Pac-Mondrian
March 8th, 2007
It dosn’t get much nerdarty than this. Play Pac man through the fantastic passages created by Mondrian!
“Pac-Mondrian closes the perceptual distance between fine art and video games by combining Piet Mondrian’s Modernist masterpiece ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ with Toru Iwatani’s classic video game Pac-Man. The two new Ms. Pac-Mondrian levels return the painting to the dance clubs that inspired it with music by contemporary techno musicians mapping the birth of electronic music in their home towns.
When Piet Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, he heard the Boogie Woogie piano of Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson, and from then on refused to dance to any other jazz, leaving the floor in a huff if the music didn’t boogie.
After years of completely abstract work he abandoned the black grid to use yellow lines and red, blue, and grey colour blocks to build a representation of New York infused with all the vibrant kinetic energy of raucous road-house piano blues in ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’.
Pac-Mondrian transcodes ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ into a Pac-Man video game: the painting becomes the board, the music becomes the sound effects, and Piet Mondrian becomes Pac-Man.
Pac-Mondrian disciplines the syncopated rhythms of Mondrian’s spatial arrangements into a regular grid, then frees the gaze to follow the viewer’s whimsical perambulations of the painting: a player’s thorough study of the painting clears the level.
Each play of the game is an act of devotion. Mondrian’s geometric spirituality fuses with his ecstatic physicality when Pac-Mondrian dances around the screen while the Trinity of Boogie Woogie jazz play ‘Boogie Woogie Prayer’.
Each play of the game is an improvisational jazz session. Pac-Mondrian sits in as a session drummer with Ammons, Lewis, and Johnson, hitting hi-hats, cymbals, and snares as he eats pellets.”
via link
And a little background on Mondrian before you start playing:)
Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondriaan, after 1912 Mondrian, (pronounced: Pete Mon-dree-on, IPA: [pit ‘mɔndɹiɔn]) (b. Amersfoort, Netherlands, March 7, 1872 — d. New York City, February 1, 1944) was a Dutch painter.
He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. Despite being well-known, often-parodied and even trivialized, Mondriaan’s paintings exhibit a complexity that belies their apparent simplicity. He is best known for his non-representational paintings that he called “compositions”, consisting of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue, white or black, separated by black rectilinear lines. They are the result of a stylistic evolution that occurred over the course of nearly 30 years and continued beyond that point to the end of his life.
is
Email this author | All posts by admin
