Oh man just got Borderlands 2 Finally!!!
Why did it take soooo long for this game to come out. I'm going to be stuck in virtual land forever now!!!
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Me Mario - LaVerne Krause Gallery - Winter 2011
In ME MARIO, I take a closer look at the mechanics of video games and explore what exactly in them keeps players engaged. Using cardboard, I recreated the environment of Mario and populated it with interactive prototypes. One example of this is the CoinBox (Fig. 5), which played a sound effect from the game itself when anyone hit the box from below. This allows the player to mimic the actions of Mario and enjoy the same reaction the video game would produce. This action is repetitive in the game and in the gallery, yet in both instances players find enjoyment from a simple sound effect and the idea of a reward. In doing this, I playfully address video games and our relationships with them. How do we interact with a game? Why do we find the reward systems in video games so enticing? Can these systems be viably translated into the real world?
Motion Studies - Washburn Gallery - Fall 2010
In Motion Studies, I explored how a person addicted to virtual space would respond to an overload of his addiction. This overload was created by forcing myself to indulge in my own addictive behaviors on the computer for an entire week straight, for over 14 hours each day. This produced a study in both my physical degradation as I completely immersed myself within virtual space, and also paralleled that condition to the virtual life that I was creating. These comparisons were made physical by presenting the surveillance video collected over the week on three monitors which were divided into 9 smaller video screens. On these 27 mini screens I presented the week in total, focusing on points of interest within the three monitors. In moments such as shown in fig. 3, I compare my head-shot as I play to the headshots I make in the game.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Deans Grant
Peter Pazderski
Deans Grant Proposal
Fall 2010
Artists Statement
Like many people, I spend a lot of time existing within virtual spaces, such as video games and social networks. The virtual world invades and sometimes overrides my physical world and relationships. My artwork has become a cathartic means of exorcising my own addictive tendencies to technology. This addiction is ironic given that the virtual, and the technology that enables it, has been thought of as a freeing element within our society. Donna Haraway wrote in the “Cyborg Manifesto” of a being called a Cyborg, which exists within the virtual realm that transcends race, gender and even historical ties - we are this being. Yet we have failed to achieve Haraway’s vision, instead of transcending our physical selves. Instead we, as a society, have created hyper-real, clichéd versions of ourselves. Our society has become obsessed with virtual space, not as a free space of ideas and harmony, but rather as a contained space for discord and fantasy. In digital installations and video work I explore this failure and the obsessions that lead to it. My goal is to be able to isolate the unseen forces that make virtual space such a compatible mechanism for desire and escape within our society.
To develop my understanding of virtual space I am exploring the aesthetics of immersion and interface. The primary method of this exploration in my work consists of video, because it replicates the experience of the virtual interface, and installation, is able to create an experience within the gallery that is psychologically similar to that of immersing oneself within a virtual space. My recent work focuses on the use of virtual space as a tool to create ‘shadow personalities’. Using the idea of the shadow, as defined by Jungian psychology, we can understand avatars and other virtual identities as not only idealized virtual representations, but also as conduits for realizing our own unconscious selves which we may or may not wish to acknowledge. By understanding 'shadow personalities' I hope to explore some of the more damaging effects virtual space can have on the human psyche.
Project Proposal
For my terminal project, Virtual Bodies, I plan to build an immersive digital video installation that combines the realm of the virtual, physical and hypothetical. In this digital installation I will explore ideas of the post-human and virtual identity. Looking at artists like Stelarc,Steve Mann and Simon Penny, I am thinking about the use of technology as extension and augmentation of the human body. As an artificial arm or eyes are augmentations of a physical body, in my piece, Virtual Bodies, I am focusing on the creation of virtual identity as an augmentation of the human psyche. In my immersive digital video installation, the viewer will become a participant in the creation of their own virtual identity, merging the world of the physical presence with those of the virtual identity and the hypothetical being of the 'shadow personality'.
When visualizing Virtual Bodies I began by thinking of what avatars and virtual identities are used for, what is there purpose? I continually returned to the idea of escapism, the idea of using virtual space as an escape mechanisms appealed to me in both a personal and cultural sense. This led me inexplicably to the idea of 'escape pods', specifically those found in science fiction movies and TV shows. These objects of our cultural imagination are perfect tools for discussing virtual identities, not only as escape mechanisms but also as functional conduits of travel. In science fiction 'escape pods' are used to run away from a dire situation, or as in the instance of Star Wars, to preserve some vital piece of data.
