustafson); TFT Tennis (Dirk Eijbouts); Pongmechanik (Niklas Roy); AR Tennis (Hitlab New Zealand); Furminator (Fur Collaboriative); Movie Sandbox - Animachine (Friedrich Kirschner); Domestic (Mary Flanagan); Endless Forest (Tale of Tales)
• Machinima: Sheik Attack (Eddo Stern); This Spartan Life (Chris Burke); She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh); Avatar Portraits (Eva and Franco Mattes); 650 Polygon John Carmack (Brody Condon); FPS and WOW (Aram Bartholl); Screen Shots (John Haddock); Readyplayed (Ludic Society); LARP (Brody Condon); WOW and Need for Speed 2 Documentary (Aram Bartholl); Boys in the Hood (Axel Stockburger); Dead in Iraq (Joseph Delappe); The War Room (Joan Leandre); Notbot (Walter Langelaar); Retroyou (Joan Leandre); Space(E)scape (Workspace Unlimited); Super Mario Sleeping (Miltos Manetas); Super Mario Movie (Cory Archangel & Paperrad)

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be in Spain all week preparing for this exhibition. Although I don’t have the time, I said yes simply because it’s a pretty impressive lineup for an exhibition on classic video games, emerging games (such as the lovely Flow), critical games (ex. Darkgame), art-games, unheimlich avatars, etc. I should mention that I grabbed the above list from the Braid blog [link] and not from the Laboral website itself which has yet to publish a full list. So this list might be incorrect/incomplete. But since I saw some of the behind the scenes activity, I do know that many of those artists and/or games will be there, and I just love the list itself even if it is innacurate : Katamari Damacy? Check. Sheik Attack? Check. Furminator? Check. Pongmechanik? Check. Super Mario Movie? Check. Shigeru Miyamoto meets Mary Flanagan? Whynot!?

From my point of view (and Carl knows this already), I will be showing what I consider to be one of my weakest works — a fairly personal work from 2001 that I feel has lost its context, long since stolen by other events; in fact, events that have purposefully been designed to render it unreadable. I’m of course talking about the Iraq war, and you have to give it to Bush when it comes to appropriation: if he were an artist, he’d been an even greater thief than Picasso. But I trust Mr. Goodman’s judgement, as I appreciate his take on gaming as an emerging art form — and no, that doesn’t mean that I think video games are art; I used the word « emerging » there (sheesh, get a life).

So I’m installing a work that the public seems to enjoy, not only because everyone loves Space Invaders, but because you can play it with your body. Further proof that the future is EyeToy and the Wii.

For this exhibit, I’ll be re-working the surveillance code quite a bit, and trying to plug OpenFrameworks into the system, not only because it’s cool, but because it’s ultimately the way to go — surveillance should really be done with hardware specific compiled code, although I might start a flamewar with that comment. I’ll also be adapting the program to the space, but I’ll have to get there before I can start work on that.

I’ve also been looking at plugging in oscpack, because OpenFrameworks is too early (not even public beta) and all the planned libraries such as OSC aren’t linked up yet. But oscpack unfortunately doesn’t do the actual routing, so I might end up using MIDI instead. And if all that doesn’t work, I’ll fall back onto some other tried and true solution, i.e. Processing or (gasp) TrackThemColors.