Unstable Aesthetics

Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding

Eddie Lohmeyer (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

216 Seiten

2023
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-7470-8 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

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.

Table of Contents

_PR35S_5T4RT!: The Mechanisms of Art Modding
ER40R 1: A (Scroll) Down Memory Lane: Non-Play 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)orientations in WE BUILD WORLDS
1N5ER7_C0IN T0 C0N71NU3: Intractable Spaces

Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	05.09.2023
Zusatzinfo	68 bw illus
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Informatik ► Software Entwicklung ► Spieleprogrammierung
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-7470-2 / 1501374702
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-7470-8 / 9781501374708
Zustand	Neuware