Play it! Make it! workshop media now online

Documentation from our recent Play it! Make it! exhibition is now online. This includes photos from the workshop as well as a playable version of the completed game - a bizaare mix of collaged couples, jumping fish, and cackling spirits. We've had a number of requests to run the workshop again, if you're interested just leave a comment.

In Pictures: Newcall gallery launch

Newcall gallery launched officially last night with the opening of Martyn Reynolds and Marnie Slater. "No Letting Go, No Holding Back" featured a readymade Mercedes A class banner by Reynolds, which seemed to continue his habit of acquiring large objects from stores and manufacturers (Reynolds previous show at Window featured a treadmill, road bike, and growing lamp from an array of sponsors). Slater's offering consisted of a dual channel project, an awkward series of bodily positions and poses mimicked by either performer. Amateur in an endearing way, the lo-res video balanced the commercial slickness of the Mercedes piece.


Behind the scenes, Newcall is an interesting exercise in reappropriating a space. Originally built at least two decades ago, the open air foyer and ground floors were designed to be a commercial mall, but failed almost instantly. The surrounding area of Newton is strongly industrial and has been for a number of years, and the combination of lack of foot traffic and parking meant the death knell for the original intent. Instead a handful of small businesses catering to office workers fill the void: a post office, a small cafe, a print shop. With it's conversion, Newcall joins the ranks of others such as the Jensen Gallery in Newmarket. Leaving the central city for a bigger, more industrial space, the gallery is quite obviously a converted parking garage, maintaining the hard lines, concrete, and ramps from it's past life.


Newcall continues in the same fashion, rejecting some aspects of it's past while embracing others. The fluorescent panel lighting and dark tinted glass stay. The carpet is (quite literally) ripped out. Walls are created over broken walls, ceiling panels removed for art hanging, vinyl glazing placed over windows blurs studio interiors while letting light in. The main entrance, a large double door affair, is rejected completely. Instead the deck is opened up and a set of stairs direct from a service entrance becomes the entry point.

One night videogame show coming to Window

Next Friday at Window we'll be presenting a special one-night only videogame show called Play it! Make it!. The first section consists of a handpicked selection of innovative, unusual, and experimental games from Bill Viola, Toshio Iwai, and others, and will allow you to experience first- hand some important game works.

Game designer Jeff Nusz will be running a lighning fast, low-tech workshop that comprises the Make it! section on the same evening. Arming small teams with a bevy of musical instruments, craft supplies and a computer, Jeff will assist participants in designing and building a simple videogame in just 2 hours.

Friday 28 March from 7 - 10 pm, at Window

Hack this code: Te Tuhi software goes open source

Douglas Bagnall writes to let us know that he's made his Te Tuhi Video Game system software open source under the GPL (General Public) license. We blogged about the show a few months ago here at Window:Scene, where visitors to Te Tuhi could draw pictures that were analysed by the software and converted to videogames via a set of rules. Opening the code to the community allows these rules to be changed and shifted, but you'll need some technical savvy. With his usual deadpan humour, Bagnall goes straight from step 4, "Try ./tetuhi path/to/some/image.jpg. If everything is working, a window should pop up with a game in it.", to step 5, "But it probably isn't working, so at this point you should subscribe to the mailing list and ask there."

Hye Rim Lee at Max Lang

For those waltzing around the Chelsea gallery scene in the next few weeks, Hye Rim sends word about an opening of new work on March 13th at Max Lang gallery, 229 10th Ave, New York.

New work on Window: Pippin Barr and Xin Cheng

This month's Online artist at Window is a selection of work from Stimulus Response, "the sprawling web-based diary of Wellington artist, writer, and game theorist Pippin Barr. From comic strips to delicate pencil drawings, interactive video works and maps, Barr chronicles the bizarre, banal, and boring in the everyday."


I've also completed a range of 'additional data' for Xin Cheng's recent show: a massive repository of texts, theses, links, and streaming audio research that provided the basis for the work shown at Window. From green roofs to gannet calls, the psychology of blogging and motorcycles in galleries, there's an array of interesting articles.

