An unusual input device

This Japanese clock comes with games that are played by, well, sticking a finger into a hole. More information (including a movie of the clock in action) is available at Asovision.

[via Ludology]

Kenny Marshall's "prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices"

Kenny Marshall has portfolio full of interesting kinetic work. He describes his prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices as being:

... a group of small robotic sculptures, each connected to its immediate neighbors via wires, that together form a net of robotic life that spreads across the Garden at the Mattress Factory and over nearby structures. These twenty-five mechanical crickets fill the garden with sound as they listen to their neighbors and act accordingly during Pittsburgh's Robot250 festival. Using Dr. John Conway’s rules for The Game of Life, each robot activates when a preset number of his neighbors is active and deactivates if too few or too many of his neighbors are active.

The Game of Life is an interesting simulation of simple life that been a favorite of geeky-types since 1970. Worth checking out (if you're a geeky-type).

Camera / Chimera's catalog is (almost) available

A Photograph Confused With the Original Inspiration, or Dumb and Dumber II
Timothy Hutchings, 2009, 4" x 3"

Untitled (220 East 117th Street, 2009)
Patterson Beckwith, 2009, 10" x 8"

untitled
Becca Albee, 2009, 11" x 14.5"

Camera / Chimera is an upcoming show that I curated. The show is a series of photographs, each by a different artist. The artists are asked to replicate the previous artist's photograph. The result is a visual game of "Telephone" in which the image slowly (and sometimes abruptly) mutates through the process of recreation.

Camera / Chimera's sixty-six page catalog should be available for $10 in the next day or two.

Artists included in the show:

Becca Albee, Holly Andres, Patterson Beckwith, Chase Browder, xtine burrough, Cassandra C. Jones, Adrianne Davis, Stephanie Dean, Dennis Delgado, Joel Fisher, Harrell Fletcher, Joy Garnett, Greta Ham, Tim Hutchings, Steve Lambert, Gus Meisner, Robin Michals, Hajoe Moderegger, MTAA, Shani Peters, Anne Schiffer, Christian Marc Schmidt, Tom Thayer, Mariana Tres, Angie Waller.

Writers included in the show:

Sarah Kate Baie, Michael Betancourt, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sharon L. Butler, Andrei Codrescu, Greg Cook, Evonne M. Davis, Laurel Gitlen, Ethan Ham, Ellen Handy, N. Katherine Hayles, Paddy Johnson, Lisa Kjaer, Jonathan Martin, Carolina A. Miranda, Ceci Moss, Jack Murnighan, Laura Napier, Tim Maul, Catherine Spaeth, Hrag Vartanian, James Wagner, Emma Wilcox

The show is at Gallery Aferro at 73 Market St, Newark, NJ 07102 September 12 - October 3
Opening Reception September 12, 7-10 PM

4'33": the video game

Petri Purho creates a video game each month. Or at least he did until becoming focused on finishing and released the brilliant Crayon Physics Deluxe:


Now he's back to the monthly games. In February he released 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness, inspired by the John Cage's 4'33" composition in which the musicians do not play any notes for four minutes and 33 seconds (so that the music becomes the ambient sounds in the concert hall). A screenshot of the game:


The game play is watching the status bar for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. If no one else logs into the game during that time, you win. If someone else logs in, you're booted off and they become the "leader."

The comment section of Petri's blog is wonderful--it's full of gamers arguing whether 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness is a game or not (and using the art world as a touchstone):

• Rob Says:
  February 2nd, 2009 at 6:57 pm Cool concept, but to call this is a game is like shitting on a paper plate, signing it, and calling it art.
  
  
• Gemedet Says:
  February 2nd, 2009 at 10:25 pm I'd argue that what distinguishes games from other art forms (films, paintings) is the ability to interact. It's great to push the boundaries of a definition, but you can't throw it out completely. Otherwise we'll go the way of the art world: they've come to the point where they consider anything to be art, and so the word "art" has lost all meaning. Still, an awesome idea, and a really clever take on the Jam's theme.
  
  
• Mike Says:
  February 3rd, 2009 at 2:11 am I don't know about defining a game, but the purpose of a game is that it should be fun. This isn't.
  
