You might remember James Barnett‘s “fauxvist” series of videogame landscapes, which I posted on Offworld last summer. He was also one of the very first Kickstarter projects and, because of certain internet community affiliations, I was an early supporter. Thanks in part to all of these things I had the option to have a specially commissioned painting from James. As I very much enjoyed the fauxvist landscapes, I went for more of that.
I thought about what videogame vistas I liked and wanted to see recreated in this fashion (leaned towards Metroid Prime, to be honest) but it soon became apparent that I was going abroad and a painting wasn’t the most practical thing to bring with me, so it morphed into a thank you gift to my friend JP. The setting became obvious: Bioshock‘s Arcadia. I must have a thing for big, artificial environments being consumed by nature (see Metroid Prime) because that was my unbiased favourite area in Bioshock. I figured he’d appreciate it more anyway on account of, you know, his design work on that specific map. The painting arrived yesterday so I can finally post it:
Coming from Nick Stumpo, whose abnormal behavior child (abc) I fondly remember as one of the early paragons of the emerging flash/web/motion design scene back when Flash 5 was still fresh, is Fatty Bum Bum. An installation slash game Flash piece by Hanazuki for the Cinekid festival.
From a game design perspective, Fatty Bum Bum is rather poor. The controls are a little unresponsive, not mapping properly to your mouse position or click actions. It’s hard to read — it wasn’t until my second playthrough before I realized what the hell was going on — and it’s impossible to tell if you are being penalized or rewarded for your actions. And, of course, the random item popping up collect-a-thon mechanics are, well, boring.
But as a piece of interactive design and animation, it really is something else. There’s so much variety in the animations, and they’re all weird and goofy and entertaining, that you are compelled to play through it a couple of times. It might be mechanically poor, but the whimsy of the whole thing is enough to support it for, at least, two or three passes. For something designed to be an installation, where attention is fleeting, it is perfectly suited. Location is everything.
The following post was originally meant for Offworld, but, well, you know. It’s sad to see it end as a its own entity — it’s subsumed into the cluttered new Boing Boing design — and I’m not saying that as someone who occasionally contributed. I was a fan long before my first post there. That said, do follow Brandon’s weblog for any possible new, post-Offworld developments.
Cubie
sadmb’s Cubie (embedded above) is a java powered music creation application that, by the author’s own admission, takes a great deal of influence from puzzle games. The above video, a demo of a recent touch-screen implementation, certainly shows this: blocks fall from above as if from Lumines; pieces, and the entire stage, are rotated off to the side as in a Rubik’s cube.
The aesthetic is also very game-like, so much so that I wish that it was an actual game that I could play and not an open-ended digital musical instrument. Designed with live performance in mind, it is, as the site claims, also of interest to those who like unidentifiable but curious thing. I certainly do.
Cubie [sadmb.com, freely downloadable version available]
Crystal Castles is the latest buzz-making indie band to emerge out of Toronto, which has been a relative hotbed of cool independent (and post-independent) music. It’s a scene that has spawned the likes of MSTRKRFT, Holy Fuck and, before them, Death From Above 1979 and Broken Social Scene and the multitudes of artists connected to them in every conceivable way (like Feist.) The two-piece of Crystal Castles, instrumentalist Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass, comes out blazing with fully armed synthesizers and their primary weapon of choice is a modded keyboard with an Atari 5200 chip in it. Yes, they’re basically creating Chiptunes.
I love chiptunes. It’s an aesthetic that has great modern and nostalgic appeal to me. The first music that I payed any attention to in my life was generated by an NES sound chip, and the last album that I listened to wasn’t very different. In the last five years I’ve been to two live shows: one was a friend’s band and the other featured bit shifter. So yes, it’s a sound I have a certain nerdy affinity to. I’m not the only one as it’s a thriving scene. There’s a countless number of artists, numerouslabels, a full-on four day music festival (Report part 1, part 2) and even a documentaryor two.
Crystal Castles, whose sound I would describe as “The Knife if they were on 8-bit peoples, with a touch of Atari Teenage Riot“, doesn’t identify with that scene at all. Hell, their name isn’t a reference to the Atari videogame (as I first thought), it’s a reference to She-Ra. It’s not the world they came from. In an interview with Exclaim!, they say as much:
It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.
That’s fine. That’s great. Music history isn’t a linear path; influence happens in parallel. The kids that grew up with the SID chips and the Atari and the NES, now in their twenties and thirties, all have personal experiences with that nostalgia and it will manifest itself in ways unique to them. It’s not synchronicity, it’s culture. What irks me about this isn’t the band, it’s the media writing about the band.