In Pictures: Johnny Chang at Gus Fisher

Quicktake: Billy Apple at Auckland Art Gallery

Billy Apple staged a sound performance at the Auckland Art Gallery yesterday afternoon, filling the usually tranquil Albert Park area with roars and smoke from the "The Billy Apple Historic Racing Collection" - a series of classic British grand prix bikes like the 1962 Norton Manx 500cc, once raced by innovative cycle designer John Britten. Reconfiguring the traditional gallery circuit of Kitchener and Lorne streets as a conceptual track, Apple had notable riders deliver their 20 minute sonic barrage in the 'pit'. Apple has a long engagement with sound in previous works, such as Severe Tropical Storm at Window, in which an extended 'soundtrack' was composed from data sourced from a fateful voyage on a freight liner. The usual generic throttle sounds were replaced with a range of throaty roars, pops, and piercing buzzes - demonstrating different attributes of each bike, and reinforcing the artist's statement that "the difference between the AJS and Norton is like the difference between a trumpet and a trombone."

New Hye-Rim work at Art Basel Miami

Hye Rim Lee recently sent word about new work in the Art Basel Miami Beach show - the US counterpart to the parent show in Switzerland. "My 3 new work Crystal City, a digital print series 1, (c-type print, 72 inch x 72 inch), Candyland, a series of digital print (70 cm x 70 cm, c-type print) will be at Art Miami Basel, Kukje Gallery stand." Lee showed earlier in the year here in Auckland at Stark White gallery, before heading off to a residency in New York.

Sneak preview of Annie Bradley's "Interpulsator"

Opening on Friday at Window Online and On Site, thought we'd give you a sneak preview of "Interpulsator", a screensaver-based work by Annie Bradley. Coming to life when the system becomes idle, the piece embraces some of the conventions of the medium, while ignoring others - installing itself as traditional software but then 'failing' to save, allowing parts of the screen to burn in because the pixels are never refreshed. Annie provides additional tangents on her show page, ranging from the first digital watch to time-keeping stars (Pulsars) and hardware diagrams of LEDs. Available for PC or Macintosh systems.

Code from crayons: new work from Douglas Bagnall at Te-Tuhi

For those put off by the gun-wielding heroes and photorealistic environments of videogames, this Saturday is your chance to create your own. Douglas Bagnall, who has previously shown works like A Film-Making Robot at Window, is exhibiting his latest project at Te-Tuhi, which transforms crayon drawings into game worlds via some clever coding.


Bagnall's Video Game Machine is part of a host of recent interactives which mix physical reality like shadows and drawings with screen-based additions. Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters tracks users, adding spikes to their arms, medusa tendrils to hair, and the ability to throw flames and projectiles.



MIT's sketch engine takes simple physics diagrams drawn on a whiteboard and digitises them, translating crude down arrows into gravity, force, and inertia. The demo is dry, the graphics dull. The potential is not.



Flash-based physics toy Line-Rider became a smash success over the last year as users took its simple mechanic of drawing lines for a sled to an art form. Massive levels like the one shown below, or others with up to 22,000 lines are entered into competitions in communities like I Ride the Lines. Little Big Planet, an Xbox 360 title poised for release, hopes to capitalise on the same idea by letting users create and post levels. Players assemble game worlds from a variety of objects which are translated into game worlds with deep physics applied.


With any set of rules and scripts, from Bagnalls 'robots' to interactive narrative such as Façade and simple 'toys' like Line Rider, the fascination lies in 'gaming the system' - finding the edge cases, glitches, and grey areas. The algorithm behind Film Making Robot favoured oversaturated images, creating a very selective memory of images sourced from Wellingtons bus routes. Only hours after Façade was released, players were already trying to break it, ignoring any goals like reuniting the protagonists and instead posting scripts featuring serial killers in an effort to defeat the natural language scripting. The top rated movies on LineRider comps are not huge hills or triple backflips, they're 'microquirk tracks', hardcore users who can place a dot in a specific location, confusing the game code and causing havoc with gravity.

Te Tuhi Video Game Machine
Douglas Bagnall
17th November 2007 – 10th February 2008

Update: James McCarthy also performed using a site-specific wall work comprised of high-tension wires. He repeated the performance on Tuesday with some members of experimental music organisation Vitamin-S. Thanks to James for the pic.

