One of my students from MTD01 turned me on to Electroplankton, a game released in Japan that is essentially a playable sound art piece. It borrows plenty of ambient/minimal music styles and sounds, but it’s execution is addictive and relaxing. The process of playing is extremely meditative, and it excites me that games like this are being developed and executed on such a fantastic level. I recorded myself playing/composing and plan on using some of this material in upcoming videos::

[audio http://doubleunderscore.net/audio/electropankton1.mp3]

Psychology in Voids (test)

I’ve been working on trying to test out new practices/looks/ideas for the machinima work I’ve been playing with on an off for a couple of months and have become increasingly interested in the kind of psychological spaces that occur between camera and NPC models. Some of the animations have a particular stance and glance that i find rather frightening at times. I feel confronted with an issue regarding gaze and viewership. In playing games like Fallout3 (and any other recent Bethesda game for that matter), this doesn’t seem to be too much of a concern for me. But in HL2 it seems to have more intensity. When playing with stripped down animations (lacking textures and light values) in void arenas this urgency seems to become more highlighted due to the lacking of the surrounding distractions that typically take place during game play. The above link is an example of a hopeful ongoing study of the play (both game-play and mind-play) in these stripped down scenes/scenarios.

More machinima work will be posted in the near future with audio edits from previous posts. Likewise these newer pieces are gravitating more towards a bit more “essential” views of these mods and experiments in a way of having more heightened awareness of light, texture, and movement within scenes.

As seen on GoogleMaps Directions for taking the Chicago Bus East.

MASSIVE UPDATE!!!! SPACE RELOCATION::
DUE TO UNFORTUNATE EVENTS THE SCREENING HAS BEEN MOVED TO HEAVEN GALLERY!
THE PROGRAM WILL START @ 7:30 INSTEAD OF 7 TO ALLOW FOR LATE COMERS DUE TO SITE CHANGE!
HEAVEN IS LOCATED @ 1550 NORTH MILWAUKEE, 2nd FLOOR

Defective: DeBugging Media Myths

Video Screening + Live Video Performances Curated by Nicholas O’Brien

We are currently engrossed in a swamp of media myth. The myths are precisely those that follow Roland Barthes’ Mythologies in that we have come to understand our media and all its manifestations as being a natural part of our cultural economy. The methods in which these myths populate our minds and envelope our space is through virtual experiences. These interactions can happen through memory, technology, and “sculpted space.” Now however, we begin to see ruptures in our virtual interactions. These disturbances occur when our mythological expectations of media are left unfulfilled or torn apart. The fragility of these myths leaves them ripe for breaking. These fissures can be found in Morgan Higby-Flowers’ System_Painting1, where the fabric of his studio fractures into cascades of glitch. Mark Beasley and Aleksandra Domanovic take mythic media objects and distort our expectations by creating hypertexts of signs and symbols that reprogram the documents original content and context. Likewise, Nicholas O’Brien takes the cinematic spaces shared between blockbuster movies and nature documentaries and renders their landscapes as being somehow both epic and transient. Jon Satrom approaches these myths with a playful skepticism and makes us question the reliability and the absurd nature of our digital interactions and appliances. In Friendly Fire, Shane Mecklenburger creates a serene field of guns doing what they do best in video games: shoot. In doing so, he takes on a role of showing the bizarre pairing of beauty and violence in certain aspects of game culture. Defective approaches the breaching of myths in our virtual surroundings by exhibiting the necessity of play and feedback in our otherwise stagnant media interactions.