Through the Windo

Here's a link to a great new interactive game/environment called WINDOSiLL. It was created by Patrick Smith, who has been making interactive animated environments in Flash for some time now; I included his "Vector Park" work in a show of animation I curated for the Ottawa International Animation Festival back in 2003.


The game presents a very meditative experience. There is a goal, where you progress from one screen to another, but there's no urgency to get on to the next thing; part of the pleasure of the game is to dawdle, and explore the strange doodads and creatures that inhabit each environment. Part of what's effective about WINDOSiLL is the way it introduces its own logic to the player. What's even better is the overarching sense of mystery that permeates everything-- there are suggestions of deep and probably fundamentally inexplicable cosmologies lurking behind the images and facades. Over the course of the game, Smith lightly tips his hat to Bosch, Magritte, Brueghel, Rube Goldberg, and Dr. Seuss.

You can play the first half of the game for free; I plunked down the three bucks to play the remainder of the game, and it was money well-spent.

Patrick Smith's sketchbook blog is located here, and you can see WINDOSiLL sketches and tests here.

Blip Festival 2008

Blip Festival 2008: The Promo from Richard Alexander Caraballo on Vimeo.

Blip Festival 2008 is currently going on in Brooklyn. From the website:

Highlighting the chipmusic phenomenon and its related disciplines, the festival aims to showcase emerging creative niches involving the use of legacy video game & home computer hardware as modern artistic instrumentation. Devices such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy and others are repurposed into the service of original, low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals — sidestepping game culture and instead exploring the technology's untapped potential and distinctive intrinsic character.

Their Myspace page has selections of some of the music. And Weekend America had interviews with some of the musicians. Interestingly, a couple of the musicians talk about the raw and "dirty" quality they can get using the old videogame systems -- a rawness that, you have to figure, derives more from a sense of aural nostalgia than from any analog ghosts in their digital machines.