LABORAL - CENTRO DE ARTE Y CREACIÓN INDUSTRIAL

WORKS

John Paul Bichard [art of game] art of war

Art of War comprises two video works that explore how representations of violence are constructed through contemporary media and how we interpret them from our safe consumerist perspective. The works blur the convergent discourses that inform them: the war movie, the war zone documentary, the news clip, overlaying them with questions of authenticity and complicity. In a war zone where lasers are substituted for real bullets and blood and guts are imaginary, the gaze of an outsider provokes performance and curiosity in those who would play at war. Often ambiguous, the footage, which could have been shot in Beirut, Belfast or Sarajevo, sets out to explore the nature of violence and how violent conflict is contextualized in the digital media age.

Web: http://www.idealmilk.com/project/violencia/artofwar.htm

France Cadet  SweetPad 

SweetPads is an installation allowing four people to play, in a totally new way, Quake 3 Arena, by caressing and stroking with delicacy new interfaces in order to move and shoot. Fast and aggressive behaviour won't be rewarded: players will have to use tenderness and slow, gentle touch to kill.

 Web: http://cyberdoll.free.fr/cyberdoll/sweetpad_e.html

Derivart El burbujómetro
El Burbujómetro (Bubble-o-Meter) is an interactive visualization of Spanish real state prices. It shows, in real time, the prices of apartments in different Spanish cities in the form of bubbles. The user controls the installation with an infrared gun, and as he or she shoots the bubbles these burst and display the prices of apartments. The piece promotes reflection on the socioeconomic dynamics of bubbles, housing, and the Spain of the current decade. The context of the installation is, of course, the Spanish real estate bubble. The surge in house prices is perhaps the most important economic event in Spain during the past few years. The building boom has also allowed the country to keep growing while the rest of Europe stagnated. 

Web: http://www.derivart.info/index.php?s=p5&lang=es

Devart Himalaya's Head

Himalayas’ Head questions the way people interact with the environment. Players are invited to play snow war with opponents projected on the screens. Wearing lightweight head beacons with infrared LEDs, they control their movement in the virtual space. Soon they experience that things don't seem to happen in a normal pace because the natural balance between their action and feedback is lost. Their movements are captured by a web cam and are calculated by a computer system which directs a 3D world and its dynamic 3D objects. Each participant controls one snowball, which reacts to her/his head movement, giving the sensation of floating through the landscape. In a hypnotic gaming situation, a game is given form by the players’ movements and social behaviour.

Web:http://www.devart.nl/projectHH.htm

Ge Jin Gold Farmers

Gold Farmers is a documentary about a group of young people in China who try to change their real life by playing virtual games. There is a new kind of factory in China that hires young people to play online games like World of Warcraft and Lineage for 10 to 12 hours a day, and produce virtual goods like in-game currency, equipment and characters, which are sold to richer gamers all over the world for real money. These young gaming workers, commonly known as “gold farmers” in the virtual world, take on all kinds of virtual adventures as a way to combat the frustration and poverty they experience in real life. Given the uncertain future of their mysterious profession, they are a little lost at this particular intersection of the real and the virtual. 

Web:www.chinesegoldfarmers.com

Vladan Joler Schengen Information System, Version 1.0.3

The SIS (Schengen Information System) was put into force in 1995 as the first supranational system for investigating and tracking people and objects. The Schengen Information System computer game follows the tradition of using the realm of computer games for the training and educational needs of military and ideological structures and questions their moral character, their purposes, as well as their political acceptability.
The player is an activist trained to break inside the Schengen Information Systems's building in Strasbourg. His mission is to intrude into the main operational part of the building-the archive, where the data base is settled-and to destroy it in real time and "real place".
The visual and conceptual environment of the game has been created with the use of publicly accessible technology and information and is based on the game engine of the Unreal. 

