Yesterday Tim, Rosa, me, Sabrina, Max, Mariam, Frank, James and the Dave’s were hanging around this old Moon Patrol arcade game after omelets. …And now there gone.

I haven’t made a self-portrait in a long time. I was sick for my birthday and having my friends around helped me keep my spirits up, but now I am back at home in bed. My cold has caught up with me and there is not much you can do when you’re sick except think. It’s lonely, especially when coming down off the high you feel when you get to spend time with old friends you rarely see. Lying here, I begin to ruminate on the fact that I am 3 decades old. …And at this point it’s gotten hard to write. This kind of isolation / uncertainty in my head is easier to express with pixels than words I guess.

Top photo by Andrew Ho
All others by John Bruneau.

Works / San Jose celebrated its grand reopening with re:group, the members exhibition. My most recent work to date “Bombs ¬ ROMs” made its debut. ‘¬’ is scientific negation, pronounced ‘not’. “Bombs ¬ ROMs” is based on my conflicting feelings toward the 80s. My art is influenced heavily by video game nostalgia. Yet the 80s were a time of extreme patriotism and nationalism in the US. The 80s cold war, Regan era mindset of USA #1! now days seams laughable if not embarrassing. This mindset however is often carried on by those heroes of the 80s, the classic arcade world record holders. For many of them it still is about keeping USA on top of the high score list. Thus this piece has become my war on terror era critique on myself. In it I am trying to reconcile my own feelings of love and nostalgia for 80s video game culture and the political era in which it blossomed.

“Bombs ¬ ROMs” was created using Atari 2600 ROMs. The “USA” Bombs and the exploding city background were each created in Batari Basic. Batari Basic is coding language based on Basic which all enables one to write and compile their own Atari 2600 ROMs. These two ROMs we then loaded in jit.atari2600 a library for Max/MSP/Jitter that functions as an Atari 2600 emulator. jit.atari2600 allows for emulation of hardware circuit bending. I was thus able to manipulate the ROMs had I programmed in order to create the skewed results. There is something to be said about warping your own creations.

The ‘¬’  in the title is a reference to the notorious Pac-Man port for the Atari 2600. This version of Pac-Man, programmed by Tod Frye is partially blamed for the video game crash of 1983. The story goes, someone at Atari wrote “Why Frye?” on the side of the company’s Pac-Man arcade machine. Tod Frye then used scientific notation by putting a line over “Why”, making it read “Why NOT Fry?”

re:group will run through September 12th 2008

So I meant to blog during Zero1. With all that goes on its nearly impossible so I applaud those who did. So here is my Zero1 wrap up based on the awesome documentation done by others. I had two projects in SJ01 this year, which was admittedly less than I had in ZeroOne / ISEA 2006 but still quite a lot to try to stay on top of.

The bigger of the two projects was Tool Shed Days. It was collaborative piece with Red76, and Ars Virtua. It was one of the FUSE residencies sponsored by Cadre and the Montalvo Arts Center. This project was one aspect of several loosely associated pieces. Such as Befriend a Recruiter, Second Home, Revolutionary Dinner, as well as the Tool Shed Days installation that was part of the Superlight exhibit in the San Jose Museum of Art. A full documentation page is coming soon. The picture to the right is of me hanging the pirate radio transmitter so we could broadcast our dinner conversation. Interestingly enough this image of my ass climbing a tree was printed in the San Jose Mercury News as part of their Zero1 special coverage. Kuniko Vroman of Montalvo published an article in the Switch Journal highlighting this work as well as the other FUSE residences.
ZERO1SJ/FUSE, Tool Shed Days

I also did my own smaller project. Buildup Sub-SoFA which was part of SubZero, the First Friday street festival in San Jose’s SoFA district. Buildup was originally Shown as part of Art Along the Avenue in Emeryville. It worked very well as a public art piece and so I decided to submit it to Bruce Labadie who was organizing the street installations for SubZero. Buildup is a fun interactive video installation that plays with ideas of crowds and time with undertones of surveillance and performance. My Buildup page will soon be updated with videos captured at the event. Julia Bradshaw from ARTSHIFT San Jose published and article about the SubZero street fair installations which highlighted Buildup Sub-Sofa as well as Thomas Azmuth and James Stone’s FontanaBot.
SoFA Presents a 01SJ/First Friday Bash

Finally Id like to give some cred to Cookie Evans who ran around all week, camera in hand, shooting everything. Check out his pictures of the events on his flickr account.
Portal
Ice Age
Urban Observatory
FontanaBot
More 01SJ Festival 08