Elam Open Days: Postgrad show

Window brings you 50 exclusive images from the Elam BFA/Postgrad Open Days. Featuring works by Fiona Gillmore, Boris Dornbusch, Sonya Lacey, Bonnie Somerville, Rachel Wills, Kate Newby, Tim Mackrell, Nick Charlesworth, Majlinda Hoxha, Anna Boyd, Jessica Van Dammen, Guy Nicoll, Angela Meleisea Felix, Sarah Rose, Sam Rountree-Williams, Nell May, Emily Pun, Daniel Munn, Matthew Molloy and Art-is-free.

Quicktake: Small Global and Never been to Tehran at MIC

Currently showing at MIC, this exhibition by renowned new media artists D-Fuse tackles globalisation and it's impact - both in terms of architecture/environments, and in business. The first room is an ambitious, multi-channel installation centreing around the viral growth of fast-food giant McDonalds. World maps chronicle the time and position of every franchise, from local California eatery in the 50s through to global domination towards the turn of the millenium. As usual, the curatorial staff at the Moving Image Centre 'hung' the show impeccably, even adding multiple translucent screens to create a triplicate projected effect (see images).

But what's problematic about the work is it's over the top slickness. The data could actually be displayed in any web browser - via Google Maps or Google Earth - but dfuse instead use a barrage of electronic looking tickers and LED interfaces. What could be a dynamic, intelligently networked piece hooked up to data sources worldwide is turned into static video because of a perceived need to seduce the viewer. Adding another layer of irony, this piece about globalisation is fundamentally localised due to it's media, although d-fuse plan to add more video content as the show makes it's way around the world.


Next door, the superficially simple, "Never been to Tehran" is a case in point. The ambitious worldwide photography project challenged artists to "take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like." Participants upload their shots to a Picasa Web Album, allowing a single hub for coordinating, as well as built in features like 'geotagging' to show origin of each image, and RSS feeds allowing blogs to incorporate it into their sites. This open framework means that curators worldwide can re-present the show in a variety of formats.

QuickTake: A jaorinum at the New Zealand Film Archive

Curated by Leonhard Emmerling, this group exhibition showcases some of the wealth of Icelandic video art, an amazingly rich selection from a country of around 300,000 people. Emmerling goes for variety here: from darkly brooding narrative pieces reminiscent of Matthew Barney (Sigurdur Gudjunsson, "Host"), to intimate, banal domestic scenes of a girl jumping on a couch. Noticeably, a good proportion of these works incorporate music in a much more dependent relationship than much video art. A significant tradition of innovative music artists like Bjork, Sigur Ros, and Under Byen has caused a rare effortlessness in crossing the visual/audio arts divide. Icelandic collectives like Kitchen Motors are a case in point, being founded by notable video practitioner Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir (exhibiting "Ours" in this show) and electronic musician Johann Johannson.

Elam Open Days: Undergrad show

Some quick highlights from the current undergrad show on now at Elam. Koreana Wilson 's towering glass sculpture titled "Burning and Dodging" hides between the library and the main studios. Deborah Resnick displays a delicate collection of ecosystems and literature - tiny, moisture filled glass containers and books cut into fan shapes. Some ambitious works for a second year project, Alexander Hoyles's sculptures consist of full scale bathroom scenes, complete with ubiquitous soap fixtures and tiling. Amber Panting humanised a glitch based sound installation by knitting over the top, turning technology into caricature. One of my standouts of the show, Gaura Kelly's earthworks were understated but fascinating. Lucy Tien's soft watercolour bleed works seemed to be a trend this year, at least 3 other artists utilised this style. Neeve Woodward's tethered orange parachute and Verity Jang's participatory piece - asking visitors to break glass - added some fun to the show.

Online artists tackle "AER" quality through exhibition

Belching through the city of Aachen in Germany on huge Mercedes-Benz flatbeds, Eve Andrée Laramée's "Parks on Trucks" is just one of the works shown in the "AER Project", an exhibition curated and released today by Andrea Pollie at Hunter College in New York.


Other standouts include Translator II: Grower, by Sabrina Raaf, a Mars-like rover with a much more down to earth mission, to monitor and visualise levels of CO2 in a room. Raaf balances what could be a patronising, overly-scientific piece with her execution - the robot draws grass along the walls with childlike glee, each blade corresponding to current carbon dioxide amounts.