Web: http://www.joler.org

Radwan Kasmiya Under Seige

UnderSiege is a PC videogame focusing on the Middle East conflict, through the lives of Palestinian family members with different backgrounds. All levels are based on real events that shape the struggle between Israeli occupation forces and militants in the second Intifada (uprising) from 1998 to 2002.
The game was developed as a sequel to Under Ash (2002), and achieved high popularity and success through ME as substitution to (Anti Arab/Moslems) video games and as a new cultural treatment to the influence of new media concepts in the Middle East.

Web: http://www.underash.net/

John Klima The Great Game. Epilogue

United Nations troop movement and airborne sortie data from the invasion of Afghanistan was "distilled" from US Department of Defense press briefings during the height of the conflict, and is "replayed" in a 3D game-like interface. It is a game, rendered in real-time software; however, you are not in control of the action, it is a game that is played for you. Although fully accurate telemetric data exists for each and every missile and jet plane involved in the conflict, these data are not available to the public, and thus an essentially "word of mouth" dataset is all that the public has access to. Inaccurate information, when presented in a media framework that pretends to be "real," has the potential to obscure the true facts involved.

Web: http://www.cityarts.com/epilogue/index.html

La Fiambrera Obrera & Mar de Niebla Bordergames

Bordergames embraces a number of workshops targeting young people and focused on the virtual and interactive reconfiguration of their environment, creating the narrative of a videogame of adventures with those young people as the heroes of the game. Bordegames La Calzada was carried out in Summer 2007, thanks to the initiative and collaboration of LABoral, Bordergames.org and Mar de Niebla. La Calzada is a working class area in Gijon suffering the consequences of the recent decadence of the city, with the dramatic end of the shipbuilding industry, social marginalization and drugs, coupled with the current real estate speculation encouraged by neoliberal policies ignoring real people. 

Web: http://blog.sindominio.net/blog/bordergames

Danny Ledonne Playing Columbine: a True Story of Videogame Controversy

El 20 de abril de 1999, un suceso conmocionó a los EE.UU. Varios alumnos del Instituto Columbine de Littleton, Colorado, fallecieron a causa de un terrible tiroteo. Seis años más tarde, Danny Ledonne creaba un videojuego para amateurs que analizaba los movimientos y posible móvil de los dos asesinos. Aquel juego recibió cerca de medio millón de descargas, convirtiéndose en un tema enormemente polémico al plantear cuestiones sobre lo que es aceptable y no en la “ética del juego”.
En el documental Playing Columbine: a true story of videogame controversy, se hace un recorrido por la historia del juego, desde sus comienzos hasta el concurso Slamdance 2007 Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition, en el que el juego acabó siendo retirado de la lista de finalistas. El documental ha conseguido reunir a personas de diferentes ámbitos para analizar las cuestiones en torno al futuro de los videojuegos como una forma de arte e intentar explicarse cómo un juego ha conseguido tratar el fenómeno desde una forma de expresión emergente.

Web: http://www.playingcolumbine.com/

Valeriano López Estrecho Adventure

Estrecho Adventure (“estrecho” refers to the Gibraltar strait) analyses immigration coming from northern Africa’s coasts and the visual format he adopts to do so is that of videogames. The first part of the video focuses on Abdul, who must overcome a series of obstacles in order to cross the border -the Strait of Gibraltar-, and enter the Europe of his dreams. In the second phase of the game, once in Spain, he collects vegetables in southern Spain’s greenhouses in order to obtain the prize: his residence permit. 

Web:http://www.valerianolopez.es/videos/estrecho.htm

Ludic Society Objects of Desire 
Desires of Objects of Desire guide a Neo-Situationist's walk through an invisible city of electromagnetic waves. The play-map constitutes of real names of wireless access points, found during a “WIFI-Sniff” through the city of Gijon. Names of actual urban WIFI zones are tagged like street-names in the exhibition space while aether waves with the same subjective names are also superimposed on the arts space, as play ground.
An SM (Standard Model) game console serves as portable Wunder-Toy to indicate the electromagnetic waves of networks, as well as waves emitted by tagged objects. Acquiring this game console, players start a Dérive aiming to track these tagged objects that wish to be moved home. The objects contain stories, desires and obsessions. Follow the object's desire, read Situation(ist) quotes, apply New Babylon instructions! You will probably jump parcour-like over exhibition walls... Or proclaim a Détournement LS SM Sniff manifesto! 

