TRIGGER: GAME ART

Quilted Thought Organ
delire
[http://delire.cz]
Melbourne sound artist delire modified a Quake II game engine to create a real-time audio performance environment. It is used both live and as an installation. Objects and actions in the virtual environment trigger sound samples, allowing the game to be played as a musical instrument. Delire says “as a conceptual territory, this is just another well-trodden foray into synaesthesia ...although as an instrument it is very flexible and demands a very different way of thinking about a performance. It commits itself better to various visual meaning systems, where a composition is distributed across an iconographic and syntactical field”.

Skin Pack
Video: Linda Erceg
[www.erceg.cj]
Audio: Roberto J Salvatore
Skin Pack is a double video installation made with the Quake II game engine. The four characters – Crackwhore, Chastity, Chastity Marks and Nude Chick – are nude versions of established avatars from the game. Sound is sampled from porn movies. Skin Pack analyses the importance of viewer perspective in pornography, creating changes in the perceived dominance of voyeur or object.

Nerve Game
Interactive: Vanessa Sowerwine
[http://www.netspace.net.au/~van]
Audio: Cornel Wilczek
Nerve Game brings together several artistic forms. It is a simple interactive game, not unlike the multitude of Flash games on the internet. But it is also a choose-your-own-adventure and an interactive comic. Nerve Game is a great example of the merging of art forms first witnessed in early films, now taken up by computer games.

BLAM
Interactive: Isobel Knowles
[http://ik.rocks.it]
Audio: Isobel, Haima and Gus.
Isobel is a Melbourne based sound and animation artist. As a result of her strong design sense, the games in BLAM are extremely cute. But don’t be misled: the challenges in these games are difficult to interpret and overcome. BLAM celebrates the importance of design in vision and sound, whilst simultaneously submerging the user in the significance of interactive design.

Level 5
Rosetta Mastrantone
[Rosetta_M@hotmail.com]
Level 5 virtually recreates the gamma space gallery inside a computer game. The player interacts with this first person shooter – fragging bots and dying – in much the same way as Unreal Tournament, the engine on which Level 5 is built. However, the implications of this interactivity are exposed once the player quits the game and ‘returns’ to the gallery. How does the experience of killing and being killed in a known environment affect our perception of that environment? What are the psychological implications of virtual experiences cross-referenced with real-world navigational memory cues?

All Your Base
Video: Various
[http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/index.shtml]
Audio: Zero Wing game from Sega Megadrive.
AYB began with a catch-phrase badly translated into English from a Japanese computer game. The phrase, ‘All Your Base Are Belong to Us’, was meant to be: “Thanks to the co-operation of the UN forces, we’ve taken over all of your bases”. It’s no wander this strangely appealing phrase has taken on cult status. In helping the quote to infiltrate international media – it’s actually appeared on the cover of TIME magazine – the devotees of AYB have embraced an opportunity to play a part in an international grassroots art installation. Through exposure it mimics and exposes US international policy, which dictates the quote to its foreign victims.

Urban Invasion
Video: Invader
[http://www.space-invaders.com/]
Invader is a French installation artist whose works have invaded public spaces in major cities across the globe. Invader glues tiles – shaped like space invaders – on to public buildings and streets. A true invader, he doesn’t ask anyone’s permission. Rather, Invader’s playful artworks extend the potential of computer games, physically realising virtual existences. As appealing as they are, it still seems wrong that these invaders aren’t the least bit disturbing to encounter on the street.

Matrix and Tum Raider
Strange Company
[http://www.strangecompany.org]
Edinburgh-based Strange Company are world leaders in the production of ‘Machinima’, a method of animation that uses an existing computer game and/or its engine. Players set up a LAN and use the game bots as the characters for their animation. The script is then acted out with the bots, with the game play recorded to tape for editing.

Arcade 84
Dave Dries
[http://www.CinemArcade.com]
Made with footage from MAME (a Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), Arcade 84 is a homage to the 80’s arcade. Purely motivated by nostalgia, Arcade 84 is indicative of the strong influence that the computer game entertainment revolution has had on its audience.

The Buff and the Brutal.
Video: Droma Productions.
[www.sumvideo.org]
Audio: LCDCI
[www.http://bubotic.net/lcdci/]
The Buff and the Brutal is an example of ‘Machinima’ from Melbourne’s Droma production group. They have used the first-person shooter game Quake as the context for a soap opera about gay gladiators. Five characters from the game try to deal with their emotions in a world where death and destruction are a way of life.

Smile and Fresh
Video: Isobel Knowles
[http://ik.rocks.it]
Audio: Askii
[askiiproduct@hotmail.com]
Askii and Isobel provide excellent examples of the retro style of early computer games, which remains appealing to many modern producers of pop art. It is possible that the appeal of this style results from the way in which 8-bit, lo-res aesthetics symbolise the core structures of digital production: uniformity, geometry and simplicity.

poly800vs6581
Audio: Tim Koch
[http://www.oninoz.com/thug]
Video: Frog Bomb
[http://www.frogbomb.com]
Tim Koch is a South Australian musician whose gorgeous electronic melodies are made on the Sid Station. The Sid is a recently developed synthesizer that uses the sound chip from the Commodore 64. New York visual artists Frog Bomb made the accompanying clip using imagery from a generic retro computer game.

Nestune
Audio and Video: Collapsicon
[http://www.symbiotic.2y.net/eye/nestune.htm]
The Nestune is an audio visual controller unit that connects to any Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), allowing manual override of the NES's internal circuitry to create visual and auditory corruption. All parameters are controlled via adjustable knobs. The Nestune also accepts three audio signals to trigger and control various NES circuitry, creating an 8-bit audio-visualiser. The Nestune is too fragile for public use, but an example of the output is on display.


		May 14 - 25 2002 Curated by Rebecca Cannon www.selectparks.net

	The City of Melbourne is proud to support the exhibition Trigger: Game Art at gamma space through their 2002 Arts Grant Program.