  
• Jonathan Says:
  February 4th, 2009 at 2:08 am Even though it feels like starting the game is the only interaction, this game interacts with every other person playing it. The author is also exploring the boundaries of interactions.

There's also a map-based visualizer of the game, created by Jonathan Basseri, where you can see folks logging in and knocking each other off.

[via Art Fag City]

From the archive...

I stumbled across a digitized copy of Dragon Magazine #158 today... This issue contains my first ever publication (written when I was in high school) . This is the first time I've seen the article in (digitized) print--I was never contacted when it appeared (I probably moved between acceptance & publication). I only learned that the article was published (and received my pay) years after the fact.

Anyway, below is the digitized copy of the entire magazine (my article begins on page 32)... the article alone is available in pdf format here. My other publications can be seen here.

Dragon 158

Related: RPG Outsider Art

Clouds, clouds, clouds

Super Mario Clouds (2002)
Cory Arcangel, modified game cartridge

cloud.s (2009)
Jason Sloan, twitter-fed generative art

[via Rhizome]

clouds of clouds (2008)
Miguel Leal & Luis Sarmento, Flickr-fed generative art

Breakout!

The video above presents the results of Game Mod, a six hour workshop by Steph Thirio in which the participants with little programming experience modified the game of Breakout! in the Processing programming language.

You can read more about the workshop (and trying modding the source code yourself) here.

[via A&D+]

Unfinished Swan

Unfinished Swan is an interesting take on a first person "shooter" game.




[via Make]

Telephone games

I've always loved the telephone game (and I'm currently working on a telephone-game-like project). Incidentally, the preceding Wikipedia link goes to an article called "Chinese Whispers," which unfortunately seems to be the British Commonwealth's more-or-less derogatory name for the game.

Yuko Mohri's Taiwa-Hensokuki (2006-08), above, is a computer speech-to-text/text-to-speech loop that continually degrades over time. One computer transcribes the other computer reading aloud text, and then the computers swap roles and the transcribed text is read aloud with the other computer now in the role of transcriptor. The result is printed out in real-time on a nearby printer to keep a record of the conversation


Jürg Lehni's Apple Talk (2007), below, seems to be a remake of his earlier Analog Information (2002). Very much like Mohri's work, Lehni's has two computers speaking back-and-forth so that information slowly corrupts.


[via Make]

The World's Largest Wargaming Table

Timothy Hutchings
The World's Largest Wargaming Table, 2006
29' x 28' x 4' MDF, wood, styrofoam, etc.

I'm a fan of Timothy Hutchings's work.

His The World's Largest Wargaming Table is very striking. I love how it starts as a blank landscape and becomes populated by gallery visitors playing with it.

His cardboard works, which range from formalist studies to large-scale models, are quite interesting, too.

Hutchings also runs PlaGMaDA (The Play Generated Map and Document Archive), which I blogged about earlier.

RPG outsider art

Yesterday Art Fag City posted about PlaGMaDA (the image above is from The Play Generated Map and Document Archive's homepage), an internet archive of art & documents done by roleplaying gamers.

Paddy Johnson (of Art Fag City) wrote:

Game nerds rejoice! The Internet brings you great tidings this time in the form of PlaGMaDA, an archive of play generated manuscripts and drawings depicting shared places. Notably, the project is more sophisticated than a database of Dungeon and Dragon collectible illustrations, the drawings resembling artifacts you might see at the Folk Art Museum. The site does however break from the art world tradition of labeling everything "Untitled" typically opting for purely descriptive titles.

I wanted to include a couple of my junior high school era (ok, ok... maybe early high school era) roleplaying documents. I dug around in my files and came up with what's below. Showing them to my girlfriend saying, "I couldn't find the really geeky stuff... just these." Based upon her expression, I could tell that the spaceship maps were plenty geeky enough.

Ayiti: The Cost of Life

Ayiti has been called the most depressing game ever... it's a surprisingly addictive "serious game" (i.e., socially relevant) in which the player tries to improve the life of a Haitian family of five. The best I've done so far is the keep the family relatively healthy and to get them slight improvements in education, material goods, and jobs.

The concept was developed in a workshop with Brooklyn high school students.