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I had work in this show last month at Platform in Winnipeg: http://platform121.blogspot.ca/2012/06/reset-post-consumer-gamer-culture.html Reset: post-consumer gamer culture
Exhibition 21 June - 28 July 2012
Opening Reception + Curator's Tour Thursday 21 June 7PM
M. Ashmore, DS Poem [detail]
PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is pleased to present the fourth exhibition in our thematic programming year, where we are exploring artists use of collections and archiving with an idea toward to palimpsest or re-writable text as a way to discuss photography. Reset : post-consumer gamer culture is curated by mrghosty for PLATFORM and will feature new media work in print, projection, and hand-held interactive form by six well-known artists in the field machinima, game culture, and video: Party Time! Hexcellent!, Clint Enns, Ian Bogost, Max Capacity, Myfanwy Ashmore, Haydi Rocket.
Video games as a medium is still very much a young one. Still less than fifty years old, gamer culture and technology has grown exponentially over that time. What began as simple pixels creating primitive representations of much grander ideas, has grown to become a multi-billion dollar industry with countless iconic brands, ‘worlds’, and affiliations. In the above board world of the game industry, a consumer economic model is the primary thrust behind the release of mainstream video games. However, as the medium has grown (much like it's cinematic counterparts), contemporary gaming culture now embodies and intersects with a variety of independent creative practices including game design, game art, hacker culture, fan-generated artwork and more.
Reset is an exhibition that encompasses the varied artistic practices of media artists who have embraced the technology, culture, and aesthetics of gaming as their chosen medium. From those who use the aesthetics of heritage gaming to create digital drawings and short animated loops, to those who use the technology as a filmmaking tool (commonly known as ‘machinima’). Where others create their own interactive software applications (“games”), modify game controllers and interfaces.
This exhibition seeks to give an overview of of these varying practices within the medium, while also highlighting the history of home gaming technology, through the devices that these works are viewed on, “played” on, and interacted with. The works represented in Reset recontextualize the notion of gamer culture as consumer culture; by taking the spirit of play that gamer culture capitalizes on and transforming this notion of play into new forms of media art creation and interaction. - mrghosty, curatorial synopsis
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