selectparks - Art Decal

Regine points out a fun new piece made for the 2006 'Undergraduate Exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago' (according to the site) by the name of Everything I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference, Part II.

The piece takes the actual undergraduate exhibition itself as material and works it into a map for Half-Life 2. Through "expressive destruction" and/or generally making a mess, the artist provides a new way of being in the very same exhibition space the work is presented in. I'm not quite sure what the HL2 beasts are doing in there but nonetheless I'm sure it's eerie to see them scuttling around the representation of the gallery you're actually standing in.

It would seem there's practically a tradition of work of this kind now, starting with Kipcak's Ars Doom (as Regine points out) then onto the widely known Museum Meltdown which we wrote about here a few years ago.

Aside from the many other FPS's situated in galleries we've posted here over the years there's one work from 2002 not mentioned enough; Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt's Container. Container was quite a landmark in the use of a game as a medium of intervention in the gallery in that it created a new memory of the site by providing an played explanation of an otherwise unexplained event. In this way, Container is an ingenious example of using games as an interface to hack experience of a site through the simple act of creating a performable 'living' fiction for it.

The artists created a completely convincing replica of a shipping container in the physical gallery space of 200 Gertrude St in Melbourne Australia. For any one of the hundreds of people that went to the opening that night, their first question was "how the hell did they get that through the door..".

Inside this container they put the PC used to play a Half Life 1 level whereby the player breaks into the gallery from the alley outside - only to find no shipping container in the digital reconstruction of the site. The player eventually finds a switch behing the curators desk, the ceiling opens up and the digital equivalent of the physical container is lowered into the empty gallery space, explaining how the huge physical object was put into the gallery.

Some drunk punters actually looked for the real switch behind that desk..

Cheers Reg (+ see you at 23C3)!