Carleton Digital Arts Festival 2003

Videogames: Theory, Practice & Play [Nideffer, Salin & Gustafson]

1:30 to 4:30, Olin 149 [Sponsored by Carleton ITS, Instructional Technology Services]

Robert Nideffer: From Skateboards to Satellites

Robert Nideffer's Interactive Project Map offers an overview of his research, teaching and publishing in the areas of virtual environments and behavior, interface theory and design, technology and culture, and contemporary social theory.

His work "Proxy, 2001" is currently online at the Whitney Museum Artport.

He has participated in a number of national and international online and offline exhibitions, speaking engagements and panels for a variety of professional conferences. Currently he is hard at play initiating an interdisciplinary program in Gaming Studies, and directing the newly formed Game Culture & Technology Lab.

Robert Nideffer has an MFA in Computer Arts, and a Ph.D. in Sociology, and is an Associate Professor in Studio Art and Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, where he also serves as an Affiliated Faculty in the Visual Studies Program, and the Art, Computation and Engineering (ACE) Program.

Robert Nideffer's Curriculum Vita
Cal-ITSquared on Nideffer's "Proxy" at the Whitney
MetaGame Group at UC Irvine
GameSpy on the UC Irvine Game Studies

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Katie Salen: Street Mods - From Liberty City to the Big Urban Game

Salen: Of punk music, rock critic Greil Marcus writes, "The Sex Pistols made a breach in the pop milieu, in the screen of received cultural assumptions governing what one expected to hear and how one expected to respond." Decades later, the same DIY cultural sensibility would resurface in a video game called DOOM. As the game that introduced the world to the art of the mod, DOOM's infiltration of popular culture has reinvented the way we play. From the streets of Liberty City to the suburban living rooms of the Sims, players are remaking game systems in their own image. Street Mods will explore and celebrate games and game mods with an eye to urban identity, social resistance, and cultural play.

Katie Salen is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Design and Technology Program at Parsons School of Design, and does freelance interactive and game design for clients such as Microsoft, gameLab, the Design Institute, Eyebeam Atelier, and LEGO. She recently published Rules of Play, a game design textbook co-written with Eric Zimmerman (MIT Press), and is a contributing editor to RES Magazine. She has curated game-related content for the Lincoln Center, CinemaTexas, and the Walker Art Center. Katie secretly wishes she had more time to play.

Game Lab
Quake! Doom! Sims!: Transforming Play: Family Albums and Monster Movies
Cinema Texas
Big Urban Game

:::::::: Brent Gustafson: Game Console

In the early 1980's, arcade games ushered in a whole new way to think about gaming, technology, and the social connection between the two. Yet over the course of the last 20 years, many of these works of art have been lost to destruction, decay, or simply forgotten altogether. Today, through the use of a technology called emulation, "Arcade Console" brings this archive of classic games back to life. Using a custom-built arcade cabinet created by Gus the Country Carpenter, "Arcade Console" mimics the look, feel and experience of a real arcade machine and includes virtually every arcade game ever created. It's a look back at the history and nostalgia of arcade gaming for those who remember it, and those who never had a chance to.

Brent Gustafson is a New Media Designer at the Walker Art Center, and holds a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. His interest in video games stems back to his childhood, and also through his work as a video gaming journalist for Gannett News Service in the early 1990's. His website, assembler.org, is a virtual playground for his video game projects.

Stephen Mohring: New Work

Boliou Lecture Hall, 4:15 p.m.

My work this year has focused on two dramatic events: the birth of my daughter twelve months ago and the ongoing battle with esophageal cancer that started for my mother eight months ago. As these events unfold I am struck by the parallels between them in specific, growth which both creates and destroys at an amazing rate controlled in the cells of a fetus, uncontrolled in a cancer.

While my daughter was in the womb I became fascinated by my wifes expanding belly and the activities inside. I tracked this by taking periodic casts of her torso and scanning these into a three-dimensional computer modeling program in order to study both the surface growth and the volumetric changes as they occurred. I took frontal and profile photos of my wife twice a week to create a flip-book as a witness to this miraculous inflation. After my daughter was born I used the same program and a digital 3D pointer, along with thousands of photos to track her maturation, as a way of staying sane and imaginative during three months of gut-wrenching colic. This digital documentation led to several pieces, two included here: 39 weeks, which is derived from a mold of the pregnant belly one week before delivery,and a conversation between life and death, which is based on the shape created while lifting my motion-soothed daughter above my head and the stairs we climbed on those endless early nights.

My mothers cancer took us all by surprise. A survivor of the occupation of Greece during World War II, she had always been an icon of invincibility. Esophageal cancer is particularly swift in its destruction, my mothers tumor spiked in size by a factor of five over just two months. While poring over medical 3D imagery of cancerous cells and researching models of their development, I searched for a sculptural metaphor for the sort of growth on display in the rabid, metastasizing cells inside her body (perhaps the nightmare counterpart to the ecstatic dream of pregnancy). Using steam-bent oak wrapped obsessively around a spherical frame which is then shellacked and burned, I intend to capture the frenzied and random destruction of malignancy.

Stephen Mohring teaches sculpture at Carleton College.

