In 1958, the American physicist William Higinbotham created what is one of the first instances of what we would today call a modern “video game”. The game, named Tennis For Two, was built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for their yearly open-house presentations of the lab’s activities. The game was built using an oscilloscope and a programmable analog computer, the Donner Model 30. It simulated a simple tennis match between two players, with a sideways perspective of the net and a ball bouncing back and forth, controlled by two player-manipulated inputs.
Continue reading « Artifactual Playground »
A significant percentage of video games employ in one way or another the figure of death. The thanatological sub-species of video game representations are practically endless: dismemberment, infection, untreatable wounds, explosion, etc. Players can be eaten, crushed, sliced, diced, quartered, electrocuted, impaled, and so on. Many of these representations are more or less approximate: in Doom, for example, a player’s state of “health” is represented by an abstract percentage value where players do not die of any specific organ failure, but instead from some sort of provoked exhaustion. In role playing games, players kill their opponents in a similar manner, i.e. by reducing this all-encompassing numerical value of their enemies to zero. In other games, players simply keel over, or disappear in a puff of smoke when touched, as in Pacman. In Super Mario Bros. players can just run out of time. Death in gaming is more a question of symbol than of substance. While we are still in the realm of simulation, the simulation is so figurative as pull us into an wholly other realm of representation. In his 1972 article on transcendence, gaming and “computer bums”, Stewart Brand used the term “symbolic” to describe the flickering figurations of death slowly taking over university computer science research consoles: “Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums“.
Continue reading « Exhausting gameplay »
For all the English readers out there, I’m sorry, but this one’s going to be en français: the land of « Liberté Égalité Fraternité » is yet again dangerously close to passing what many have been calling a « liberticidal » law, but that might more aptly called a « future-art-killer ». Two days ago, a film opened in New York entitled RiP: A Remix Manifesto; the film has also been distributed under a CC-BY-NC licence and therefore can easily (and legally) be downloaded off of Pirate Bay and other sources; I suggest you see it, and donate to the cause. In it, the filmmakers describe the [...]
Continue reading « Déclaration de guerre »
Some time has passed since my Invaders! installation started something of a $#!¥storm back in August at the Leipzig Games Convention. I tried to give the piece some context and gave a few interviews to responsible journalists, but ultimately the whole thing just blew up as people lost all sense of scale and started taking for granted all sorts of assumptions about the work. Ok, so that’s the backstory, and you can think of all that what you will. But now that hipster pop acts such as Röyksopp are reportedly referencing the work (I have my doubts) and given that [...]
Continue reading « Invaders! video »
There is a new French law currently in preparation on the subject of (yet again) « Création et Internet ». I think you’ve already figured out the translation, but in case you haven’t, it is (yet again) about pitting « artistic creation » against « the Internet ». We’ve already gone through several cycles of this game and still haven’t made any progress on these issues. And yet, here we are, yet again, as if the opposition of art and Internet were somehow an inevitable slow motion head-on accident that only the State could possibly prevent. Some background. The French have always prided themselves — theoretically [...]
Continue reading « Internet, mon amour »
I’ve been following the various forums commenting my Invaders! installation as much as my busy schedule allows me (I’ll be away for a residency all week, so the assassins will have to start looking elsewhere). At this point, it goes without saying that I am apparently responsible for the latest flash-in-the-pan in the world of video game controversies. It appears that controversy is easier to provoke than more significant forms of experience, and given the current reaction, I suppose the only conclusion I can come to is that the piece has failed in more ways than one. Whatever the case, [...]
Continue reading « Some context… »
Ok, so now I’m really pissed. So I’ve bought the damn upgrade, simply because I have so many old projects languishing on this dying platform. I’ve also been getting email from people because some of these projects are online, and no longer work; and instead of saying, “Macromedia, er Adobe, couldn’t move its sorry ass for over two years to get this software working on your platform,” the alert instead says, “please contact the author,” which in its tone suggests that somehow I’m the one who can’t manage my own projects. Okay, okay, so that’s the way software works, fine. [...]
Continue reading « Director[11] = #@§! »
Also known as: Perceptive Pixel‘s multi-touch marvel is no match against Tim Russert’s felt-tip pen. My favorite part is actually all the noise Russert makes as he drags out his chart ;-)
Continue reading « Magic Marker versus Magic Screen »
I’m not much for petitions. A pure formality, at best. I’m far more impressed by more creative forms of communication. But given the speed at which events are unfolding, all I’ve found to do concerning the actual crisis in Pakistan is to sign this petition my colleague Jean Biagini suggested to me yeasterday: End the Emergency. For I’ve just learned via Jean that the former director of the National College of Arts in Lahore has been arrested in connection with the crackdown on so-called extremists. While I, like many in the west probably, can easily imagine there is indeed some [...]
Continue reading « Pakistan »
Ok people, you can stop sending me emails about Microsoft Surface. I’ve seen it already. And as I mentioned in this interview and this one the experimentation phase of interactive surfaces is over. Everyone knows that Microsoft is the pretty much the last cog in the technology wheel. When they’ve figured it out, well that means that just about everyone else has already figured it out some time ago. I love that historical timeline on the surface web page. NO REALLY EVERYONE, LOOK, WE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE THE IPHONE. NO, HEY, WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING? IT’S TRUE! The funny [...]
