Eddie Lohmeyer
Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds.
The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel, JODI, Julian Oliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others –- were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds-to intentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.
PUBLICATION DETAILS
LANGUAGE | BINDING | EDITION | ISBN | YEAR | PAGES |
English | Hardcover | 9781501364907 | 2021 | 216 | |
English | Paperback | | 9781501374708 | 2023 | 216 |
English | eBook | | N/A | 2021 | 216 |
TAGS
Authors: #EddieLohmeyer
Publishers: #Bloomsbury
Languages: #English
Format: #eBook #Hardcover #Paperback
Accessibility: N/A
Genres: #Homebrew
Companies:
N/A
Public Figures:
N/A
Games:
N/A
Misc:
N/A
Comments