So I’m cosplaying as Lucina from Fire Emblem Awakening. It’s probably my favorite in the Fire Emblem franchise. She’s also playable in the Super Smash Bros. so she’s probably a little more widely known.
Today I’m cosplaying as old Luke from The Force Awakens.
My name is Tritemare and I’m the Kigurumi King. I’m a Twitch broadcaster of three years, and this is my costume and character.
My character’s name is Mei. She is from the game Overwatch. She was a scientist and she was cryogenically frozen because of an accident that happened. And I like her because she’s just so bubbly. She’s so happy and she’s ready to take on the world.
My character is from the game Overwatch. It’s a fun first-person shooter game. She’s also a female gamer—a Korean female gamer. And since Korean female gamers kinda get a lot of hate and a lot of sexism and stuff, like, it’s really cool to have a character that exists that, you know, represents something that could be.
It’s something that you can’t do anywhere else. You can’t go and dress up as your favorite character and walk out . . .
I went to Dunkin’ Donuts this morning and people were staring at me like I was nuts!
Well, it’s overall something that sets you apart. And it’s another way to make yourself unique.
Instead of being the shy person that fixes computers, I can run around and say, nerf this!
She’s very shy normally. Like, this is the most I’ve heard her speak in, like, ten years.
I’m very specific with my work now. Like, my gloves took me eleven hours to make, my shirt took me about seventeen.
Everyone has the pose they come with and that’s the character they embody. So when someone asks me for a picture, I do that scene at the end when he pulls his hood off and gives Rey that dopey look.
So, I’m known really for many of the social change–based games that I create. Whether it’s the physical, fiscal sport Budgetball that’s played on the National Mall and talks about what it feels like to go into debt and what it feels like to get out of debt—both on a personal and federal level—to a game that gives a history of activism in different cities called Re:Activism, which has been played across the country.
You know Brecht used, had a quote, something about, “Art should not be a mirror; it should be a hammer to shape reality.” And I think there’s something interesting there, and I do think that games and culture provide us with an opportunity to push against the boundaries of a system and the rules of the system so we really look at all the possibilities. We break out of our own thought patterns and find new ways to think, and new perspectives and new points of view.
It lets us play as a kind of person that may not be socially acceptable in real life. So, you know, I can go out there and explore all kinds of issues without the kind of serious consequences that I might have in real life. So, play gives us that opportunity to really try things out, and then, maybe when we’re done, to think about how we can apply that kind of playful mindset to the world we live in.
While the PlayTime exhibition ended in May 2018, PlayTime on pem.org is still up for engagement. We started the conversation here: how is play changing our lives? Check out more on the artists involved and explore the shifting role of play in art and culture with us.
Australian artist Alexander Perrin has a passion for meticulous dynamics, detailed digital rendering techniques, and cats. AShort Trip is the first in a collection of interactive illustrations he is creating for the web. Think of his games as “slow play.”
Alexander Perrin has been developed as a study in capturing and respecting the essences and affordances of graphite pencil on paper within a digital context. Players are invited to transport feline passengers to their respective destinations as the sole operator of a scenic mountain tramway. There is no strict schedule on this particular line, so take all the time you need!
In part 2 of her essay, scholar and activist Susana Morris extends her look at racial identity and play and reflects on the work of artist Mark Bradford. Missed part 1? Check it out here.
African-American artist Mark Bradford has an inspired take on the role of play. He specializes in large mixed-media collages that bring together a variety of ephemera from urban communities, from end papers used at black beauty salons, to flyers advertising everything from divorce court to DNA testing, to other seeming pieces of refuse, in new and innovative ways. This work disrupts commonplace definitions of “trash” and “art,” inviting the audience to consider alternative paradigms. Likewise, Bradford’s art installations and video projects tease out the connections between popular culture and so-called high art to trouble or perhaps even collapse the usual distinctions between the two genres. There is a running theme of a particular type of irreverence and playfulness in Bradford’s oeuvre.
What does it mean to celebrate and play in a state of surveillance?
