Unstable Aesthetics

Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding

Eddie Lohmeyer (University of Central Florida, USA)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic USA
15 April 2021

Media studies; 3D graphics: games programming

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.

By: Eddie Lohmeyer (University of Central Florida USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781501364907
ISBN 10: 1501364901
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 15 April 2021
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Table of Contents _PR35S_5T4RT!: The Mechanisms of Art Modding ER40R 1: A (Scroll) Down Memory Lane: Non-Play and the Vitality of 8-bit Engines in Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Bros. Mods ER40R 2: Slaying Machines: Embodied Mimesis in ArsDoom ER40R 3: Perspective Engines and the Strangeness of 3D Space in JODI's Untitled Game ER40R 4: Generative Mods and the Violence of Sensation ER40R 5: Random Planets and Alien (Dis)orientations in WE BUILD WORLDS 1N5ER7_C0IN T0 C0N71NU3: Intractable Spaces Bibliography Index

Eddie Lohmeyer is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Games and Interactive Media at the University of Central Florida, USA. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with a particular emphasis on video games and their relationship to traditions of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization.

Reviews for Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding

Unstable Aesthetics provides a thorough and scholarly examination of current and historical video game art modding with a keen understanding of the poetics of the genre generated through both materiality and audience engagement. Abstraction is at the core of Lohmeyer's investigations - pulsing, perceptual spaces made to produce bodily affect. * Gabrielle Jennings, Associate Professor, Graduate Art, ArtCenter College of Design, US * From Mario Clouds and Ars Doom to Velvet Strike and San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam, Eddie Lohmeyer’s Unstable Aesthetics offers a new perspective—or rather, a glitchy anamorphic angle—on the concept of game art through a deeply material analysis of both videogame technology and the experience of playing games in galleries, museums, biennials, and festivals. Moving deftly between PRG ROMs and BSP trees on one hand and media theory and object-oriented feminism on the other, Lohmeyer shows exactly how artists’ mods not only expose and expand the capacities of game engines, but also change the ways we play. * Patrick LeMieux, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, University of California, Davis, USA *