Made with Love and NES sprites. Need to get more emulators running on my machine, to record these sprites more effectively. I’m prepping for upcoming work in Cleveland, as well as project/work/contribution which I will announce early next week. This is a very preliminary sketch in using Love as a abstract game engine. I’d like to really consider how to employ this program in an unconventional way(a current recurring MO).
Below, screen grab of silly test when first starting to learn the environment (my version of “hello_world”)
I’ll be honest, I love Breaking Bad. I think it’s an excellent show for many reasons. As the show develops, I think one of the things that I’m enjoying most is it’s sense of space. It treats the simultaneously rural and urban competing spaces of Albuquerque, New Mexico with an amazing sense of space and place. Although the setting is fundamental to the plot/story dealing with Meth use/trade/production (even though it seems Missouri has it’s problems too), the cinematography and spacing/pacing of the show pays tribute to the residue left on this landscape from the frontiersman of the wild west and the mythology that surrounds them. Perhaps that’s too dense, or giving the makers too much credit, but the show does address issues of space in two specifically discrete ways.
The first way that this is handled is through examining emptiness, or the expanse of The West. Through openness – or if a may be so bold, absence – we are struck by the fragmentary nature of isolation amidst urban/suburban living. We find our empty parking lots for big-box department stores yet to be opened (or perhaps put on pause for an indeterminate time). Although the above image is in a lot, the show also drops us off in many remote places surrounding Albuquerque. We’re taken to the desert, the junk yard, and to other anonymous zones. These scenes are positioned as spaces, as containing experience, as having significance at least to the episode plot, if not to the tone of the entire series. It’s specifically postmodern in a way; context is more relevant that content.
These external events, the locations outside, being amongst an undulating landscape, reflect on domestic space: Homes. Our need for permanence and stability – ownership and occupancy – becomes disrupted, complicated, and hard to navigate. In the show, politics happen in living rooms and at the breakfast table; calls from strangers/outsiders to the house create panic. In The Immaterial of Architecture by Jonathan Hill (an essay in Untitled (Experience of Place)) comments that, “the concept of home is… a response to the excluded, unknown, unclassified and inconsistent… It is a metaphor for a threatened society and a threatened individual… The purpose of the home is to keep the outside outside and the insider spatially defined and materially certain.” In Breaking Bad, and for Walter (the main character), the walls – the mere infrastructure – of his home internally swell from the pressure of the outside world (as if the cancer of his lungs serve as a metaphor for the swarming plague of the outside world). The outside is creeping in. Walter, in his desire to help his domestic situation, has left the windows and doors open, letting the weight of the outside world find its way through.
This duality between inside and outside, and the subsequent oppression of both of these places, is a reoccurring theme. We traverse from MRI’s and car trunks, to valleys and highways. However, in all this diversity, we never seem to leave the city. We can’t stray from this context; Walter roams and wanders, but only seems to accomplish retracing the lines of the city and it’s environs. The barren landscape of the desert, the primary place where Walter’s meth gets cooked, reflects the hostility of the city. Nature provides no escape, it is as imprisoning and complex as the bedroom or the doctors office. This mutual implication of openness and closedness – wilderness and shelter – create a state of psychological liquidity; Everything is corruptible, everything can be redeemed.
The second subtlety is exposing the rapid urban growth of Albuquerque. Architecture in particular seems to reflect this sense of newness. However, this new found boom of growth is exhibited as being impermanent. Above is an example of the surge of mini-condo cookie-cutter urban structures is a result of the demand for personal space (homes, ownership of space). We see in these kinds of neighborhoods a lacking desire for individuality. We have shifted to deeply internalizing our personality in space. We prefer our outside facades to remain homogeneous, sterile, and anonymous; in a word, distraction-less. The blandness of this type of space lends itself to its own temporary nature. There is little to no cultural value in these spaces, and as a result, future generations won’t have qualms about bulldozing them to make way for entirely new manifestations of temporary housing.
It seems there is a noticeable shift in our desire for homes. We no longer need plots, yards, driveways, and foliage. Instead, there is a growing tendency to make our domestic places transitional. We compromise our needs for space ownership/personality by constructing unappealing, bland, unassuming structures in multiples. Culture industry has expanded into the stale manufacturing of our domestic space (not necessarily a new development, ie pre-fabs). In the show, I feel as though these architectural landscapes serve as a reminder to the imminent demolition of the characters. The transient nature of domestic and personal space is mimetic to the fragility of the characters both psychologically and mortally. We glide within this flux; an ever wandering desire to recapitulate ourselves in our environment even when our own ambiguity and ambivalence prevents us from determining our morals (as is shown in the series).
