Game Over / Continue?
Here is a little preview of a piece for the upcoming Giant Robot San Francisco show, "Game Over / Continue?". The theme of this group show is video games and it will even feature some actual playable games collaborated from artists in the show. In the end I painted the controller buttons red.
This piece is a celebration of the home gaming systems of my youth... the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Sega Genesis. These three systems were, in fact, each from a different "generation" of home video game consoles. The Atari 2600 (released in 1977, the year I was born) was a 2nd generation, 4-bit system; The Nintendo Entertainment System was released when I was eight and changed my life. It is a 3rd generation, 8-bit system. While I was a Super Nintendo kid, the Sega Genesis rolled out in 1989 and had Sonic the Hedgehog packed with it. 4th generation and, you guessed it, 16-bits.
I like how these are three controllers from different brands and generations, and each one has a different number of buttons. Yet, they are all controllers from cartridge based systems and are easily recognizable to anybody who played home video games in the 1980s.
Each of these controllers was drawn from a live sample from my collection. The entanglement of chords is just the natural result so I made it an aesthetic element that pulls the whole piece together, I hope. I think one of the greatest developments with the current, 7th generation of home video game systems is the introduction of truly wireless controllers.
I haven't gotten a title yet. I was thinking something along the lines of the ideas entanglement or being tangibly connected to the video game through the controller... like the umbilical or something. I don't know. Titles are so hard. Maybe I'll go with "77-85-89", like a padlock combination or code. Hmmm.
Anyways, the show opens March 27th at GRSF. Be there.
Here is a link to wikipedia's History of Video Games article
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