Page 73 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

a popular and common practice among some player communities. In fact, many games such as Unreal Tournament (Epic Games) or Half Life (Valve) are just as or even more famous for their modi able potential than as games.The aim of these artistic interventions is to transform the original nature of the game, usually from a critical, humorous or ironic approach. They are usually preconceived ethical and aesthetic parodies. They are conceptually subversive acts that entail a twofold intention: one of criticism and revision, and one of creation or regeneration. They can also be regarded as a testimonial de ance of the multinationals that underpin the videogame industry.the rst Super Mario Bros to create a 15-minute story that is projected from an old NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) console and features Mario in a variety of rather outrageous situations: among others, crying on a cloud, riding on a magic carpet and at a rave party.A similar case is Brody Condon’s reinterpretations of Northern European medieval religious images in which he uses technological developmentand the current visual style of games to create animated paintings. DefaultProperties (Fig. 5left) and Resurrection (after Bouts) (Fig. 5 right), although presented by the gallery as a mixture of animation and infographics, are in fact automated videogames. The pieces are animated but not interactive recreations of classical scenes from European painting.DefaultProperties, for example, is an automated game featuring a tubby Asian man with a dreadful skin disease who moves, apparently engrossed in prayer, in a medieval Northern European landscape; beside him, a man dressed in animal skins wades through a river clutching a aming sword. Meanwhile, the sky lls with extradimensional movement from which a heavenly being emerges (Condon 2011).FIG. 4: Screenshots of the mod Retroyou RC Fck the Gravity Code by Joan Leandre (1999).These practices, which come close to countergaming, evidence di erentiated artistic and aesthetic attitudes. Some of them exclude any possibility of involvement in the game, forcing the design to return to other media such as video, animation, etc. Negation of the ludic experience (Galloway 2007) is evident in pieces such as Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002), where the artist modi es the game to the extent that the initial game completely disappears and all that remains is its landscape resembling a lm set. In Super Mario Movie (2005), the same artist alters an 8-bit cartridge ofFIG. 5: Left, screenshot of DefaultProperties (2006). Right, screenshot of Resurrection (after Bouts) (2007). Both pieces are by Brody Condon.In a similar transmedia vein, we nd machinima productions such as El tenista (2006) by Felipe G. Gil, of Colectivo ZEMOS 98. Here the artistAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201673