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Event Wrap Up: Yumi-co's CuteXdoom Yumi-co's CuteXdoom, an Unreal Tournament mod, was displayed on a wall-mounted LCD monitor and controllable through a generic game pad. Exploring modern culture's addiction to cuteness, the game is a simple quest to collect cute items using a wildly-colored anime-inspired avatar. Set in a lush green environment, the architecture is polluted with monitors and screens demanding adherence to the cult of cuteness. The quest ends with a disturbing, randomly-generated sequence of images as payment for delivering the collection to the cult temple.
The mod can be downloaded at Yumi-co's homepage with a Quicktime video also available for those without a copy of Unreal Tournament 2003. Gamasutra was able to speak with Yumi-co's Anita Fontaine. What was the inspiration behind CuteXdoom? CuteXdoom was inspired by society's obsession with popular culture, in particular the obsession with cuteness and fabricated entities. In modern culture, material objects have reached cult status, and some icons are worshipped as idols. In the game; play revolves around a religious cult that believes the possession and worship of cute material objects will ultimately lead to happiness In action, the game is appears quite a conventional 3D collect-em-up. How have you subverted this genre? Well first of all, CuteXdoom is an Unreal 2003 modification, which is traditionally a pretty violent shoot-em-up. I wanted to critique this genre of game by replacing violence with cuteness so to speak. As for subverting the collect-em-up genre, the motivation for play is quite dense and unusual for most collect-em-ups. Instead of saving a princess you receive a randomly-generated mantra and the 1st stage of enlightenment. Also, the aesthetics of CuteXdoom are cute but deliberately over-saturated to look hyper and surreal. Are interested in, or particularly aware of, other Unreal mods? Do any particularly interest you? There is a lot going on but haven't been keeping track since making CuteXdoom. I have moved along a bit from making game mods in the last year into things like locative gaming/cinema, net art, and film. What do you expect people to take from your work? They take away a randomly-generated mantra, and a cute overload! I am also aware that many people come away from the experience with insight into the obsessiveness of consumerism and how it corresponds to religion and spirituality. Are games art? Some games are. But I see most games are commercial monsters with very little thought into creativity apart from maybe what the gun in the game should look like. Luckily there are games like Okami as well as a lot of cool game mods that breakup this idea. Prize Budget for Boys' Ms. PacMondrian and Calderoids Prize Budget for Boys chose to show two separate installations, both fully working arcade cabinets. Ms. PacMondrian was a functionally indistinguishable revision of their earlier title PacMondrian, featuring a Ms. Pacman level inspired by the art of Piet Mondrian to navigate, and Calderoids was a surprisingly playable fusion of the art of Alexander Calder and Asteroids, with the role of the asteroids played by the hanging pieces of Calder's abstract mobiles.
The original title PacMondrain is available to play online here, and Calderoids is available here. I had a chance to talk to Prize Budget for Boys' Neil Hennessey. What was the inspiration behind the pieces? Pac-Mondrian was inspired by a black and white reproduction of Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' from a 1950s MoMA catalogue. With the colors flattened, it looked like a maze with dots: "Wow! That looks like Pac-Man!" That was the first art/video game mash-up we did.
With Calderoids we were searching for an artist whose work we could mix with Asteroids, Atari's best-selling arcade game of all time; Ian Hooper suggested Calder, since his mobiles are already in motion and he called some of his early sculptures 'Constellations', so it was the perfect formal fit. Mike Horgan then did all the programming to get the Asteroids ship to fly around and blast the mobiles, and Calderoids was born. What do you expect people to take from your work? Our motto is 'Let's Play Art', so we want people to look at art as something they play with. Are games art? Absolutely! If you rearrange the words in ATARI you get "ART AI", which is what games have always been: art + artificial intelligence. All the activities that go into the creation of video games have traditionally been considered art, but the end product was originally associated with children so people don't take them seriously. Video games are as rich a medium to explore artistically as painting, sculpture, film, and writing, all of which appear in different forms in video games. Tasman Richardson: Apollo Shrapnel Part 1 and Restless > Wrath Tasman Richardson, a celebrated Canadian multimedia artist, put on show two videos from his series of videos created using glitching Atari video games. Apollo Shrapnel Part 1 is a combination of a graphical glitch and discordant noise that brings to mind a lightning storm, and Restless < Wrath is a display of rotating rings thick with texture and accompanied by a warm fuzz of electronic noise. Clips of Tasman Richardson's Apollo Shrapnel Part 1 can be found here and Restless < Wrath here. What was the inspiration behind Apollo Shrapnel Part 1 and Restless > Wrath? Apollo Shrapnel Part 1 is part of a series that attempts to collect video signifiers symbolizing the god Apollo. It's a lot of solar, nuclear, lighting and vigor. This first step was the most abstract, the most primary use of aesthetics as language.