In creating my 'escape pod' I am trying to overlap the physical space of the body, virtual space and the hypothetical space of the psyche. To accomplish this each space needs to be represented and activated. The physical space will be activated by the 'escape pods' physical presence, which will be a geo-sphere constructed of steel piping, large enough to hold one full grown adult, suspended from the ceiling. The interior of the sphere will be wrapped within a black cloth that will block light and sound from outside the sphere. When entering the sphere, through a small passage on its side, the viewer will become more aware of their physical presence, because of the claustrophobic size of the space as well as the slight swaying caused by its suspension. The virtual space of the sphere will be present in a series of projections from outside the sphere which will be projected into the space through small openings in the cloth. These projections will be of instances where the creation of virtual identity will happen, the creation of an avatar in video games, profile pages on social websites and references to the virtual identities present within science fiction realm. These will overlap not only each other, but also with the viewers themselves. Interaction will happen in the virtual space through a series of sensors; motion, light and sound, which will register the viewers position and reactions and manipulate the virtual space accordingly. Viewers will interact with the physical light of the projections themselves as they enter the space and the projections become activated by the viewer's presence. The final space of the hypothetical is created within the viewers mind as they register the reaction of the space to their presence within it. By combining the actual space of the sphere, the virtual space of the projections, and the hypothetical space created within the mind of the viewer, I will create a singularity of thought and consciousness, which idealizes the actual creation of a ‘shadow personality’ within real space. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Monday, October 18, 2010
5 Artist References
I've been looking at some virtual and installation artists to give my work some context, here is a short list with descriptions.
Eteam - This is a group of artists working on environmental and virtual reality concerns. I'm looking specifically at their Second Life projects and the way there able to use the virtual reality to question real life issues. Second Life dumpster is the best example of this.
G+S - Goldin and Senneby are two artists working in collaboration exploring " juridical, financial and spatial constructs through notions of the performative and the virtual. This is another pair using Second Life as a starting point to talk about virtual reality and desire. Their project 'Objects of Virtual Desire' catalog the personal virtual possessions of a series of people within SL and then brings these items and their owners stories into the gallery space. I really think the most effective part of these works are the interviews.
Eva and Franco Mattes. aka 0100101110101101.org - This pair of artists are interested in internet art and public media. Their project dealing with avatars and virtual identity is really well put together and researched, as well as their essays on the subject.
Jeffrey Shaw - As an artist Shaw has work dating back to 1966. His current work is interesting because of the way he is able to bring virtual space and interact with it in real space. The most obvious example of this is the 'Golden Calf'. Which is a work that quite literaly allows the viewer to see a virtual space in real space.
Perry Hoberman - Hoberman's installation work uses interface and digital projection to bring multiple ideas into play. I really like the setup and interface of 'Timetable'. Its a very interesting and clean work, which questions not only time, but interface and our interaction and use of time.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Cyborg Manifesto
Note and Quotes -
- Cyborg - is the Chimera - theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.
- condensed image of both imagination and material reality
- joining the two structures, any possibility of historical data is transformed i.e. destroyed
-the relation between organism and machine is a 'border war'. - stakes are territories of producer, reproduction and imagination.
- Cyborg ignores the process of growth that produces strife with the other i.e. woman/nature
- Cyborg has no need for father's, love or the 'Garden of Eden' ; "it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust".
- wary of holism, but needy of connection
- 3 crucial boundary breakdowns -
- human to animal
- Animal-Human to machine
- Physical to non-physical
-Cyborg - consciousness or its simulation - 'shadow personality'
Relationships
In the cyborg manifesto Harroway creates the metaphor of the cyborg to problematize the feminist movement, and really our understanding of gender, race and language. I find this metaphor very compelling, and while not the focus of the writing, definitely the most pertinent part to my work. The Cyborg as she describes it resembles an idea that I've read elsewhere as the 'shadow personality' or avatar. It is a identity which is created out of nothingness and exists only in consciousness and virtual space. Having no history, gender or race assigned to it, it can take on and become anything. What's interesting, and actually contradictory to some of what Harroway says in her writing, is that most cyborgs are not genderless, but actually super gendered. Looking at avatars in computer games, or facebook profiles, one starts to see this rather quickly. Gender is in fact idealized, giant breast and bulging man muscles dominate the scene. When creating a 'shadow personality' humans tend towards wanting to idealize themselves, transforming into the rockstars and celebrities (or elves) they wish they could be. It seems that the cyborg, though free of history and the need for fathers love, and mother earth, it is not free of desire. In fact desire seems to be hyper realized and catered to in the virtual world.
Monday, October 11, 2010
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