My favourite was SuperGas by SuperFlex, a "simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family." Visually strong, the huge orange blog resembles a giant Claes Oldenberg piece. But more interesting was the stance towards the "art", shifting the traditional concept from representation to tool, a practical object that invites participation and heavy use - deriving as much from the fields of engineering, science, and agriculture as contemporary art. Currently SuperGas is being tested in the field in Cheing Mai, Thailand.


Unfortunately after very tangible pieces like SuperGas and Parks on Trucks, works like Amy Balkin's Public Smog appear overly conceptual at best, pretentious and ineffectual at worst. And while the project's page disclaims that "Public Smog is no substitute for direct action", the piece requires too much suspension of reality to even work as an exercise in raising awareness.

Quick Take: Stephen Foster at MIC

A spotlight appears on a screen to the left as a suited figure with Indian head dress steps into the frame, a clear reference to the iconic Bond opening sequences. Delayed by a few seconds, the right screen lights up as a second shooter strides across. The crack of gunshots sound as firearms on the left and right are drawn and triggered. The work, entitled Gunfight, is one of a series by Canadian artist Stephen Foster, currently showing at MIC.

What's interesting about the work is the tension deriving from the timing - it's not immediately clear who will shoot first. As writer Monika Gagnon elaborates, "The loops end, and replay endlessly, cowboy or Indian drawing first, depending on how the two digital videos align themselves to each other on each screening."

Unfortunately I found Gunfight to be the strongest piece in the show. Foster employs a number of graphic techniques consistently, resulting in compositions of high-resolution digital objects with glowing effects and obvious scan lines. The resulting style Gagnon describes as "hyper-real", a fitting aesthetic in some ways for work which deals with posturing and power struggles, historical and contemporary authenticity. But while it's an apt commentary for it's subject, the staged aesthetic asphyxiates it's medium as well, leaving behind a series of artificially slick digital compositions which ultimately fail to move or compel.

Tracking the trackers: Unmasking wiki

Next month US based artist Wayne Clements will present a new variation of his un_wiki project specifically for Window. Clement’s Neutral 3 script filters through electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia’s recent pages log, ignoring hundreds of edits on boyfriends, tech trends, and local events, in search of something more sinister. The software contains a list of ‘shadowy editors’ – from defense departments in the US and Australia through to corporate giants like Deutsche Bank, Shell Oil and the Ford Motor Company.

Using tracing technology developed by Virgil Griffith, the artist is able to link the editor with the edited. Griffith created the software "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike", and has so far succeeded. Australian Department of Defense staff are now banned from editing articles after it was discovered the department has made over 5000 edits. Dell, the American Rifle association, and both Democratic and Republican parties were also caught in the fallout, being linked to 'improving' articles that were potentially damaging.

Of course, Wikipedia "conflict of interest" policy is ineffectual and debateable. Who better to create that article on a new technology than the developer? The organiser of a local event is the perfect contributor for an wiki article on it. The problem lies in the potency of the information - from relatively harmless "graffiti" remarks on Helen Clarke's page, to rewrites of presidential administration history, and changes to crash articles by the airline responsible.

Quick take: Phil Dadson and Rosy Parlane at Starkwhite

New Zealand sound artist Phil Dadson, and London-based soundscape musician Rosy Parlane performed at Stark White last night to a full house. The pairing was a good one - active versus passive, old skool versus new. Dadson roamed around the room, slamming away on metallic coils, dropping chains and pumping bellows of organs furiously. Parlane was consumer and filter - recording and looping Dadsons efforts, building up soundscapes of drones, glitches, adding Vangelis-like synths into the mix.

The performance worked best when the distinction between the two grew less - one of the high points occured when Dadson placed a simple $2 fan against taut wires, producing a pulsating percussive backbeat. The ability to replay loops from 10 minutes ago created a much more complex, wholistic piece than Dadson could have performed solo. Unfortunately it's all too easy to create monstrous, piercing tones with a laptop, and Parlane overpowered the piece at times, obscuring whole passages of Dadson's sensitive reed organ work.

Note: images of Parlane and Dadson shown were not taken from performance

Online artist for next month's show at Window

Due to some rescheduling by artists, we have a slot open in next month's Online programme. If you've recently created new work, or would be interested in in developing something specifically for the show, email me at luke dot munn at gmail dot com. You'll be showing in conjunction with Jasmine Lajunen, a former Elam student who's interested in perception, the glance, and who's work will probably take the form of installation. The show opens on September 13th.