Episode 393: Jesper Juul & Oliver Warden & art fair madness

by | Mar 11, 2013 | Podcast


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393
This week: Video games. Amanda talking about porn and boobs. People behaving badly. Oh, yeah, some art. It’s after 3 AM.  I’m tired you aren’t getting a huge, organized note, go and google stuff, you can do it. I am even more nasally than normal in the audio, damned airplane petri dishes.

This is a show for the ages.

Jesper Juul is an assistant professor at the New York University Game Center. He has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990’s. His publications include Half-Real on video game theory, and A Casual Revolution on how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii brought video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”. His most recent book is The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of playing Video Games. http://www.jesperjuul.net

 

Oliver Warden (b. 1971, Cleveland, Ohio) is a multidisciplinary artist, working both in the realms of contemporary art and technology. When online, he goes as his avatar name, ROBOTBIGFOOT. The majority of his body of work is inspired by and culled from his experiences in the virtual world, as he spends about 40 hours a week inside the realms of Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and various independent titles. It can be said that Warden essentially, and by 21st Century definition, lives in two worlds: online and off. His paintings, ranging in size of 1 ft to 21 ft canvases, are made by a unique process of pouring Galkyd onto canvas laid horizontally in his Bushwick studio. The semi-transparent and glossy layers build over each other in intricate and elaborate geographies, creating an effects-driven and technologically mediated super-world. His cameraless-photography is created on his computer, in virtual spaces. One series that I find especially innovative shows the “edge of world” in the video game Tribes; Warden literally played the game until there were no more challenges or objectives to complete, and after reaching the literal end of the map (where the playable area stops), he took thousands of screen shots. The results are works on paper, presented as pixelated photographs.  His performance pieces are the third factor of his work, creating a complete balanced and intentional body. Inspired by his interactive experiences, he built a body of work around notions of privacy, voyeurship and control.  Stalking people in Central Park at midnight and “capturing” them on video, living in a school wall for a week and pulling covert ops at night and sitting inside a chair as unknowing sitters sat on his lap, all challenged and occasionally broke the rules of engagement and participation.

Christopher Hudgens
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