As some might know, I’ve been teaching over at Columbia College’s Interactive Arts and Media Department (IAM). The department is a mix of game design, interactive design, web design, computer science, and newMedia Art. IAM, and Columbia in general, have great resources for bringing artists to come and lecture about their practice to students and faculty alike. Terence Hannum has been one of the main coordinators for this, and he’s done a brilliant job the past couple of semester’s I’ve been there (although Patrick Litchky was responsible for this visit as well).
Most recently, IAM brought fellows and residents of EyeBeam (which conveniently went through a redesign last night) to come do a series of workshops and talks as part of the EyeBeam Roadshow. Yesterday afternoon the group did a presentation about EyeBeam as an organization, as well as talk about their individual work that they’ve developed during their time at EyeBeam. Although the presentation consisted of many great projects/initiatives, I’m going to just give some of my personal highlights::
Above Michael Mandiberg and Jeff Crouse discussed some of the “greatest hits” of work developed and produced at EyeBeam. Although I don’t have video of it, I was really impressed with Jeff’s presentation of his work. I was really drawn towards his project Delete City, which keeps material normally hosted by 3rd party sites like youtube hosted locally on your blog. I’d like to give the plug-in a try and see what results might emerge from it (or else talk to Jeff about it the API back-end of it and see if it can “force” deletion by flooding servers w/ requests). During his presentation, Jeff also spoke of the Invisible Threads project that he and Stephanie Rothenberg collaborated on. I really love this project; it approaches some fascinating critiques of labor and virtual artifice with humor and tact. I would be interested to know, however, where the money in these transactions goes (I’m sure this is documented somewhere). Afterward Jeff also talked to me about ABSML an auto-writing language for making “bull shit” artists statements (quoting him). I was tickled by how he spoke about it as being a bit of an obvious project, but was delighted to hear about his enthusiasm in creating the code (ie code as art). I got the impression that it was peculiar for him to find a group willing to let him indulge in being that geeky, but Chicago people reassured him that he had a friendly audience here.
Yael Kanarek also gave a great presentation about her multi-faceted, “marathon running” projects, which all stem or be influenced/in dialog with her ongoing project World of Awe dot net. Although I’ve known about this project for a while, I was reminded how approaching an idea in a different mediums can bring great benefits. The variety – an understatement – is the awe-making part for me. Ranging from games, sculpture, writing, research, and wearables, Yael’s work encompasses a great passion for reinvestigation and integration of many view points as a means to address a relatively singular story/narrative. This process creates a staggering displacement in time and space, disturbing the conservative balance that often is manifested in traditional types of story telling. I find that this approach is somehow deeply tied to the traditions of folklore; using means of communication to create a nebulous amalgam of culture and language; media at the brink of obfuscation, enabling myth to nestle into the work as it passes through time.
Although I didn’t get a chance to take video of his talk, I was also highly engaged with Jon Cohrs’ work; particularly the pirate radio station he is planning on building after the digital conversion happens in June. The specific aim of the project wants to address the lacking creative content that occasionally plagues pirate radio TV stations after their first initial launch. He showed a quick line-up of broadcast blocks that ranged from “User generated content,” “#1 Torrent Movie of the Week,” and “Screen Saver Showcase.” We spoke about this project a bit after the talk and I asked him about the plans for the broadcasting tower that he intends to build. He said he wasn’t deeply concerned with this technical end as much as the content. I remember asking him if there was going to be an online component to that station, but I don’t remember if he gave me an answer. One really interesting thing that he brought up during his talk was the fact that the majority of individuals that this broadcast will engage with are people that won’t have the means to make the conversion: lower-income families and the elderly. I’m intrigued with the idea of having an analog reach-out to these communities (especially during government mandated digital divisions), and I think content management/interaction is going to have to be essential in engaging this intended audience. The promotional materials that he showed during his presentation positioned the channel as hosting/broadcasting a number of remixed materials (youtube videos, early video art pieces, sound/image hacking, etc). I felt as though Jon was more interested in having content that could appeal to these digitally neglected communities by creating an outlet for their interaction and integration of content and production, and I’m very excited to see this project develop (making me wish we had more pirate TV in Chicago).
EyeBeam will be continuing their workshops Wednesday April 1st and Thursday April 2nd at UIC and IAM, then traveling down to Champagne-Urbana for a couple of days to continue the Roadshow.
