games
fun and games
Three of us went to Futuresonic in Manchester yesterday, to research digital art. Well, I say Futuresonic, but really we just went to Cube since that’s where almost all of the art events in Futuresonic are located. A couple of events I wanted to look at were listed as city-wide, but we saw no evidence of them, and since we’d finished at Cube by lunchtime, we decided not to wait for the highlights of the Japan Media Arts Festival at the Contact Theatre in the evening.
If I had to chose a single piece as my favourite, Flight Patterns by Aaron Kolbin would be a strong contender, but I also liked Nuage Vert. I confess that part of their appeal for me is that the latter was created using Processing and I suspect the former was too, though the interpretation notes mention only an “open source programming language”.
On that basis, I ought also to like the knitting scanner in Making Fun Serious, which appears to use Arduino and therefore probably Processing as well, but somehow it merely left me bemused – an electronic version of a pianola, albeit one that plays knitted patterns, with the consequent distortions to the output. It’s quite possible that several other items in the RCA/Yahama section, such as the wearable instrument, used Arduino and Processing too, but the precise method of control was less obvious.
The whole Yamaha section was interesting and it contributed hugely to the relaxed atmosphere that I hope we can emulate in our digital art exhibition in 2011, but I felt the title was the wrong way round. It couldn’t really be taken seriously at all, and should only be seen as a bit of fun.
After leaving Cube we went to Urbis, to see the videogame nation exhibition, which was even more fun than the Yamaha pieces. There were a lot of games I’d never heard of, and most of the games I used to play, such as Myst, Spindizzy, Dark Seed and Wipeout, were missing, and there was little or no mention of the Amiga, my computer of choice for many years. It turns out (though perhaps I should have noted the title of the exhibition) that the emphasis was very much on games created in Britain. I enjoyed trying many of the games on offer, but I struggled, as I always did, with the driving simulators, and some of the controls were too complicated to pick up without a manual or much more time to experiment. My only regret is that I forgot to try Little Big Planet, the one reason I might consider buying a Playstation. The £3 entry fee to the exhibition was a bargain.
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