In a 2007 video installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bradford contrasts two events—the annual Martin Luther King Day parade in Los Angeles and a busy Muslim night market in Cairo. Both videos capture black and brown bodies at play. The video of the King Day parade shows cheerleaders and dancers celebrating the life and legacy of a slain civil rights leader; the scenes of the Cairo night market highlight the exclusive world of a Muslim-only night market complete with amusement park rides and street food. Yet, there is an important distinction between the two videos. While the Muslim carnival goers ride merry-go-rounds and eat sweets with their loved ones in peace, the MLK celebration happens amidst, or in spite of, a heavy police presence. Bradford notes, “I go to the parade every year. Certain details, you start to see over and over and over and over again, such as the policing. There’s as much policing of the parade as a parade. Every frame—and it’s not that I tried to put police in it, they were just in every frame.”7 So, the video invites us to consider, what does it mean to celebrate and play in a state of surveillance? As Bradford himself says, “To see so many black bodies in public space it’s always political.” Blacks existing and playing in public is a political act, a transgressive event. What might it mean if the black parade goers had a safe space like the Cairo night market? Would their play look different or hold a different meaning?
Bradford also troubles the line between playfulness and politics this in his video installation Practice (2003). In Practice Bradford appears onscreen on a basketball court, dribbling the ball and taking shots at the basket. He has also donned a Los Angeles Lakers jersey and pairs it with an incongruously large antebellum hoop skirt. The figure of Bradford playing basketball in a hoop skirt is a comical one, highlighting how impractical a hoop skirt is for any sort of athletic movement. He admits, “I wanted to create a condition, a struggle. I would create this huge antebellum hoop skirt out of a Laker uniform. My goal was to focus on dribbling the basketball and making the shot. But, obviously, when you have an antebellum skirt fanning out about four feet around you that’s going to be difficult. And it was an incredibly windy day, one of those Santa Ana, Southern California incredibly windy days where everything was blowing. What it created was this billowing of the wind. It would catch underneath the dress. It became almost like I was floating.”
It was about roadblocks on every level—cultural, gender, racial.
Both the outfit and the elements conspire against Bradford’s free movement, mimicking the structures that impede marginalized bodies daily. Hoop skirts and other restrictive gendered clothing styles have had the effect of restricting their wearer’s movements. How could a nineteenth-century woman, for example, play, run, or even walk quickly if she is wearing pounds of encumbering fabric? Simply put, she cannot. She is not meant for movement but rather she is ornamental, an object that is perhaps moveable but which does very little moving on its own accord. Yet Bradford does move and play in this ridiculous outfit, not unlike the participants of the MLK parade who play and celebrate despite the threat of police violence: “And I would fall and get up and I would make the shot sometimes, and I wouldn’t sometimes, and I would always get up.” There is something comically poetic about Bradford ambling about a basketball court, dribbling a ball, occasionally falling down, but always rising again to take a shot. This playful take on basketball represents a larger metaphor about transgressing boundaries. Bradford reveals, “It was about roadblocks on every level—cultural, gender, racial. Regardless that they’re there, it is important to continue. You keep going. You keep going, and so that’s what it was. And I made the hoop, I made the shot. I always make the shot. Sometimes it takes me a little longer to get there, but I always make the shot.” Ultimately, play for marginalized peoples, particularly black bodies, is not necessarily about complete freedom to do as they would like, but celebrating what our bodies can do despite very real obstacles. ♦
In 2003, a posse of artists, programmers, and musicians raised on first-generation computers and early programming languages embarked on a cross-country house tour. Los Angeles Times music writer Randall Roberts tells the story, including the details on a stop at his home.
A few years after graduating from college, the dozen-odd creators included, at various stops, an outfit known as the BEIGE Programming Ensemble, the electronic noise group Extreme Animals, whose screaming singer Jacob Ciocci was a co-founder of the Paper Rad artist collective, the elusive stunt-mixer who performed as DJ Shoulders, and ghetto-tech producer Bitch Ass Darius. They dubbed it “The Summer of HTML.”