Web: http://www.ludic-society.net/desire

Brian Mackern Living Stereo

Living Stereo's main focus is the recontextualization of the discourse carried on by publicity when this technology was made available for the mainstream market, being its main line the immersiveness that stereo technology makes available to people. Using this anecdote as an excuse for presenting two ways of using, seeing and hearing things in which digital processes are involved, this CD-ROM's main interface reflects fragments of the 1958 film Introducing stereophonic phonograph records, by Handy (Jam) Organization. There are two main sections: "SoundCode.Sketches" and "cinema.tik", each linking to different sets of soundtoys (simple and playful sound-visual interfaces and remixers) that reflect two ways of interacting/reacting with code and digital processes linked to sound and visuals.

Web: http://no-content.net/lst/

Larry Miller Interview with George Maciunas

This rare interview with Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, took place a few months before his death in 1978. Maciunas discusses his famous chart, "Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and other Four Dimensional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial, and Tactile Art Forms", tracing influences ranging from John Cage and Marcel Duchamp to vaudeville and Spike Jones. This tape offers invaluable insights into a celebrated artist and the forces that shaped the diverse Fluxus movement.

 

MIT Lab - Drew Harry, Dietmar Offenhuber, Orkan Telhan Stiff People's League

Stiff People’s League is a mixed reality game where teams composed of players in Second Life and a player at a physical football table work together to play a football game. The virtual players move their avatars around the stadium and kick the ball, while the players at the football table can control football figures in the virtual stadium by moving the rods of the football table back and forth. This piece inverts the normal relationship between the physical and virtual world by making the physical players rely on the virtual players to help them play the game.

Web: http://www.stiffpeoplesleague.com/

Molleindustria Faith Fighter

Faith Fighter is provocatively promoted as a cathartic tool, a game that allows the players to give vent to their religious hate by controlling their favourite icon. Players will inevitably be seduced to use characters that do not represent their own beliefs, establishing a sort of conflicting link with the avatar. This religious interchangeability that necessarily leads to the same scenario of destruction and violence, addresses the passage from the "freedom of religion" to the "freedom from religion”. The attempt is to create a hybrid object that is at the same time uncomfortable to handle and hard to attack. The game doesn't make any negative statement against any religion in particular. It represents a configurable conflict between several religious entities, a conflict in which the collateral victims are inevitably the humans.

Web: http://www.molleindustria.org/faithfighter/index.html

Volker Morawe & Tilman Reiff PainStation

PainStation is "a contemporary dueling system". PainStation comprises a box structure housing a horizontal screen over which the two players face each other. The software is based on Pong, an early computer game. Players use their right hands to control a bat on screen, and must keep their left hand on the console's "pain execution unit". Removing your hand means breaking the circuit - game over. During play, if your screen bat misses a ball, your left hand suffers the consequences through the application of heat, electric shocks or a quick whipping on the back of your hand. PainStation marks out a new territory in convergent media and may well inspire the games industry to further innovations. En garde!

Web: http://www.painstation.de/

Julian Oliver levelHead

levelHead is a 3D spatial memory game in the form of a tangible interface. It uses a hand-held physical cube as its only interface. On screen it appears that each of the cube’s faces contains a little room and each of them is logically connected with the others by doors. In one of these rooms there is a character and by tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the way out. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in. levelHead challenges the player's spatial memory. Each player has just 120 seconds to find the exit of each cube and move the character to the next. There are three cubes (levels) in total and, just as you imagine, the mnemonic traps become increasingly difficult to avoid as the player progresses.

