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.
- 217 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication Page
- Contents
- Figures
- PR35S_5T4RT!: The Mechanisms of Art Modding
- ER40R 1: A (Scroll) Down Memory Lane: Nonplay and the Vitality of 8-bit Engines in Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Bros. Mods
- ER40R 2: Slaying Machines: Embodied Mimesis in ArsDoom
- ER40R 3: “Perspective Engines” and the Strangeness of 3D Space in JODI’s Untitled Game
- ER40R 4: Generative Mods and the Violence of Sensation
- ER40R 5: Random Planets and Alien (Dis)orientationsin WE BUILD WORLDS
- Bibliography
- Index
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Yes, you can access Unstable Aesthetics by Eddie Lohmeyer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Computer Science & Digital Media. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.