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?”
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
It was late at night and memories of my family and my Atari 800 just kept coming. This post was in response to a question poised on the gamer blog, gaygamer.net.
Atari 800, probably about ‘85, the NES was just hitting big. My uncle gave it to us. He had a few Ataris and this one was extra I guess. He also gave us a slew of games. Most of which were utter nonsense. I never figured out how to take off in “jumbo jet pilot” or what the point of “squish ‘em” was. But “Joust”, “Star Raiders 2″, and “Journey to the Planets” we played on end. My little brother even locked the whole family out of the house once so he could get more Joust time. The games didn’t really have music other than an intro tune so we would make our own on my mom’s Casio-esque keyboard. That was player 2’s prerogative in 1 player games.
My dad invited a homeless man over for dinner once and he saw us playing and wanted to play Pac-Man. Luckily we had it but the joystick didn’t feel right to him. It wasn’t like how he remembered in the arcade and he wanted a surface to leverage. So for the next hour my brother and I set out to assemble him a reasonable facsimile of an arcade tabletop for the controller out of plywood scraps and old shelves. He was pumped and man did he rule at Pac-Man. He knew the patterns and had his timing down pat. He tried to explain to my brother and I that there were safe zones where the ghosts would never get us. We watched in awe but could never recreate the wizardry.
My uncle also gave us old analogue computing magazines with games. Not on disk but in code, printed. I got my first programming experience typing Atari Basic code in line by line. It took several hours of hunting and pecking and debugging my mistakes. And after all that there was no way to save, we didn’t have the floppy drive. My cousin was using it for college or something.
My mom didn’t game much but when she did she gamed with much zeal and broke our classic joystick and our replacement so finally we got a trackball. I still have my Atari 800 tackball and all. Still works fine aside from the keyboard missing a few letters. I got a new classic joystick for it and a sega controller as well. Every once in a while my cousins try to get it back from me claiming that I was just “borrowing” it. But I luvz it too much to let it go.
Some follow up:
The rest of the conference went well enough. It continued to feel it a little dry and ditched from the virtual world itself. After the conference sessions I joined a few instance raids, and those to me were far more interesting interactions. My party members and I discussed the implications of virtual worlds and online environments intermixed with warcrys and attack stratagems, all while battling to stay alive. I made good friends, we had become science war buddies. In my opinion that is how the entire conference should have been designed. Rather than distilling World of Warcraft down to a chatroom, all presenters and participants should have touted their ideas while battling for their lives. Of course, it is no small feat to truly engage the environment of wow but how else honor points in the world of academia.
Call me Science Again. I am a member of the Science Guild on Earthen Ring. I flew to Durotar today to attend what has been hailed as the first Science Conference in World of Warcraft. There was a great turn out. I have been grinding with my fellow scienticians all week and they are a great group of people. I was a bit skeptical, however, about how the actual conference would play out. I know from my experiences with Ars Virtua, that organizing conferences in virtual worlds is no easy task, especially in WoW. Audio was a no go, which was expected. It is exactly what we went through in the first day of our Borders Conference last year. All conversation took place on the guild chat channel. The medium itself essentially became a glorified chat room. I soon came to realize virtual location didn’t actually matter and decided to slay some burning blade fanatics as I followed the conversation in the chat window. The conversation quickly turned to more of a social interaction debate than focusing on what I would call the “hard sciences”. guild relations, gender gap, play vs non play, game vs non game, data collection of user stats. While not outside the realm of science, the issues discussed where definitely not unique to Science. In fact, these are the same issues begin examined in virtual worlds, across all disciplines.
The system for moderating the discussion was also only quasi functional. When the issue of sexism, homophobia and player attitude came up, I mentioned John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and I got in a little bit of trouble with Maggiemae, the moderator, for joining the general discussion. The idea, I then learned, is that we were supposed to whisper her first. It was readily apparent that that is not what was going on, however. Chat becomes chat. So I am sure Maggiemae had her work cut out for her. Panelists need precedence. Or at least that’s what we assume from the panel discussion metaphor in RL that we continually try to emulate. Yet it is hard to enforce a hierarchal environment in one that inherently is not. That’s where Audio would have come in handy. If panelists are broadcasting over audio then guildchat can be free to be guildchat.