Web:http://julianoliver.com/levelhead

Hannah Perner-Wilson & Mika Satomi Massage Me

Massage me is a wearable massage interface that turns a video game player’s excess energy into a back massage for an innocent bystander. Massaging someone is usually a boring task. If you're lucky the most you'll get after a lot of pleading is a five-minute back rub. The artists noticed the potential of gamers, obsessed individuals in our midst, whose fingers seem to contain an endless source of energy. Transferring the concept of massage into the gaming scenario enables an innocent bystander to receive that long desired ever lasting back massage.

Web:www.massage-me.at

Personal Cinema & the Erasers Folded in

Folded in is a project about the notion of borders and their representation in the social networks of the web 2.0. User-generated systems like YouTube show that users tend to reproduce in the web the same prejudices, superstitions and nationalistic beliefs of the real world and shape similar types of borders and even conflicts in the form of video wars.
The project attempts a détournement of the representational space of YouTube, by transforming it into a game space, and by respectively turning the selected videos and the tags into game elements. Users are asked to cross tag - borders, conquer and map territories evaluating the data they watch. The Folded in project wishes to contribute to the semi utopian idea of the creation of the thoughtful gamer. What type of sociality does the ‘Social Web’ produce and for whom? Can we liberate ourselves from prejudices and beliefs through play? 

Web: http://www.foldedin.net/

Martin Pichlmair & Fares Kayali Bagatelle Concrete 
Bagatelle Concrete is a pinball machine turned musical instrument. It is played for making music rather than achieving a high score. Consequently, the score board was replaced with custom speakers. The more successfully the player interacts with the machine, the more intense the accompanying soundtrack gets. The piece maintains the roughness of the electromechanical original game, mixing physical sounds happening on the playing field with manipulations of their recordings. All you hear is origins in your style of play. 

Web: http://bagatelleconcrete.attacksyour.net/

Orna Portugaly, Daphna Talithman, Sharon Younger Jumping Rope

Jumping Rope integrates a familiar playground game with the computerized world. Two virtual characters projected on two opposing screens are holding and turning the rope for the player. The middle part of the rope does not exist, one needs to imagine it and jump on time. The characters on the screen react according to the player’s success or failure, influencing the game’s continuity. With the use of video tracking technology, the virtual and the physical world merge, and the original game revives in a new context that preserves the physical aspects.

Web:http://www.orna-p.com/interactive/

Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand 8 bit. A Documentary About Art and Videogames

8 bit is a hybrid documentary examining the influence of videogames on contemporary culture. The documentary ties together seemingly disconnected phenomena like the 1980s demo scene, chiptune music and contemporary artists using machinima and modified games. Some of the artists featured in 8 bit include Cory Arcangel, Bit Shifter, Bodenstandig 2000, Bubblyfish, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway, Glomag, Paul Johnson, John Klima, Johan Kotlinski, Nullsleep, Joe McKay, Tom Moody, Akiko Sakaizumi, Eddo Stern, TEAMTENDO, Treewave and Carlo Zanni. With the help of media critic Ed Halter and new media curator and writer Christiane Paul, these very recent artistic strategies are put in the historical context of modernist and postmodernist discourse and examined as potential examples of a transition into fresh, uncharted territory.

Rolando Sánchez Matari 69200
The Matari 69200 project focuses on the political violence suffered during the 1980s in Peru. For that purpose, the artist uses as a medium the videogame and the ATARI 2600, a very popular videogame console in Peru during the same decade. The number “69200” in the title refers to the number of fatalities throughout the war.
The armed conflict was between the Peruvian government and the Shining Path Maoist guerrilla. Thousands of people were murdered and tortured and many others disappeared. The savagery came from a fundamentalist guerrilla and from the police forces who executed an abusive and indiscriminate repression ignoring all citizens’ human rights. The same TV screen that showed images of this war was also used for playing Pac Man and Space Invaders. Matari 69200 conflates these two experiences into a videogame based on episodes of a real war. 

