Heather Kelley: Live game code - naked in public
Samstag, 19. September 2009 - 19:00 Uhr
RaumD / Q21
im Museumsquartier / quartier 21 / Raum D, 1070 Wien
Die Vorträge finden im Raum D, dem Veranstaltungsraum des Quartiers für Digitale Kultur (QDK) am Ende der Electric Avenue statt.
Eintritt frei !
LIVE GAME CODE : NAKED IN PUBLIC
HEATHER KELLEY (CAN)
computer and video game designer and interactive artist
Live Game Code is an ongoing project by Heather Kelley of Kokoromi to design and program small personal games in an open studio setting. Game making and code writing is mysterious to many people, and challenging to learn if you're not (yet) a software engineer. Live Game Code exposes the artist's self-education in software creation - its realities and absurdities - by making public the learning and coding process itself, through public acts of creation and symbolic visualizations of the process which are generated in real time, in the physical world and the digital realm.
In this lecture, Heather will present the results of Kokoromi's Live Game Code: Love Letters project at the Montreal Biennial in May 2009, and introduce the second phase of the LGC project. In the first iteration of this performance-creation project, which took place inside a combined workshop and gallery space, the real-time analysis of the creation process was created using analog means only. For instance, pushpins and electrical wire attached to a tack board tracked the distracting use of social media, while toy cars were moved along an exposed pipe to represent the projects' race toward completion. The current performance of Live Game Code debuts a suite of uniquely-created playful software-based data visualization applications. These animated and interactive analytical tools provide precision and automation, allowing for more detailed and nuanced visualizations of software events during the performance. While on one hand a richer and more precise visualization might afford new insights into the creative game-making process, on the other, every failure of the artist will be amplified and publicized to the visitors.
With the rise of digital distribution, the games industry, and especially the art game community, has seen a resurgence of the elite one-man game developer hacker held up as a romantic ideal of the artist. In the discussion of Live Game Code's conceptual development, the lecture will serve as a philosophical and cultural examination of being a female game creator: an algorithmic ingénue and artistic generalist in the brave new world of indie art games.