The pitch for the series of events was this: “on this tour we will be doing live HTML performances as well as audio music nintendo hacker adventures audio rave nightmares and video showings of our cartoons. We are going to make new webpages and put them on a cool webpage.” Like a package concert tour but minus the concert part, the two week expedition took them to galleries and performance spaces in New York, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere. In St. Louis, the tour landed at my house, a.k.a. the Louis Hartoebben Contemporary Art Museum, named in honor of the retired fireman who had sold me the building for a song.
The BEIGE Programming Ensemble, which featured multimedia artists Cory Arcangel and Paul B. Davis, sound engineer Joseph Bonn, and high-level programmer and DJ Joseph Beuckman, had recently issued a record called The 8-Bit Construction Set: Commodore 64 vs. Atari 2600, an interactive 12-inch “DJ kit” on which they had transferred a few dozen of their programmed locked-groove beats. The sounds on one side were programmed using a Commodore 64; the B-side on an Atari 2600, each of which had its own distinctive synthesized tones. When employed by a DJ with a pair of turntables, a mixer, and two copies of the record, the looped grooves served as building blocks—the construction set—to create on-the-spot, 133 beats-per-minute, 8-bit tracks. Place the needle in the groove and rather than progressing through a song as it glides toward the center, the stylus moves in an infinite circle, looping whatever recorded sound is contained therein. The record also featured sound samples of Atari- and C64-related tones and two wildly complex original Davis compositions, “Dollars” and “Saucemaster.” The inner band on each side was a data track, or stored program, that—when taped onto cassette and loaded into a computer tape drive connected to a computer—ran a Roland 303 emulator.
Raised on first- and second-generation computers and gaming consoles, BEIGE was exploring ways to harness interfaces and their low-level programming languages in service of visual and sonic art. Most famously, Arcangel and Davis, both students at Oberlin (along with Bonn, who is now an accomplished music editor for film and just concluded work on Star Wars: The Last Jedi), were cracking open Nintendo cartridges and reprogramming the chips to create striking video game vistas and blippy 8-bit music scores.
“Arcangel had recently unveiled his acclaimed hack Super Mario Clouds, and offered a step-by-step tutorial.”
Along with Beuckman, who was living, studying, and spinning records in St. Louis under the name DJ Cougar Shuttle, the quartet weren’t a musical group per se. “It was barely a band,” Arcangel told me during a recent conversation. “I always thought of it more like a crew—like a graffiti crew or a drum ‘n bass crew.”
During the performance at the Hartoebben, Arcangel delivered a PowerPoint demonstration that included a detailed explanation for how he and Davis hacked Nintendo cartridges and messed with the innards. Arcangel had recently unveiled his acclaimed hack Super Mario Clouds, and offered a step-by-step tutorial. Davis teamed with the mysterious spinner DJ Shoulders to tear through a set that mixed Detroit techno – a lot of Underground Resistance, if I recall correctly—and improvised Construction Set compositions featuring squiggly-sounding acid house tones and Atari and C64 samples. Extreme Animals—Ciocci and David Wightman (a.k.a. DJ George Costanza)—performed a frantic set of synth noise. Ciocci also screened short Paper Rad films created by him, his sister Jessica Ciocci, and the visual artist Ben Jones.
BEIGE seldom “played” music as a band would, either on the tour or any other time. “It was even more disparate, which is more in line I think with how one would operate over a computer,” Arcangel said, describing the process as “more electronic or something, where we were never all in the same place at the same time.”
Now an artist and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, Davis told me that when he was working on the already anachronistic machines in the early ’00s, he was thinking about “the explosion of the internet and how it often felt like the interfaces were leading you where whoever designed the interface wanted you to go, rather than, from a programming perspective, where you might tell the computer what to do.”
The video game character Mario might seem to be content to race through his programmed course upon boot-up, but he was locked in a Sisyphean cycle. What if, pondered ensemble members, Mario and his gaming environment could be freed from the shackles of the creator’s programming?