It’s not my intent to start a “my subculture is better than your subculture” pissing match — we’d lose, the indie army is far crazier and more numerous — but I hate how the oft ignored, under the radar and frequently dismissed 8-bit aesthetic that defined the chiptune world years and years ago is now seen as this great and novel innovation. It’s hyperbolic articles like this one that stir my shit. Attaching a classic game system sound chip to a keyboard makes for a totally unique and new sound? They are the most exciting and original band in the world right now? Really?
Fan-video for “xxzxcuzx me”.
Tracks like “xxzxcuzx me” and “Love and Caring” and “Alice Practice” have been described by some as “8-bit terror”. It’s mosh-pit music for the Nintendo generation and the crowd reactions to their performances reveal as much. Suburban ghetto music writes:
The pit was open and as the ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches washed over me I was inspired to run in, fists waving, until I was pushed out by three different people roughly twice my size. Usually I am one to shy away from the actual ‘moshing’ but repeatedly I was going for it, especially when killer track ‘Alice Practice’ came on.
That “killer track” is oft described by Crystal Castles as an “accident.” What’s even more telling is that they seem rather ambivalent to that glitchy sound. In interviews they say that they did it to be annoying:
We like to use sounds that annoy people. Especially in the earlier songs, like “xxzxcuzx me†— that was just to annoy everyone. It’s really strange when people tell us it’s their favourite song.
That annoying sound — the very same one that is getting all the praise for being “innovative” and “something completely new” — is the very same sound that has been previously derided as nerdy nostalgic noise with no musical value. Look no further than Paul Ford’s “Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s” for proof of this dismissal. There are threefour chiptune artists on that list and they all have one circle ratings. Aonami is described as “8-bit gunk” and Receptors gets the snarky “Can they win the boss level?” treatment. If anything, it proves that reviewing music is no different than reviewing the last time you masturbated: immeasurably personal and subjective.
That’s not to say that there isn’t any value in that — there is — it just depends on the context that is brought to the review. Paul Ford dismisses Receptors as noise; I hear Kraftwerkian lo-fi bit-pop. That’s my experience with it, no doubt fueled by the knwoledge that the man behind Receptors is the man behind 8-bit Operators, the chiptune Kraftwerk cover album. An album that is notable for being published by a “mainstream” label, AstralWerks. And when he hears as “8-bit gunk”, I hear a head bopping mix of nostalgia and awesome.
It’s a matter of perspective. When those not familiar with that chiptune “8-bit terror” sound hear it coming from Crystal Castles, and they like it, they like it because it’s something new and fresh and innovative. For me, however, it’s a sound that I’m already intimate with. I enjoy it because I know it. I have a frame of reference to it. I know of other acts and performances and songs with which I can compare their aesthetic to. When I hear about the mosh-pits to songs like “Alice Practice” and “xxzxcuzx me”, as mentioned above, I think about this performance by Hally at the Blip Festival.
I find this Gradius-inspired tune and performance to be as good as anything produced by Crystal Castles.
As with everything else, it’s all been done before. David Sugar mixed nanoloop-powered Gameboy chiptunes with hip-hop over a year ago.
Beck did his thing three years ago with Ghettochip Malfunction on the Hell Yes EP. And Welle:Erdball have been doing it for over a decade. None of that matters though. Whether they’re seen as “innovative” or indie cool or as chiptune artists doesn’t change the fact that their music is fantastic. Their take on that 8-bit aesthetic is distinctly theirs. It’s personal. It’s good. It’s recommended. A fine addition to the chiptune canon.
Their debut self-titled album comes out this week.
Monday afternoon I spent wandering around the Toronto International Art Fair. It’s about as good of an art gallery as you can hope to find temporarily housed in a giant convention centre. It is a show that is geared more towards art collectors and dealers than mere gallery hoppers but it’s still interesting enough for the regular observer. Especially since it gives you a very tiny sneak peak behind the scenes of the art world through various overheard conversations and, especially, the price tags affixed to nearly every work. As usual, the stuff that I found to be most interesting ranged in the one to four thousand dollar range, the low end of the spectrum. The most banal, ho-hum art tended to be in the six figure range. Go figure.
One of the artists that I really liked there was Eric Liot. His work on show could best be described as geek pop-culture collages mounted (screwed) on wood. Here are some examples. The collages mix everything from comics and advertising and random ephemera, to anime and film and religious and political iconography. One of the pieces even had a very prominent Tribes 2 installation CD screwed right onto it. In hindsight I should have at least bought one of his books.
There were also a number of Liu Bolin prints who’s best known for his “urban camouflage” (not to be confused with the other, similar, urban camouflage). The book carvings of Brian Dettmer were also impressive, especially in person (photos don’t show the depth very well.) Jane Edden had some electronic, sound sculptures. Really nice stuff but I’m partial to art involving electronic parts.