Continue reading « Beneath the Surface… »
Note to readers. Please observe that I am just about to condemn myself from all future speaking engagements by unabashedly biting the hand that feeds; even worse — coward that I am — from the comfort of my little countryside home, after-the-fact, far from stone’s throw. Whatever. Let the chips fall where they may. Some things just have to be said. I’ve just gotten back from a very strange festival, of the likes I’ve been avoiding for quite some time: Flash Festival, a very well-produced, well-intentioned festival + prix, but with an absolutely vaccuous artistic core. It suffered from being [...]
Continue reading « Flash in the pan »
As you may or may not have noticed, I was teaching last month at the Chicago Art Institute. I met some pretty amazing people while there, but the person who really stood out for me was the very charming Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal (cf. http://www.crudeoils.us/) who was preparing an interesting online performance entitled Domestic Tension: all throughout the month he has been living at the Flatfile Galleries where — via a locally housed server — you can chat with him, watch a live video feed of his life in the gallery, and shoot at him with a collective remote controlled gun. Now, if you [...]
Continue reading « Shoot an Iraqi »
A few weeks back, the cool French journalist Marie Lechner asked me to collect a list of interesting YouTube videos. I was originally going to do something more interresting than what I came up with, but I was busy travelling and so I quickly scraped together this fairly traditional list along with a there-goes-the-professor-again accompanying verbiage. Even if you don’t read French, the videos are fairly explicit: there’s insolent stuff, code stuff, remix stuff, political stuff, etc. Here’s the link: Playlist #1 par Douglas Edric Stanley. If you want a translation, Google will do it for you here: link. My [...]
Continue reading « Playlist »
Vincent Cogne found some time (between evaluations and the whatnots of end-of-semester madness) to put up the source code to the solution he found for creating stereoscopic Processing sketches [link]. We tried a few different solutions before this one (well, to be honest, I just made teacherly suggestions with a lot of OpenGL theory and Vincent did all the work). This was all while Ben Chang was here teaching us his solution using Ygdrasil. I think Ben has done great work on making a viable solution, but I just cringed when I saw all the hackery-clickery that had to be [...]
Continue reading « Stereoscopic Processing, Torque, zzzzzz… »
So, Steve Jobs, being the kinda guy he is, has decided to post his personal thoughts on Digital Rights Management in an open letter. It’s an eye-opening read. As usual, he turns the whole thing ass-up, claiming that in fact he would rather just get rid of the DRM, while still maintaining that Apple’s DRM does not in practice tie users to their iPod since only 3% of users have DRM’d music on their machines (hmm, how to you say « bullshit » in Norwegian?). He also claims that there is healthy competition (here comes the smoke and mirrors) because other [...]
Continue reading « iDRM »
Program: Partage du savoir, privatisation des connaissances Radio Station: Radio Grenouille 88.8, Marseille Times & Dates: 18h, Monday January 29th; 18h, Tuesday January 30th; 18h, Wednesday January 31st Speakers: Jean Cristofol, Douglas Edric Stanley, Paul Devautour (Art et propriété intellectuelle); Emmanuel Vergès, Philippe Aigrain, François Deck (Société de l’information et économie de l’immatériel); Fabienne Orsi, Jean Cristofol, Bertrand Jordan (Appropriation du vivant) I already mentioned this back in December, but Radio Grenouille recorded several speakers from the series of conferences organized by Jean Cristofol entitled Partage du savoir, privatisation de la connaissance. Those recordings have now been edited and will [...]
Continue reading « private/public »
I was just reading this interview with Nolan Bushnell (via fluctuat) and sure enough, the former head of Atari was talking smack about the Playstation 3. He’s out of the game console loop, so I suppose his opinion as the head of a former video game empire is worth something (although he is currently developing a new casual gaming restaurant franchise that seems to be missing that japanese touch, côté design). Of course, Bushnell will always have a warm place in my heart — no, not for Pong, I’m talking about all the hours spent on Crazy Climber thanks to [...]
Continue reading « 2600 vs. Playstation 3 »
Ok, this is one of those things that only an engineer could think of — also known as how to shave off a minute here, a minute there, when you have perfectly better things to do… Take a look at this photo. It is my Epson R300 printer just after replacing the ink cartridge. It has just made all sorts of spugeeech, zhmurrrr, shpukwaaaaam, shazzaaaam noises. All this takes about a minute. There is a nice little screen on the right that first told me how to do things, and when I was ready it asked me to press OK. [...]
Continue reading « Forced Labor »
Ok, just to let you know that although I personally think my ^3 instrument is pretty frikkin Airwolf, Andy Polaine of ex-Antirom fame caracterized it as « dull » along with everything else at ISEA2006. Actually he originally thought ISEA was dull, but when Karl D.D. Willis insisted, Andy was more than happy to throw me into the briar-patch too. If you’re saying « Karl who? », he’s made some cool stuff you should check out on his website, and nicely used some of my current theories in a recent paper entitled « Creative Interactive Experiences as Production » for the The First International Symposium on [...]
Continue reading « anti3? »