The discussion got detoured a bit near the end concerning the topic of percentages of male vs female players, and moderation took a back seat. There were stats posted left and right and everyone was expert. It was a bit frustrating because when everyone is an expert no one is. I also think it is somewhat of a mute point because in synthetic environments people are given the chance to escape their gender. I know men who play women and women who play men and if you “become” your roll who do you really identify as? It is an ironic debate, especially on an RP server. I am also curious as to where the stats are coming from who is getting polled and how? If its just user account data, that can be as synthetic as the toon itself.
I am looking forward to day two. Of all the science conferences I’ve been too, this one definitely had the most usage of “lol” as part of standard discourse. I would, however, like to have more discussion of science in practice such as disease research based on the Corrupted Blood Plague incident. I would also like to have the discussion take place in a scenario more true to the WoW experience like a 40 person raid instance. Molten Core anyone? Perhaps tomorrow someone would be so kind as to flag us for PVP so that the alliance can jolt our little chartroom back to “reality”.
Yes. My first faculty art show (or fart show as we call it in the biz). I am showing Sticky Anonymity. I am really trying to push the art in The Art Institute. And if I was going to talk the talk, I felt Id better walk the walk so to speak. I wanted to show something fun and not extremely complex to install. It turns out my piece is the only interactive work in the show, and it seemed as though it may be the first. I can’t say for sure, but I learned that there really is no such thing as a simple digital media installation. I would like to thank Bruce, Gigi, James, and Kyung for the help and support during installation.
Art Institute of California - San Francisco is located at:
1170 Market st, San Francisco, Ca
Opening night is this Thursday February 7th. 5pm -7pm
The Show runs until march 6th.
Today the Streaming museum launched in galleries on all seven contents and cyberspace.
We at Ars Virtua are proud to host the cyberspace exhibition on rooftop space in Butler, Second Life.
A 48-minute exhibition of work by artists responding to a world increasingly influenced by technology that is relevant to some of the predictions, ideas and creative influence of pioneer video artist Nam June Paik. it features visual and performing artists …Graciela Taquini, Mark Amerika, Robert Wilson, davidjr.com, Andrea Ackerman, Jeremy Gardiner, Marcia Grostein, John Bruneau and James Morgan, Semi Ryu, Marty St. James, Kurt Ralske, Roy Volkmann, Elisa Monte Dance Company, Joe Bergen, Isabelle O’Connell, Jacob Ter Veldhuis, Joan La Barbara, Bret Mosley, Iannis Xenakis… with an entertaining mix of fashion and celebrity pop culture.
Did you hear that? I mean read that? “John Bruneau and James Morgan.” Yes, Looks Very Tidy, James and my vacuum cleaner machinima piece was accepted to the show. Tidy has been on a roll lately. I promise I’ll put it online as soon as the buzz dies down. If not, Ill just have edit together a clip for y’all.
I think I just became an internationally exhibiting artist today.
Ars Virtua is offering our first Artist in Residence in World of Warcraft. The Ars Virtua Artist in Residence (AVAIR) with help from our friends at Turbulence has been offering opportunities for artists to “reside” in the environment of Second Life since 2006 The results have been amazing. Now we are venturing into uncharted territory by expanding this next residence into the most popular MMORPG of all time. We have already received quite a few proposals that, to put it bluntly, Kick Ass! If it was entirely up to me I would love to extend this to our next AVAIR funding or not. If you think this sounds like it rules then send us your proposal. W00t.
The Call: Ars Virtua | Turbulence
Grades are done. Almost. I got the double deuce this month when both my class at the Art Institute which is on the quarter system and my class at San Jose State, which is on semester ended at the exact same time. Only a day apart actually. On top of that I had a lot of students turning in work after the last day of class. It made me decide I need to rethink and remix my SJSU class, ta142. On the long list of the things I want to get done over break is to totally redesign the course outline, re-do the greensheet, syllabus and all new assignments, or projects rather. I am thinking that 4 projects is a better way to go then 8 assignments and 6 exercises. The students seem to have a hard time keeping track, (even though it is all well spelled out online * grumble grumble *) We shall see if I can get it together in time before the next quarter starts at AI. Also I don’t what to put my self through the tediousy of grading and then regarding that much stuff, especially when the students are prone to put less effort into each assignment when it seems that each one doesn’t count that much in the big picture. It was tough for me to get thought it, even though, I had more time that usual. Instead of powering though, I created creative ways to distract myself. (WoW). I found myself the night they were due on the Stinko Man sprite comic generator, for no good reason. …Other than it feels very post modern to use an application meant to mock pixel comics to make art. Pixel comics themselves being art created through repurposing of applications. Why do the awesomest distractions always materialize when you got shit to do. I can answer that myself – Because I always have shit to do.
