Friday, July 22, 2016: 3:00 pm (Noether): Game art duo “foci + loci” (Tamara Yadao and Chris Burke) talk about hacking immersive video game spaces. Over the last six years, they have been using Little Big Planet to build and break custom game environments for live music performance. Joined by multidisciplinary technologist Jeremy Pesner, they will demonstrate and take apart some of their stranger maps and virtual instruments like the Tiltofon, the Flotrillium, and the Anytime-inator, while discussing successes and failures arising from repurposing or pushing game level-building tools beyond intended uses. They will raise questions about hacking the “look and feel” of game spaces and how it relates to professional game development tools like Unity and the Unreal Engine versus off-the-shelf games like Little Big Planet, Minecraft, or Portal. They will also look at Machinima (using game engines to create cinema) as an early strategy of video game appropriation and its relationship to culture jamming and hard/soft hacking in the gaming community. Lastly, they will present a sneak peak of the upcoming musical-in-game-space, Songs from the Robot Apocalypse, featuring the Arachnobot, the flying Toasterbot, and a robot made from a classic Game Boy DMG-1.

Tamara Yadao, Chris Burke, Jeremy Pesner