Yesterday I went to see the exhibition of work by the architecture masters students at RMIT, on the top floor of the very handsome building 100. The exhibition was not so interesting (architecture models and renders are weird and tacky to me), but the outdoor pavilion space is lovely: private feeling, but with great access to 360 degree view of the city.
Archive for the ‘Opinion / musings’ Category
From Building 100
Saturday, July 6th, 2013Videogame catch-up
Monday, May 13th, 2013I’d been intended to write a post to summarise 2012, but I think that idea’s time has passed. I do still want to highlight the games I’ve made since the last time I mentioned them—which was all the way back in July 2011—though, so here goes:
Click of the Moth
Made for the 50th Klik of the Month Klub, the game is a 50 screen stupid pun. Probably way too long, and way to hard! It plays like a few other games I’ve made, where each separate screen has a different win condition.
Breakanoid Ball
A breakanoid game where you control the ball instead of the paddle. You influence how much you turn the ball by hitting the correlating button more frequently, which is a fun mechanic.
Breaktroid
A clunky adventure game, racing game, and breakanoid that doesn’t really work. It probably could, but I would probably need to use something that wasn’t Klik and Play to do that.
Three Bullets Per Minute (3BPM)
This one is pretty good! An action game where you can only fire a few shots before your gun has to regenerate. The early levels are a bit tedious, but it gets nice and tricky by the end. The level design is all based round the game’s logo, which actually worked, and I had a lot of fun making the graphics, and experimenting with enemy placement. It’s probably the most resolved game I’ve done. It was featured as a ‘Freeware Game Pick’ on indiegames.com, which was a nice surprise. I should make a Flash version of this, too.
Glorious Trainwrecks
The most recent thing I’ve done, made for Glorious Trainwrecks’ sixth birthday. It’s pretty simple: the aim is to crash trains, but it’s fun to try and complete as fast as you can.
You can play it online, but you may have to have a Newgrounds account. Don’t make a Newgrounds account just to play it.
I’ve uploaded a proper online version now.
I also made a a bunch of games for Pirate Kart V:
Gavin on Mars
A monkey named Gavin has to ride a horse or a unicorn into a castle. Gavin lives on Mars and wears a crown. He is playing games and stuff in the castle. The name of the game is “Gavin on Mars.”
(Courtesy Eric, age 4)
Pirate Kart V was made to show at the Game Developers Conference, and the funding to get it there was raised mostly through Kickstarter. One of the rewards for donating a certain amount was to have a game made based on a title and description suggested by the donator. I chose to make a few games based on suggested titles, this being the first one that caught my attention. Eric turned out to be the son of the founder of Glorious Trainwrecks, Jeremy Penner, and they both worked on an expansion of the game you can download here.
Make the Bed
Another game suggested by a Kickstarter person, this time only a title was provided. It’s an obtuse adventure game, where the goal is to make a bed. I doubt anyone’s finished it. I’m not sure I remember how to finish it.
Fighting Pilot
In this game you control a helicopter with a big, muscley, arm. The helicopter is vulnerable, but the arm can be used to destroy harm causing things. Problem is it’s kind of awkward to position the arm where you want it to be. But that’s not actually a problem. This is pretty good, and I will make a Flash version soon.
Racing Eightway
A 2-player racing game where the way the car is controlled is changed each lap—sometimes. The control methods are dictated by what is built into Klik and Play; so sometimes it’s like a racing game, sometimes like an overhead game, sometimes like a platformer, etc. It doesn’t work very well! I’ve made a few games exploring ‘wrong controls‘, which I’ve maybe mentioned before?
Breakanoid RC
A Breakout!-like game where the paddle is controlled like it’s a race car—if that makes sense. So you press ‘up’ to go forward, and use ‘left’ and ‘right’ to turn, instead of being able to only move left and right.
Pololo Shodown
I think this is a really fun 2-player competitive game. Or, I assume so, because I think I’ve only played it against myself. Each player controls a paddle, Breakout!-style, and use that to deflect the bouncing ball into the other player’s goal. I intend to do a Flash version of this, too.
Being KK Slider
YOU ARE “KK SLIDER”!
KK Slider is a character from the videogame series Animal Crossing. In those games he appears every Saturday night to play his guitar, and give the player a new song to listen to in their house. In this game you find yourself inside his head, able to, with great will power, control him to a small degree. I mostly just made this because I wanted to make the cover image.
I also worked for a while on a 3-D game, using Unity. Not so much a game, I guess, more of a toy. The environments were made out of bad 3-D models generated from video content I recorded. I may get back to it next Summer holidays.
Melbourne Free University seminar on the state of the tertiary education system in Australia
Thursday, April 18th, 2013MFU Podcast 45: Uni-what? The state and future of the tertiary system in Australia.
This was an interesting, and timely, talk (timely for myself, at least). I haven’t listened to the recording yet, but hopefully it includes the audience discussion, too. It’s hard not to feel frustrated by the way education is being handled by these massive companies, and this was a good opportunity to share that, with both staff and other students. There was a protest yesterday about proposed funding cuts, but to me the problem (that too many don’t seem to even see) is not an economic one, but a philosophical one.
I have been working on a website to host my work, which is changing the way I think about using this blog. I imagine I will make more posts like this in the future; less explicitly output related.
