[-empyre-] playthings response

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

hello playthings..

great to meet up with a lot of you at Plaything in Sydney last weekend, and
some of you at Electrofringe in Newcastle the previous weekend..,
our -empyre- guests Troy Innocent and Eugenie Shinkle are on their planes
home and should return to postings soon.

my response to the conference was framed by a conversation i had with
theorist Melanie Swalwell after the closing session. Melanie pointed out
that there had been some hostility on the -empyre- list towards games when
we had our lab3d discussion in june  and i had to admit that i was one of
those deriding the genre.. as although i sometimes enjoy killing machine
code others  as much as the next person..  i just had the tendancy to lump
all games discussion into the category of commercial first-person shooters..
rather than the wide and encompassing arena that it actually is ..

so i really enjoyed the intense gaming focus of plaything... ..from Mary
Flannagans historical look at  the subversive game play of victorian girls
who created a market for doll coffins by killing their dolls, to Eric
Zimmermans dynamic presenattions and cute retro game lab constructions, to
Laurens Tans fascinating exploration of las vegas gaming/gambling, to
experencing first hand the game packages designed  by The Australian Army to
train soldiers for real life combat situations.  Kipper previewed  and spoke
on the issues of Escape from Wommera, a game built around the premise of
refugees escaping from a detention center in Australia, Van Sowerwines
devious and surprising  animation.noirs,  a presentation by Feng Mengbo of
his existential  journalistic interventions in the upperlevels of Quake, and
Andrea Blundell and Chad Chatterton showing Select.parks the exquisite
renderings and interactions of acmi {{ park }}, the soon to be released
Federation Square project.

Rebecca Cannon, our former -empyre- moderator and selectparks game.art
archivist provided a great overview of the genre ..   showing  game mods and
machinima. This worked nicely with the FraGGed  exhibition curated by Thea
Baumman at Electrofringe the previous weeekend, which unfortunatelty doesnt
have web site (Thea will get it up in december), which includes works by Tom
Betts, Anita Johnson,  Jonah Brukner-Cohen, Kipper, Brody condon, Corey
archangel, Kristin Lucas, Eric Cho, Sky Frostensen, Luke Illet, Josie Starrs
and Leon Cmielewski and lots more..  links to a lot of these works can also
be found in the selectparks game.art archive..

what i am left thinking about after the rush of information are mods and
machinima. given that artists have always subverted technology from its
original intent, exploiting the gaps, and bugs and crevices of the analog
and digital landscape,   im wondering if this just a continuation of that
tradition, or does it represent something different ... some other sort of
morphism..?

melinda


---------------
plaything   http://www.dlux.org.au/plaything
electrofringe http://www.electrofringe.org
lab3d http://www.cornerhouse.org/exhibitioninfo.asp?ID=54
mary flanagan - http://www.maryflanagan.com
eric zimmerman http://www.ericzimmerman.com
laurens tan http://www.octomat.com
feng mengbo  http://www.mengbo.com
vanessa sowerwine  http://www.netspace.net.au/~van
escape from wommera http://www.escapefromwoomera.org
starrs & cmielewski http://lx.sysx.org/biotek/index.html
select parks - acmi {{park }}  and game.art archive
http://selectparks.net/index2a.htm
tom betts - http://www.nullpointer.co.uk