Which leads me to the Robotic Chair. I’ve read about it Border Crossings along with all the various weblogs that posted it a while ago but at the Art Fair I could see it in person. Watching a chair reassemble itself was oddly hypnotic. I like it a lot. It combines three things I like into one piece: art, technology and sitting. Here’s a video I took of it (unfortunately I didn’t capture it falling apart as this was the last showing of it before a break): Robotic Chair on Vimeo.
The 2007 Toronto Film Festival is approaching and many a film is being announced. Along with those, the TIFF Group recently announced its exhibits and installations which, amongst other things, includes a showing of Into The Pixel: The 2007 Into the Pixel Art Exhibition (ITP) is an exploration and celebration of the art of the video game, curated by interactive industry veterans and experts from the art establishment.
Torontoistwrote about the exhibit and said of it: It’s nice to see the Toronto International Film Festival take a greater interest in mediums other than film–particularly video games–in order to highlight their artistic and cultural relevance. Roger Ebert won’t be pleased, but Torontoist hopes they continue to increase the role of multimedia in the festival.
sigh. The “guest” comment there is, clearly, mine. Edited, I repost it for local posterity:
I don’t want to retread on this tired subject, because it’s been done and I’ve written about it enough already, but an art gallery showing a bunch of concept drawings and game art is not a showing that embraces a new medium. It’s embracing an old medium — painting and illustration — that’s just taking on a video game related theme.
To embrace video games is to embrace interactivity. That’s the whole point of the medium. Without it, it’s just a bunch of paintings or films. Boring films, mostly.
It’d be like having a “film festival” but only showing production photos; it misses the point.
The Tblisi Ministry of Transport is very constructivist and/or brutalist. Basically, very Soviet. It also bears a striking resemblence to the kind of structures that you’d find in future-set FPS games. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Half-Life 2 is set in an Eastern European styled city.
It makes me wonder if anybody has done (I’m sure somebody has) a study on architectural/civic design as represented in video games. Could be an interesting subject.
If going to a show where an orchestra plays music from video games makes me a nerd, then what does it mean when I go to two such shows in a month? After going to Video Games Live a month ago with (recap writing) Jenn, Saturday night I attended Play! A Video Game Symphony. The main difference between the two shows was the $50+ price disparity, which reflected itself in the quality of the arrangements, the guests, the size of the orchestra, the audience (and how it was dressed), and the lushness of the music. Maybe I’ll write a review later.
The other stuff wasn’t as compelling. There were a lot of nice galleries open — and for the first time I saw the “Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art”, which was more interesting than I thought it would be — but those can be seen on any normal day without all the crowds. There was a tree wrapped in tin foil. OK. There was a wall with shoes on it. OK!? There was a projection of sheep on the Planetarium. OK. There was a projection of The Three Stooges on a wall, played at a fraction of normal speed. OK. There were some funky light things at Trinity Bellwoods and at the Drake and the Gladstone, but apart from that, there was only the fog. And it was muddy. But it was worth it.
Looks like it’s “official” now, even though the news has been (sort of) out there for over a month. Frank Gehry will be redesigning — transforming, if you will — the Art Gallery of Ontario. With everything else that’s being built, I hope that by the next decade Toronto will no longer be one of the most architecturally boring metropolises in the world. If anything, I should hope that the new AGO will counter-act and counter-balance that god awfulOCAD design.
XHTML doesn’t have the proper tags to fully emphasize just how awful it really is.
The scary thing is: OCAD is right next door to the AGO. God, that’s going to be some serious contrast of styles.
For no reason other than for looking at them, here’s a bunch of paintings (and one collage) I like. Some of these fit my current mood; then again, they fit my always mood, which is probably why I like them in the first place.
I like the illustrations. I don’t like how they open in a really small pop-up window that is supposed to auto-resize itself, but since I use Firebird with window auto-resizing disabled, I have to do it manually every time. El retardo.
Came across Indie Gamer today. While not the best looking of sites, nor the most chock full of information, it does serve as a sort of “mini-portal” to the independent game dev scene. There’s some links to other indie game review sites and some developers. I think I’m going to check out some of the more original games I find there. Perhaps that might offset all the complaints about the lack of originality coming down from the big publishers.
I’m very much for the convergence of digital games and art. It’s just that if art is under the guise of a “game”, it should act as a “game.” Often times artists misconstrue simple interactivity with gameplay. While that is intentional in some cases (or ironic, or clever, or whatever), it’s often an overlooked aspect of the greater picture. Nobody wants to involve themselves with a game that is a chore, regardless of the statement it contains. The gameplay is crucial; and making fine, balanced, and enjoyable gameplay is, in itself, an artform.
Without the politicians and stiffs, it was surprisingly difficult to whittle it down to just five, since there are so many utter cunts out there. In true drunken ramble style, Sam and I broke out a pen and paper and devised an impromptu ratings system to help us decide.
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
