Here’s a preview of the main work (Play Space) I have in the RMIT Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) grad. show, opening tomorrow evening (November 27th). I have two spaces, and will be showing Coober Pedy in the other. My spaces are in Building 4, Level 3; one in each room.
100 Free Assets was made for last weekend’s Klik of the Month Klub, as a response to this list of 100 Free Assets for Unity 3D. I downloaded as many as I could, and used them to construct somewhere interesting to explore. Some of them have built-in behaviours: for example that monster thing moves with the player.
I’ll also mention that the website I was working on is up and running (while still being expanded upon) at blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net. Simple websites are not as much fun to make as they used to be.
While I’m posting reading material I’d like to post this essay/talk by Ted Mack. It’s a broad-reaching reconsideration of how the Australian political system is organised and functions. It can be frustrating reading things like this: where there are exciting ideas that one can’t imagine ever coming about (not that I agree with everything in there), but also stimulating.
Here’s a link to the transcription (HPoration2013.pdf), but I’d also like to give credit to the place I found it: AustralianPolitics.com.
I am reading this on e-flux: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/—
[…] it has become clear that images are not objective or subjective renditions of a preexisting condition, or merely treacherous appearances. They are rather nodes of energy and matter that migrate across different supports […]
[…] artificial islands mimic genetically manipulated plants. Dental offices parade as car commercial film sets. Cheekbones are airbrushed just as whole cities pretend to be YouTube CAD tutorials. Artworks are e-mailed to pop up in bank lobbies designed on fighter jet software. Huge cloud storage drives rain down as skylines in desert locations. But by becoming real, most images are substantially altered. They get translated, twisted, bruised, and reconfigured. They change their outlook, entourage, and spin. A nail paint clip turns into an Instagram riot. An upload comes down as shitstorm. An animated GIF materializes as a pop-up airport transit gate. In some places, it seems as if entire NSA system architectures were built—but only after Google-translating them, creating car lofts where one-way mirror windows face inwards. By walking off-screen, images are twisted, dilapidated, incorporated, and reshuffled. They miss their targets, misunderstand their purpose, get shapes and colors wrong. They walk through, fall off, and fade back into screens.
In the past few years many people—basically everybody—have noticed that the internet feels awkward, too. It is obviously completely surveilled, monopolized, and sanitized by common sense, copyright, control, and conformism. It feels as vibrant as a newly multiplexed cinema […]
—and these things have stood out so far.
After printing and reading the whole thing I am a bit put off by the—I guess—anthemic tone to a lot of the writing (see one of the quotes above). But that final quote got me thinking about fashion and its appeal (which has always seemed odd to me): perhaps fashion acts as a sign for a fracture in the status quo and perhaps this is also behind the (short term) attracting force of Internet services (Twitter, Vine, Facebook, etc.) that seem to open up the Internet and how we use it, though they also strive to box it in, almost construct their own meta-Internets.
Games from dreams. Made using free 3-D models and Google image searches.
I think that maybe I’ve made an erotic videogame (which you can play in your browser)
Which seems as-good-a-place-as-any to start catching the Internet up to what I’ve been making. In this last half, of my final semester I’ve been experimenting with ‘play spaces’, and currently and more specifically digital play spaces. This has come out of something I was doing as a break from art making during the holiday—recording myself playing about in other peoples’ games—and has evolved through thinking about performance in virtual space, to now trying to make open, kinda dumb, play spaces, where the player is asked to make something of / complete the work. I’m putting together a little web page to keep them all which I’ll link to when I’m done.
On Saturday we went on a trip up to almost-Horsham to watch a three team football match, organised by artist Gabrielle de Vietri. I guess I don’t have any art things to say about it, but it worked really well!
http://threeteams.net/ (gone)