Alex Sanjurjo Obstruir - serie Reiterar

Reiterar acciones (Reiterate Actions) is a series of five interactive audiovisual installations that share the same subject matter in common. The user has the possibility to interact with five different contexts through five interfaces with different volumes and each with a different way of working. Through the interaction of these five installations the user can experiment with different contexts where elements are characterized by repetitive actions.
In Obstruir n.1 all the sound and visual actions play around one element on the screen, obstructing it. The user can move this element playing with the interface-object. 

Web: www.alexsanjurjo.org/html_an/p_obstruir_an.html

Gordan Savicic Constraint City

Constraint City / the pain of everyday life is a critical performance in urban environments, addressing public and private space within the realm of everyday constraints. A chest strap (corset) with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as a fetish object. The motors tighten the straps when an enclosed wireless network is detected: the better the WIFI signal is, the tighter the jacket becomes. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a static schizogeographic pain-map whose data is acquired from Google-Maps servers with automated script bots. By wearing the straight-jacket, the artist not only writes, but is at once also able to read the city code. The object itself presents a new genre, a mixture of a fashion apparatus, technical gadgetry, low-tech DIY object, sex toy and a sarcastic wearable media device.

Web: http://www.yugo.at/equilibre/

Silver & True SellYourRoleX

Taking the avatar from computer games and bringing him/her back to real world is kind of a revolt towards this increasing phenomenon of simulation in our everyday life. Silver & True reversed the principle of computer games. They turn the simulation back to reality, exposing the avatar to the real pain of life. What happened with social games then? How do people relate to the live avatar? Surprisingly, people play carefully with such a live avatar. They develop an emotional engagement and responsibility for him. The mathematical logic of simulation world is replaced by social logic of real world. Code controls emotions and social behaviour.

Web: http://silver.avu.cz/sellyourrolex

Axel Stockburger Tokyo Arcade Warriors - Shibuya

Tokyo Arcade Warriors - Shibuya is part of an ongoing series of video portraits of players of video and computer games. It was shot in September 2003 in three different public gaming arcades near Shinjuku/Tokyo. The faces of the players are the only visible evidence of the games being played. Their facial reactions are synced with the sounds emerging from the game consoles. 

Web: http://www.stockburger.co.uk/art/index.html

Román Torre Life Floor

Life Floor (beta) is a virtual and interactive installation based on the "Game of Life", one the most popular algorithms of the so-called cellular automatons (mathematical representations of intelligent cellular systems), devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. When entering the installation, the audience becomes part of this virtual representation of cellular and intelligent life, interacting with the ecosystem and intervening in the development of generations during the exhibition. These generations will be monitored on a meter visible to the public.

Web:http://www.romantorre.com/

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: Jorge Cano y Enrique Tomás

David Valentine/MediaShed The Duellists

Free-running meets free-media film when two late night traceurs are caught on CCTV as they engage in an acrobatic competition in the Manchester Arndale shopping centre in England. The video was filmed entirely using the in-house CCTV network with a soundtrack created from the environmental noises recorded during production. The fluid, uninterrupted movement of the two runners who act as players re-energizes the environment in the most vivid, playful and spontaneous way.
The film is the outcome of an invitation the Futuresonic Festival addressed to the Mediashed, in March 2007. Filmmaker David Valentine worked with professional parkour breakin’ crew Methods of Movement to choreograph and shoot the short film over three consecutive nights. The soundtrack was composed by electronic artist Hybernation and is created entirely from the found sounds and noises he recorded during the production.

Web: http://www.mediashed.org/duellists

William Wegman Two Dogs and Ball (Dogs Duet) 
William Wegman uses the area framed by the camera as his performance space, employing a single, fixed camera to record the scenes as he and Man Ray, his Weimaraner, act them out. It has been suggested that Wegman's performances with Man Ray are uncanny invocations of broadcast television's manipulations of its viewers. Man Ray and his companion are collectively mesmerized by a tennis ball. Wegman explained that he had created the video by moving a tennis ball around, off-camera, thus capturing the dogs' attention.