Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding

Description

Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel, JODI, Julian Oliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others -- were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds-to intentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.

Eddie Lohmeyer is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Games and Interactive Media at the University of Central Florida, USA. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with a particular emphasis on video games and their relationship to traditions of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization.

Unstable Aesthetics provides a thorough and scholarly examination of current and historical video game art modding with a keen understanding of the poetics of the genre generated through both materiality and audience engagement. Abstraction is at the core of Lohmeyer's investigations - pulsing, perceptual spaces made to produce bodily affect. * Gabrielle Jennings, Associate Professor, Graduate Art, ArtCenter College of Design, US * From Mario Clouds and Ars Doom to Velvet Strike and San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam, Eddie Lohmeyer's Unstable Aesthetics offers a new perspective-or rather, a glitchy anamorphic angle-on the concept of game art through a deeply material analysis of both videogame technology and the experience of playing games in galleries, museums, biennials, and festivals. Moving deftly between PRG ROMs and BSP trees on one hand and media theory and object-oriented feminism on the other, Lohmeyer shows exactly how artists' mods not only expose and expand the capacities of game engines, but also change the ways we play. * Patrick LeMieux, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, University of California, Davis, USA *