Responding
Sunday, November 18th, 2012As a simple way to keep myself working while I’m studioless over the holidays I’ve set myself the goal of making one response per day. You can follow the project at antiphons.tumblr.com (gone), though it’s only early days yet—day two!
It’s changed the way I engage with my days: I find I am looking at things more; thinking about them; trying to take something from them.
Proposals for a Ritual
Saturday, November 3rd, 2012The introduction from a text I wrote for school on my latest work:
Proposals for a Ritual is a set of actions performed, in variations, over the last few months of this semester. Each action/performance is a meditation — an isolating act therapeutic to the artist — but also sometimes disconcerting to the viewer. A ritual, to paraphrase Evangelos Kyriakidis (2007), is a label given to an action that, in a sense, seems irrational or illogical to the non-participant; applied as classification by the onlooker, or as an acknowledgement of the potential to seem irrational or illogical to onlookers by the performer. Approaching the work from this perspective a ritual can be thought of as a language of gesture and material. Proposals for a Ritual offers these actions as suggestions for the viewer to carry out themselves, or at least contemplate.
I may add a little bit to this post later. I’m using it to wrap-up the project, at least for the time being.
Monologue Six
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012I was worried about this one. At the time I was depressed, and felt completely incapable of doing anything, incapable even of thinking about doing anything (I wish I could articulate this better). But I had planned to make a video, just as I had planned to go in to the studio, and was able to do these things out of habit (I guess). Making it I worried about it seeming silly, and shallow, and one-dimensional. I think you see that frustration right away in the way my hands move. Unlike the others this is a series of actions which, again, is a product of that frustration. I cover myself, a throw clay at myself, then I want to bury myself in it. They all seemed so dumb to me, at the time. And the clay always makes my face look so sad! And here I look like a sulking cartoon baby at times. That clay, though! It was wetter than before, and such a lovely consistency!
It’s not the shallow thing I thought it would be, though. It’s sort of funny, too! And, as the videos are being presented all together, the individual piece is not so important: it’s about what it adds to the whole. And I think this adds depth.
I’m still thinking about the title/s. perhaps I’m leaning more toward something like ‘Ritual #’, or ‘Proposition for a Ritual #’; something referencing those aspects.
Monologues
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012
This is what I have been working on. I’m still thinking about the title, but at the moment ‘Monologues’ fits well enough. The first four have been filmed performances: of me either covering myself in clay, or stuffing my mouth with it. The fifth is a series of seven sculptures made by the same process of filling my mouth with clay, but then spitting the clay onto a board. The image above is from a version split across two projectors, showing the four videos simultaneously.
The first three have been posted previously, but I wanted to have them all together here.
I’m still working these out. Still considering other actions, still wondering exactly what they are about. The immediate, practical, goal is to make six of each of the performances, and then experiment with how to show them, and how the sculptures fit into that, too. Key words and phrases floating round my head at the moment include: absence, repetition, ritual, touch/tactility, mediation, communication, production, sensual deprivation, recycling, anonymity, reperformance, frustration, substitution, approximation.
Tolstoy, authorship, and communication
Thursday, August 16th, 2012They talked of the injustice of power, of the sufferings of the unfortunate, of the poverty of the people, but in reality their eyes, gazing at each other through the sounds of their conversation, kept asking: ‘Can you love me?’ and answering ‘I can’, and physical desire, assuming the most unexpected and radiant forms, was drawing them together.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, in Resurrection.
Whenever I talk about why I love Tolstoy this is the passage that comes to mind. Amongst his alien details of rural settings and Russian society he includes such precise, and well articulated, observances of universal, basic, human, personal, and (apparently-not-)inarticulatable truths, I feel like I am in direct, private, contact with him. This direct connection with an author is what moves me in art, and is why art is so important to me. It’s fake, of course; incredibly real, and beautiful.
I’ve noticed recently that I can’t speak about things I find beautiful without struggling to get the words out; without my lips quivering, and my muscles seizing, without my body wanting to give them up. It’s like the experience of things like this becomes perfectly etched into my memory, and recalling them reenacts them physically, and makes them even stronger. I don’t know how much of this reaction is related to the difficulty of the reexperience happening simultaneously with attempting to vocalise, and how much is a reaction to having to share something so private, and personal.
Pounds
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012Erin and me have been constructing some songs, using bits taken from some droney keyboard/organ things we recorded in Buckley in January. I haven’t made music in this way before—both playing with another person, and using a computer to assemble a song from an overwhelming amount of pieces—and, though it’s been slow-going, has resulted in work I’m proud of. There should be a track or two more later, but mostly we’re done. I add the disclaimer that the tracks lose a bit (and in the case of Stationary a lot) in the process of getting onto Soundcloud. We will be making tapes of them later.
Previously I had made music with very little computering involved; either one-take improvisations, or a series of improvisations layered on top of each other, each played while listening to what had already been recorded as I played. We talked today about trying that method next time, with each of us taking turns to add a layer.
Francis Bacon’s floor
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
Wandering down a street in London I bumped into a gallery with a Rembrandt and Bacon exhibition on. Mostly there were Bacon paintings, but there was also a terrific Rembrandt, and these two images. They’d been found on the floor of Bacon’s studio, and carefully filed away. The poor photos don’t do them justice but I was captured by the strong connection they have with the way Bacon paints, and the way these banal, greyscale, reproductions were transformed by (I assume) neglect.
I had to do some sneaky photography to get these copies. I wish galleries would realise that they own the objects, not the images.