Opening Reception: STATE OF THE ART: Maps, Stories, Games and Algorithms from Minnesota

Opening Reception in the Carleton Art Gallery, 7:00 - 9:30 p.m.

This exhibition, curated by Steve Dietz, presents new media artworks by national and local artists that complement the themes of the term-long Digital Arts Festival, including mapping, databases, algorithms, open work, video games, and narrative. The show closes November 19, 2003.

Steve Dietz is former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9, and the digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Instite of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site mnartists.org with the McKnight Foundation.Steve Dietz is former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9, and the digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Instite of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site mnartists.org with the McKnight Foundation.

[See listing for this exhibition on the MNartists site, including this list of artists and works in the show.]

Join Guest Curator Steve Dietz and Gallery Director Laurel Bradley for an Opening Reception featuring a Gallery Talk by guest artist Sam Easterson.

Sam Easterson is the Founder and Director of Animal, Vegetable, Video, a project dedicated to building the world's largest and most comprehensive library of video footage taken from points of view of animals and plants. In what will become his life's work, Easterson explores the visual world of everything from lily pads to alligators to millipedes to buffalo by mounting tiny video cameras on them, such as this buffalo staring at its own reflection.

Easterson has worked as a video artist for over 10 years. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions across the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. Included among the institutions that have featured his work are the Whitney Museum of American Art(Whitney Biennial), New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA.

Sam Easterson has a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. He has won national awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1999 Louis Comfort Tiffany Prize), New York, the Creative Capital Foundation, New York and the Peter. S. Reed Foundation, New York.

Artists in the show include:

Justin Bakse: Recognition, 2002

Brian Carroll: Electronetwork

Gary Dahl: Fairy Dust, 2003

Tomas Filsinger

Colette Gaiter: Space/R a c e

Brent Gustafson: Arcade Console, 2003

Jonathan Keller

Geoff Lillemon: Oculart

Patrick Maun: I Am, 2003

Jim Ockuly: The Obstacle Course, 2000

Roman Verostko: Manchester Illuminated Turing Machine & Cyberforms

Kessie Wheelock: Ruinedeye

Eric Williams: Distributive Justice

Marina Zurkow, Scott Paterson, Julian Bleecker: PDPal

Laurence Bricker & Paul Frett: The More Things Change... [Designing For Interactivity]

Boliou Lecture Hall, 7:00 p.m. [Sponsored by Media Studies]

The complexion of media has changed. With more options than ever, where do you get your news? Your entertainment? How do you shop? How do you reach out and connect with your community?

Join Paul Frett and Laurence Bricker for a look at how interactive communication is in the process of changing our relationship with mass media. Although over 10 years old, the Internet is in its infancy. After a period of intense growth, fueled by speculation and ultimately broken promises, the internet is changing the way our global culture interacts. It has the potential to change the very core of mass communication.

Explore some of the ideas defining the very nature and future of new media. What is really new and unique about this communication channel? What are the elements of experience design? Where do we go from here?

Laurence Bricker -- Co-founder / Creative Director of Popular Front Interactive.
Laurence is a new-media pioneer. With 14 years in digital interactive media, he specializes in providing both strategic and creative perspective to experience design and application development. Bricker has led the development of online communication solutions for many businesses, including Macromedia, 3M, PBS, and Target. His commitment to strategic, creative, and technology integration has won numerous industry awards for Popular Front. Laurence serves on the advisory boards of the University of Minnesotas New Media Institute and the Minnesota Film Board.

Paul Frett - Manager, New Business Development Planning & Strategy for Target.com and Founder of Perspective Soup.
A strategist, a writer and an interactive expert, Paul works with companies all over the world to help improve how users experience their message. In 1998 he founded Perspective Soup, a company focusing on information architecture, Web strategy and experience-based design. He has directed and led Web and software development projects for a variety of companies including Intel, Target, Univision Broadcasting, 3M and the Shanghai Free Trade Zone in Shanghai China. In his current role at Target, he is helping to merge new media and e-commerce into a custom, informative and compelling user experience. Paul is on the interactive media teaching faculty at Brainco - Minneapolis School of Advertising.

Popular Front Studio [Not to be missed!]

"Desktop Icons": New Digital Cinema [U.S. Premiere!]

Olin 149, 7:00 & 9:30 p.m. [Sponsored by the College Film Society & Media Studies]

Digital Cinema is not merely anything shot with a digital video camera, it's an emerging genre of its own.

This program of short works by 25 Scottish and international artists points to the digital desktop film-making of the future. Popular culture meets art, design and new technologies. A new desktop iconography emerges.

"The computer desktop culture is often over-hyped as the mantra for the new century. It informs our present lifestyle choices, the way we create and consume today. If a desktop is normally judged by its functionality, not its appearance, an icon of popular culture is traditionally perceived as more glamour than substance. In the age of narrative chaos, when traditional storytelling is being overthrown by the advent of new media, the Desktop Icons programme was conceived as an attempt to unwrap the new protagonists of popular culture--computer desktops and new screen icons."

Curated by Iliyana Nedkova for New Media Scottland.

Catalogue for Desktop Icons [Download .PDF]
"Desktop Icons" Trailer Download [10 MB file size]

New Media Scotland [>Desktop Icons]