meditation

"Black Room," is a browser-based, narrative game about falling asleep while on your computer, on the internet. You play as an insomniac on the verge of sleep, moving through shifting states of consciousness. Hallucinatory, pixelated visions of landscapes filled with sprites ripped directly from the arcade/NES/SNES video games of your childhood appear and disappear as you click through fragile internet spaces. Point-n-click mini games are scattered throughout the narrative. Often  interrupted, you continually return to the Black Room, a meditation technique your mother taught you for falling asleep, visualizing black flowers in a black vase on a black table in the center of a black room.

This game, conceived as a feminist dungeon crawler, features a majority women cast of video game sprites from the 1970s-current day.  This work seeks to bring these characters together to form new narratives:  Chun Li reposes elegantly in a desert oasis filled with flamingos;  Catwoman languidly cartwheels across the nighttime beaches of Coney Island; Jennifer Simpson, the lead character from  Clock Tower, runs endlessly through the brightly pixelated fantasy landscapes of the Oregon Trail. These narratives appear as “Strange Visions,” to the player, induced by shifting stages of wakefulness.

(Source: Creators description of work)

if-notNow, if-then-when-else www.alintakrauth.com/ifthen is an interactive 3D html5 piece that looks at the theme of climate change as an environmental disruption, through the lens of glitch art and code poetry. The piece opens on a page of movable squares, purposefully reminiscent of digital pixels, but moving and squirming, much like watching people move through a city from above. These boxes can be clicked on to zoom in and back out again, in order to read the coded and glitched poetry.
Both glitch and code are clear visual examples of what goes on behind the scenes in a digital world, and here this is juxtaposed with real-world human-made disruption. In the artist’s native home country of Australia, where the glitched footage is taken, this constant tug between too little and too much rain is now experienced on a yearly basis, and the poetry within this piece reflects that sense of too little vs. too much through the cause and affect relationship of “if-then statements” – a particular cause and affect coding statement.
Visually, if-notNow, if-then-when-else is an overload of visual stimulation – flashing colors and fast-moving text that simultaneously shows disorder within order, and order within disorder. It is, at times, difficult to read, as it purposely forces the reader to stay on each box for some time in order to read each line and de-code the glitch, making for a more intimate and longer-lived experience. It includes metatextual and self-referential layers—the code that shows itself through text and image.
if-notNow, if-then-when-else also includes a glitch sound poetry soundtrack created by the artist, made from glitched spoken word. In this way, this piece explores ideas of meditation within over-stimulation and synesthesia, and how this relates to our changing environment.

(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)