Unstable Aesthetics

Throughout the 1990s artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked glitched and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as <i>Doom</i>(1993) and <i>Quake</i>(1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In <i>Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding</i> Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. <br/><br/>The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel JODI Julian Oliver Krista Hoefle and Brent Watanabe among others -- were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction technology and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns and collaging together surreal gameworlds-to intentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body or rather the strangeness of art modding.