Nerd Arts

Scalable City is a project by Sheldon Brown and the Experimental Game Lab. The world needs more of these types of experiments with the game space. As the 3-d gaming environment becomes a more well defined aspect of our lives, people need to deconstruct these environments so we can really see what these places mean to us. Art has always strove to make people look at ordinary situations in a new light, and that is what the people at the Experimental Game Lab are doing. Hats off to them. Scalable city is an introspective look at a certain type of building (particularly American Suburbia) . This is what the sims would have looked like if Terry Gilliam had been the top designer.

Link

Yasuhiko Hayashi and Yusuke Nakano have made this grand installation by using model train tracks as a medium with which they draw their lines. Very ingenious and creative way to re think an otherwise fairly banal object.

Link

via Neatorama

The Telegarden is a system that allows a living garden tended by a robot manipulator to be operated via anyone on the WWW with a desktop (or laptop!) computer and modem. We had three major objectives in constructing it.

1 To integrate natural, organic elements with robots, so that some parts were fixed and others would grow, change and decay;
2 To create a work of art in the interplay of natural beauty and technology, and
3 As an experiment in electronic community where web surfers can gather and interact amongst themselves and with a real environment.

link

McLeod Mirror Series 1: See Yourself in Others are not actually made of mirrored glass, but an LCD screen housed in a wooden case with a web cam attached to the top. The camera records the viewer and creates a collage of the person’s image along with images of everyone else who has stood before the mirror. The image allows the viewer to “see themselves reflected in others” in a new way. The mirrors bring a timeless bathroom product into the digital age, creating a twist on the staple that is more interesting and dynamic than the original, while perhaps pointlessly complex. The images are not recorded or archived, so the digital artwork created on the spot will never be seen again.
Link

via neatorama

Damn. These are some absolutely amaxing pieces. Ma Jun makes ceramic televsions.

Link

Jana Bartouskova makes these really cute little aliens, and monsters. Unfortunately she dosn’t have a website where they can all be found. I wish she had a website where more of her items could be found, well, maybe I’ll have to make her one, considering that she’s my girlfriend:)

She made this hand with the severed for my friend who we forced to see Hostel. He wasn’t very impressed with the film, so she had to immortalise it in some way.

She made me this pacman pillow for an installation I did last year. I’m posting this because I want my female readers to know that they can send in their stuff as well. There is a lot of boyliness going on here at nerdarts and I like to see both sides. I really like a lot of the stuff going on at etsy.com . So girls, feel free to send us your submissions as well!

Rey Ortega has made a great interactive book. Reminiscent of the Choose your own adventure series. You are Cagney who is transversing though a fantastical landscape, encountering monsters, and making tough decisions. The illustrations are great, and the weathered look that he gives the book make it all the more personal. I won’t give anything away, you have to play/read it for yourself!

Link
Rey Ortega’s Blog

Chicago had thousands of Bulls throughout the city years ago, Buffalo NY had, well, buffaloes, and continuing the tradition of letting a large group of artists rethink a form we have a group of comic book, tattoo, and comic book artists taking their own individual stabs at Darth Vader (well, helmut mainly). Participating artists and companies included Troy Alders, Kii Arens, Attaboy, Anthony Ausgang, Axis, Aye Jay, Gary Baseman, Andrew Bell, Tim Biskup, Andrew Brandou, Buff Monster, Mister Cartoon, Mr Clement, Steven Daily, Dalek, Cam de Leon, , Bob Dob, Marc Ecko, Eelus, Ron English, FERG, David Flores, Brian Flynn - Hybrid Design, Paul Frank Sunich, Huck Gee, Fawn Gehweiler, Mike Giant, Joe Hahn, Derek Hess, Jeremyville, Sun-MinKim, David Horvath, Jim Koch, Frank Kozik, David S. Krys - DSK Designs, Peter Kuper, Wade Lageose - Lageose Design, Joe Ledbetter, Simone Legno - Tokidoki, Mad, Bill McMullen, Melvins, Brian Morris, Niagara, Mitch O’Connell, olive47, Estevan Oriol, Alex Pardee, Pizz, Plastic God, Playskewl, Dave Pressler, J. Otto Seibold, Shag, Sket-One, Shawn Smith, Winston Smith, Jeff Soto, Bwana Spoons, Jophen Stein, Suckadelic, Cameron Tiede, Touma, UrbanMedium, Michelle Valigura, VanBeater, and Amanda Visell.
Link via starwars.com

A live action role-playing game (LARP or LRP) is a form of role-playing game where the participants perform some or all of the physical actions of the characters they are playing within a pre-determined space for a pre-determined span of time. LARP may be considered a form of improvisational theatre.

The two most common ways of simulating combat in LARP are through either physical representation or symbolic determination. Physical combat occurs without interruption in role-play, using “boffer” or latex representations of edged weapons, airsoft or laser tag guns, and similar. A variety of physical combat uses relatively harmless versions of real weapons (blunt steel swords, firearms loaded with blanks) rather than representations. Games using physical combat are often known as “Boffer” or “Live Combat” LARPs.

Symbolic determination relies on players momentarily suspending role-playing in order to determine the outcome of combat, for example by rolling dice, playing rock-paper-scissors or comparing character attributes. In symbolic combat systems, weapons may be represented as cards or inaccurate replicas. A “no-touch” rule, prohibiting physical contact between players, is often enforced. LARPs which feature symbolic combat may be known as free-form role-playing games or theatre-style games.

All symbolic combat systems, and most physical combat systems, use game rules governing attributes such as character strength, fighting skills and ability to endure physical pain in order to determine the outcome of a combat situation. An exception is honour system LARPs, where players are trusted to determine the outcomes of combat through free improvisation.

Physical representation is most common in, but not exclusive to, LARP styles where combat is seen as central to game-play. Conversely, symbolic determination and honour system LARPs tend to place less emphasis on combat.

Combat resolution is usually indicative of the design philosophy behind a specific LARP system. The same approaches as are taken to combat will often be used for other elements of LARP simulation such as magic, political power, character sexuality, scenery and propping. For this reason, combat resolution is the most widely used criterion for distinguishing between LARP styles.

Some LARP games involve heavy combat with boffers. Although some games have a “No-touch” policy, some other games are wildly violent in terms of weapons combat. Players of these LARP games must learn the old styles of combat in order to stand a chance in the “real” combat they intend to engage in. Practicing is often encouraged when engaging in these games due to the fact that if you don’t practice, you will be beaten fairly regularly. This aspect draws many people to combat intensive LARP games because the idea of taking on a persona that is well versed in the art of sword fighting is very attractive.
Link

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.