200X: subtle textures from video game artists

200X reveals some of the ways that video games stand as a new artistic potentiality, straddling the gap between traditional forms of visual, auditory and literary expression and the non-linear, horizontal unfolding of the possibilities provided by digital media.

With the ascension of digital media culture, it is now apparent that the Video Game is not simply a passing fad or adolescent distraction. Yet twenty years ago this genre was seen by the mainstream market in precisely this way, and trivialized it as just another type of game or entertainment. However, as the first few generations who were exposed to video games come of age, they have carried the influence of the video game into various disciplines. This fact demonstrates that the video game possesses definite qualities that could be called artful or literary. But our traditional narrative forms remain anchored in the pre-digital modernist paradigm of characters whose psychology and agency constitute them in a positive world. The broad format of video games provides the possibility to stop telling stories about bogus "individuals" in a dubious "real world", and to begin telling stories about things, and situations…perhaps even about stories themselves.

There are myriad critical approaches to the emerging world of electronic games, from the study of cultural history to the artistic and technological development of future possibilities. However, 200X confines its scope exposing people to certain reified aesthetic elements of specific works that would be called video games (it is by no means a survey of the entire industry or its history), and furthermore to display some examples of the modulation of these formal aesthetics in the work of contemporary artists.


work includes:
screenings of tool-assisted speedruns (including a TSA performance of
the "Unreal Tournament" by Kevin Discoll and Dan Lopatin)
.GIF tower
illustrations by Nik Gulacsik
felt landscapes


200X
co-curated by Nik Gulacsik and Andrew Shea
Saturday, October 13, 2007
4pm-am
sponsored by Grolsch

visit http://andrewshea.com for more info