Proposal

For my project, I have decided to revisit something that I had initially looked at some time ago. Still keeping with the theme of gaming, I’ve decided to drop the idea of using a real-world game or a sport to generate the digital in favour of using a computer game as an instrument or even an orchestra to generate sound. I have always liked the work of Alison Mealey who uses Unreal Tournament to generate art. Some of her work can be seen in this interview with artificial.dk – http://www.artificial.dk/articles/alison.htm. She uses the positions of the bots within the game to draw coloured circles and every time there is a death in the game she uses it to draw a black circle. I have also liked and have been inspired by the work of Friedrich Kirschner and his person2184 series of films which, as with Alison, he made using Unreal Tournament. Unlike her though, he uses the inbuilt editor to construct the set and then plays and records the film within the game. With both of them, I like how they use the game as the tool for their work which is something I want to explore.

I want to extract the data from a live game and feed it into PD or Max/MSP to generate sound. I’m also keen to explore the idea of “learning” the game as you would an instrument. I’m not a particularly strong gamer and so it could be interesting to hear the sounds made at the start of project before I learn to play and compare them to the sounds made once I’ve mastered it.