One piece that Davis programmed featured Mario set against a black background, staring to the side. Above him in Nintendo-era digital lettering were the words, “Now I just stand here silently among data that grows cold.” Arcangel said that when he, Davis, Bonn, and Beuckman were working on the record, he’d just switched majors, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, and was making beats onto a Commodore 64 at off hours. Working with what the artist described with affection as “a beautiful, simple tracker that just showed a screen full of hexadecimals” called Future Composer 4.0, he built loops one coded line at a time. “The game was to get these really raw sounds,” Arcangel said. “Just make these really nasty, raw loops.” It didn’t hurt that the record was mastered in Detroit by legendary techno engineer Ron Murphy, who made the loops sound gritty and deep.
“Working with what the artist described with affection as “a beautiful, simple tracker that just showed a screen full of hexadecimals” he built loops one coded line at a time.”
In addition to being an awesome object, Davis stressed that aspects how they made beats for the 8-Bit Construction Set were, for him, “slightly political in their response, I think, to the way I saw computer usage progressing in society at the time.” Describing “anti-reverse-engineering and surveillance laws then coming into effect,” Davis recalls being critical of the corporatization of programming. Now, he said, “It’s like par for the course. No one even thinks about it. It’s understood that that’s how these devices are in our lives. They’re not supposed to be investigated in any way.”
Simultaneously, Arcangel said, the goals of the project and the tour “were very unclear, but that was part of the fun. Nothing was planned. There was just a lot of energy, and that is kind of what sustained the enterprise. Especially with the tour. You saw the tour. It was chaotic. You couldn’t do it if you’re forty.” ♦
Photo credits: Feature image of Cory Arcangel’s Totally Fucked, 2003, courtesy of the artist. Marginal images of the 8-Bit Construction Set in St. Louis and posters, courtesy of Randall Roberts. Lower left image by and courtesy David Wightman (Paper Rad).
Halloween is Tuesday and PEM’s hometown of Salem has been planning for the event since November of last year. This week’s edition of our link pack is dedicated to the alternate personas that most of us wait all year to celebrate.
But if you’ve been reading Lizzie Stark’s Performing the Real—a three-part introduction to the world of larping—you’ll find that there are plenty of folks who don’t wait for Halloween to embrace their alter egos. Part 2, in particular, focuses on the key role that wholly assuming an alibi plays in the success of a larp. She goes so far to say that alibis are not reserved for the players alone, but that larp itself can be an alibi for interaction. Part 3 arrives on Tuesday.
Cosplayers of color don’t always have representative characters to model on. Recently, a vocal community united on social media to affirm their presence and prowess—and voice support for one another—after Mic.com interviewed five cosplayers who addressed the role race plays in their character development.
Then there’s cosplayers of . . . construction? This cosplayer got a little meta when he costumed himself as the Javits Center, host to this year’s New York Comic Con.
File under: just because we can, does that mean we should? Digital Avatars and fake news.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was roundly and justifiably rebuked for “teleporting” his virtual self to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico in a bizarre attempt to show sympathy for storm victims. He later apologized.
Rutherford Chang is an artist and collector—and the third-ranked Game Boy Tetris player in the world. Watch Chang in a live streamed performance of Game Boy Tetris.
In 2014, Chang started recording and broadcasting his gameplay to a competitive gaming world for which Game Boy Tetris held little sway any longer. Once he began recording and streaming on a daily basis, he began to look at his gameplay as a kind of performance.
Dear NintendoPower, a companion piece to Chang’s live performance, is at once a testimonial to the addictive nature of achievement and a modest homage to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. Chang says in a recent interview on The Creative Independent:
“He used to write these letters to Nintendo Power in 1991 boasting about his top score. I did some stuff like that too when I beat him and he heard about it apparently. He left a comment on a news article about the project. He had claimed he had gotten higher scores, but I’ll believe him when I see him stream it live on Twitch.”
Watch Chang play Game Boy Tetris via the video stream link below, recorded live on October 25. Has Chang bettered his ranking? Tune in to find out!