Restless > Wrath was a progression based on an older video called "Collapse". The idea is that if I take each layer of video noise and peel the screen edges back, I'll reveal the layers underneath. As each layer recedes into the center you get more and more rings. Each ring has its own content and therefore its own sound but it's nice to hear and see the progression, it's like listening to a cross section of a tree and hearing how old it is. The rings are moving and adding up and in the end the sound is so dense and over driven that the waveform pushes itself out of range so that the speaker cone can't vibrate anymore. How did you create them? Are they recorded live, or edited and arranged? Are the sounds from the glitches? I took an Atari 2600 console I'd been holding onto forever, since my childhood, and tried to find a glitch that I remembered from way back then. I yanked the cartridge out before switching the console off and this simple jarring razor tone came blaring out of the TV. The best part was, the tone had an image with it! It's dead simple to get a mistake like this with an Atari. Just turn it on with or without a cartridge and see what happens. Mind you, when you finally decide you want to use certain colors, tones, textures, etc. it's a pain because you're fishing for specifics in a sea of noise. I don't think you can even capture this kind of glitch anymore, I mean, not exactly the same way. New capture devices and camcorders reject the glitch and mistakenly think it's a copyright inhibitor! I found myself having to research piracy techniques just to finish working on Restless. After I found an analog-to-digital converter that accepted the signal (somewhat) I could only record 10 second fragments at a time because my PC at the time was too weak to handle more. I sorted all the glitches by what I thought would have universal appeal and meaning in the most general primitive sort of way. Then I started editing. I would cut and paste in DDClip to build rhythms and then when I was sure it was working, I'd flatten all my work and take it into Premier to layer. Then I'd just peel a little here or crop a little there, just enough so the viewer could see I wasn't cheating, that what they were seeing was what they were hearing, and vice versa. Which games are used? Outlaw worked well for the bright vertical scrolling noise in Apollo Shrapnel Part 1, and Ghost Manor had a very stark black and white vertical hold glitch that resembled a lightning bolt. For Restless, I opted to use the console with no games at all. I just flicked the power on and off to different degrees. Just short brown outs to confuse the console or tiny delicate flicks to make minute adjustments to glitches I had generated and wanted altered but didn't want to 'reset' altogether. I've used all the cartridges in my collection to make a more extensive video series called "The Atari 2600 Remixes" which covers 42 games in total. Is there any particular reason for the choice of Atari games? Do you particularly like or respect the machine? It's an extremely hardy console and I like the fact that it can take so much abuse. I have a lot of old consoles, NES, Turbo Grafix 16, etc. but the Atari 2600 can really take a beating. There's something about the cartridges themselves that are so resilient and long lasting, it really puts contemporary gaming to shame in terms of construction. There's something very disposable and fragile about current gaming formats that seems to me, to be de-evolved, in spite of superior graphics and gameplay. Naturally I have a soft spot for the 2600 since it was my first introduction to video games. What do you think Atari staff of its heyday, or Nolan Bushnell, would think of your work? I imagine they'd be pretty into it. They all seemed pretty experimental for the time. Anytime you see photos or vintage ads of them, they strike me as these crazy, risk-taking hippies so I think they'd be up for just about anything. What do you expect people to take from your work? I'd like it if they could experience something more than just a formalist surface reaction. It's more than eye candy or gloss. There are actual decisions and intentions here and I'd like them to spend enough time with it to actually be able to interpret my choices, my pruned noise and signal. That can be hard though. I don't expect that, I've moved on since these experiments so it's not as important to me as it was at the time I made them. Are games art? Everything is art. Sleeping, eating, pissing... why not games? There's so much art everywhere and a lot of it's crap art, but it's art regardless, without question.
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