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Life as Video Game Art
DoasFu writes "Screenshots is an odd art project depicting historical events in an isometric video game style, a la The Sims. Very strange."
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I can't really put my finger on it, but they really are quite interesting. I think that, in many ways, this style of art seems more "real" to me than the photographs. I've seen the images from when Dr. King was killed, but that's history. (By which I mean it's something inaccessible to me, just as distant to my 22-year-old-self as the Civil War.) Seeing an alternate rendition might be sufficient to make these scenes more real, but this offers more than that. This makes these distant concepts and events as real as the hours and hours that I've spent looking at Sierra and Maxis games.
Yes, I know those games are fiction, and the attack on the Birmingham protesters was real. But not to me they're not. The Sims is real. The attack on the Birmingham protesters is something that was in my history books in middle school.
I think this exhibit has had the desired effect (what I assume to be the desired effect) on me. I'm not sure that I like that effect, or what it says about me and my worldview. But it is fascinating.
-Waldo
Check out.
It's an article about this. It's very helpful for those of us who don't know what many of these events are - for instance, the Mercedes is the Princess Diana crash, and the cabin is the Unabomber's cabin.
-JimTheta
---
My stupid web site
You are in a convertible in Dallas.
You see a man in a pinstriped suit on the Grassy Knoll.
Your car slows down for no apparent reason.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
If anything, they are anti-propaganda, since they tend to view the events coldy and unobjectivly instead of trying to manipulate emotions.
Something about the directness and lack of perspective actually made it more affective for me...stripped of all the adrenalin, it seems much sadder, if that makes any sense.
I've never talked about art before on /. ...
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Here you go sir:
Oswald sings the blues
"The Sound of Music"
Assassination of Martin Luther King (Memphis, Tennessee, 1968)
James Meredith shot by a sniper on US Highway 51 (Hernando, Mississippi, 1966)
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shoots a Viet Cong prisioner during the Tet Offensive (Saigon, 1968)
Federal agents sieze Elian Gonzales (Miami, 2000)
Kim Phuc and other Vietnamese flee napalm (Trang Bang, Vietnam, 1972)
Bodies of Anna Nicole Smith and Ronald Goldman (Brentwood, California, 1994)
"The Godfather, Part II"
Jack Ruby murders Lee Harvey Oswald (Dallas, 1963)
"Twelve Angry Men"
Reginald Denny and Damian Williams (Los Angeles, 1992)
Rodney King beaten by LAPD officers (Los Angeles, 1991)
"Mary Poppins"
Quang Duc commits suicide to protest Vietnamese War (Saigon, 1963)
Theodore Kaczynski's cabin (Lincoln, Montana)
Car crash killing Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed (Paris, 1997)
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School Cafeteria (Littleton, Colorado, 1999)
Anonymous man faces down tanks at Tiananmen Square (Beijing, 1989)
Civil Rights protesters attacked with fire hoses (Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)
Fence to which Matthew Shephard was left to die (Laramie, Wyoming, 1998)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Hahaha! Little do they know that I am playing in God mode!"
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
ASU Art Student Seeks Credit For Playing Video Games
Because the arts will die without government funding! (After all, the arts never existed before government funding!) Superb projects like this will disappear! Imagine the loss the world will feel when no longer an artist will be able to recreate a scene from "The Sound Of Music" with a videogame feel! The pain! The horror! Such artists would have to find a _real_ job! Like farming! Or military work! We are killing our artists and turning their corpses into government endorsed mass murders! Sorry, just had to deliver a daily dose of sarcasim.
If you appreciate art, pay for it. Don't make me pay for it with my money.
Then again, if you vote republican, maybe you can get rid of those pesky public schools, too, what with the voucher plan and all :) Go W!
Unusually for me, these pictures seem to actually make sense. Most of the time it seems like anyone can put a dog turd in a fishbowl and call it art, but I found these pictures to be oddly thought provoking.
if my life is ever depicted with video game screenshots, i hope to god it contains more Leisure Suit Larry than The Sims.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Pointing out the Martin Luther King one in specific, you can tell the "looks like a computer game" was just a gimmick to kind of tweak the emotions of the scene a little bit. In the same image, imperfections in the right angles help to keep it from being too "computery".
:) 'Grats to the artist though.. pretty cool pieces he's done.
I do like the idea. Kind of a way to link bad stuff that happens in the world to computers. I wonder if the artist had some kind of underlying motivation to point out the (supposed) links between video games and violence in the world (physical or otherwise).
Can look at it two ways.. either these images point out that bad scenes aren't nearly so horrifying when done on a computer (and thus people need not worry about video game violence), or computers trivialize the reality of violence to the extent that it is unable to effect us like it should.
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