Brody Condon: Twentyfivefold Manifestation

"The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life." Raoul Vaneigem


Combining the fantasy Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) subculture, public sculpture, and ritualistic performance art, Twentyfivefold was a series of physically and psychologically intense live games involving 80 players which evolved over the Summer of 2008. The events were organized by the artist Brody Condon for the Sonsbeek International public sculpture exhibition in the Netherlands.

Set in a distant future where civilization as we know it had almost been lost, players from different worlds met deep in the holy forest and inhabited a 40 feet high tower "in character" for 3 days at a time while worshiping invented deities embodied by the other artworks of the exhibition.


www.sonsbeeklive.org

"Copyright law is broken. Creative consumption and modification of existing media is a totally intuitive and appropriate way to function as a cultural producer. That is not to say I function without any honor system whatsoever, I give credit where it is deserved..." Brody Condon, Rhizome interview

Lecture in Luleå

Sunset in Luleå.

I have just finished a presentation at Luleå Culture Center on Computer Games and Art.The presentation went fairly well, considering I spoke for almost two hours in Swedish. I like Luleå, although I have seen very little of it. For a town this size the culture center is huge and every second person I speak to seems to be an artist.



Some interested/ing people in the audience and got some good questions. I ended by showing Malcolm McLaren on This Spartan Life, a clip I had not actually seen before but it suited the moment perfectly today.


This Spartan Life - Episode 3 Module 5- Malcolm McLaren Interview

Free Culture Game

Italian artists Molleindustria promise "radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment," and their latest effort may be their most direct statement against the pleasure industry to date. Touted as "playable theory," the Free Culture Game offers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art. A circular field represents The Common, where knowledge can be freely shared and created; your job is to maintain a healthy ecology of yellow idea-bubbles bouncing from person to person before they can be sucked into the dark outer ring representing the forces of The Market. Your cursor, shaped like the Creative Commons logo, pushes the ideas around with a sort of reverse-magnetic repulsion field (a clever alternative to the typical shooting, eating or jumping-on-top-of-and-smooshing actions of many other 2-D games).

Mad Game Art from Mark Essen, a.k.a Messhof

(Contains flashing images which may cause photosensitive epileptic seizures.)

RANDY BALMA: MUNICIPAL ABORTIONIST (18.7 MB Download) by Messhof
The screen is constantly rotating and the games left-right controllers keep switching valences without warning. The more visually-minimal titles in the Messhof back catalog are even thornier. The abstracted Flywrench necessitates navigating a mere flapping line through neon-piped geometric environments using a maddeningly arbitrary array of button-combo protocols, while Punishment and its sequel Punishment: The Punishing are two seemingly simple platforms that become very difficult, very quickly. In his work, Essen combines the essence of old 2D arcade games-- misleadingly cute single-player titles that did everything they could to make you choke on that twenty-five cents-- with the viewer-challenging puzzle-logic of avant-garde cinema. He's currently working on a suite of new works that include a western-themed side-scroller, a bow-and-arrow shooter, and a stenography simulator, tentatively titled Stenography Hero. - via Rhizome