In the second installment of her two-part essay, writer Virginia Heffernan continues her pinball pilgrimage and humanizes the digital-analog divide. Missed part 1? Read it here.
There were also beeps in this game. When my balls—my extra balls by now, I’m that good—hit one particular bumper and bounced back on it, again and again, piling up points and aiming me for the leaderboard, the beeps beeped furiously. Each one was a half-second, more or less tonal, and—as usual for me—beeps sit on the knife’s edge of puzzling and rapturous.
Beeps belong to nature and electricity and electronics and the Internet. All the centuries. Like the railroad toot but unlike an old telephone ring, beeps have both a distinct start and finish, marked by the twin plosives “b” and “p,” and an elastic center that can generously expand and contract like an accordion: beeeeeeeep. You can create Morse code in beeps. Beeeep beep beep beep. Beep. Beep. Beep beeeep beeeep beep. Yes, they’re a frankensound—but nature can almost, almost suggest them. They certainly seem to have always existed. Maybe art teases beeps out of nature.
The beep is synthetic; it’s manmade, like climate change. Plants don’t beep, nor weather, nor animals, nor birds except Road Runner. If you hear a beep, you know that a person, or more likely his artifact, is signaling. There’s no wondering, Is that a beep or a nightingale? Is that a beep or a tornado? Beeps are also not voices or music.
And still, sonically exotic as they may be, beeps are, as my pinball home insistently suggested, easy to make; they are cheap and light. No wonder everything beeps. E-mail beeps. Texts. Trucks in reverse. Hospital monitors. Stoves, dashboards, cameras, clocks. Coffee machines. Dishwashers. Elevators. Toys. Robots. Toy robots.
[In] the Monopoly game the beeps were modulated and engineered to define my experience, the very victories I thought I was creating with my analog tendons and fingertips and wrists.
The onomatopoeic word “beep” launched in 1929, and prewar beeps were produced by car horns, though sonar, electric elevators, and clown horns may have beeped or protobeeped even before the 1920s. Other car horns of the period, and now especially those of big cars, are usually heard to “honk.” Beeps as the sound of cute cars—makes sense. A small, zippy, nuisancey thing chirping, “’Scuse me, could you move a smidge? Thanks!” That’s a beep.
As a source for beeps, car horns gave way to piezoelectric technology, a breakthrough used increasingly after World War II in labs, hospitals, and military operations. With the arrival of the transistor, small piezo buzzers could be made to beep in devices like electronic metronomes and game-show buzzers. An efficient, low-power way to gin up a tone for a device to emit. Beeps could now be heard in a range of contexts, but the sound still managed to speak of seriousness and technology.
The material world and our bodies, in concert, can reconfigure themselves, as if to prove they can’t be digitized.
Were those beeps on the pinball playfield digitized? I choose to believe they were not made in sound labs, but date from the bells and horns of J.P. Morgan days. That every time a ball hit a bumper it squeaked because it was weighted metal on hard, smooth rubber, and something in the angle—and I misread it as a beep—but I’m not crazy: Naturally on the Monopoly game the beeps were modulated and engineered to define my experience, the very victories I thought I was creating with my analog tendons and fingertips and wrists.
Beautifully, submissively, we have adjusted to the hegemony of computers. But this Monopoly table, with its rusty screws and peeled paint, suggests one road back or through to an ecstatic, three-dimensional, and entirely mortal form of culture, in which our imperfect and limited bodies might reassert their centrality to culture, politics, and philosophy. This reassertion I anticipate with some giddiness the way, in my Bolshevik days, I used to anticipate the digital revolution. This time I resolve not to be so impatient with my elders.
The material world and our bodies, in concert, can yet reconfigure themselves, as if to prove they can’t be digitized. I believe that. In games like this one, from 2001, before broadband razed our nervous systems, I hear trills of promise. Of course, on this day, I was at forty-five in the middle of the journey my life, lost in the dark wood of an executive hotel. I was a truant; I had skipped a conference for a stolen pinball game. And reader: I was winning. ♦
