Art

As you may know I’m currently on sabbatical from the games-industry and my company Starbreeze. After having the best job I can imagine for 8 years, I felt I needed a change of scenery and decided to take the money I had managed to put away and burn it on things that makes me feel wiser. You can see some of those things on this site, with small projects of different kinds; some art-projects, some game-projects and some other things that may or may not be good ideas.

The biggest of these projects is one that I haven’t really started on. It’s the project that I’ve been hoping to do for quite some time, and it’s the project that made me create this site in the first place. It’s the Collecting Smiles project.

The idea behind the Collecting Smiles project is to collect different smiles throughout the world. It is supposed to give me a reason to travel and force me to meet people I otherwise wouldn’t meet. In every country I visit, I will take a picture of a smiling person living in that country. I will also collect the smiles of other people traveling and while I don’t know how possible it is, I hope to collect the smile of a person inspiring the people of that country, ideally the president/prime minister. The goal is to collect all smiles in each category from every country in the world.

I just came back from what I guess you could call a dry-run of this project, where I visited Israel, Thailand and China, and I’m starting to realize how hard this will be (surprise!). Ambitions (and pretentious) as this may be, it’s still something I need to try and hopefully things will get rolling soon. Of course, I’ll make heavy use of the internet for this project with the hopes of eventually building a community to help me with the “inspiring-smiles” part. I’ve set up a prototype site for the purpose of the project that can be found here.

Posted: December 17th, 2007 under Art, Projects, Travel.
Comments: 2

I’ve talked a bit about games and art in the past, but something that is much harder to pinpoint is programming art. I was introduced to programming art a long time ago with the demo-scene, where people are creating beautiful applications that often try to do things with a computer that computers weren’t meant for. Another example is one of my great inspirations Karl Sims. While I’m not sure he ever claimed that his work was art, I have a hard time not calling it that while seeing his Virtual Creatures. Last January, I was introduced to another style of programming art by Miltos Manetas who created the site http://www.jacksonpollock.org/. He inspired me to create some of the things exhibited together with Rorschach at Godsmagasinet in Uppsala. One of those creations was something called Replicating Blot which you can check out here.

As with any other trade like writing or painting, programming is an excellent material to create works of art. The difference is that it is a material that is quickly changing along with the technology it relies on, but that just makes it more interesting.

Posted: October 5th, 2007 under Art, Projects.
Comments: 1

The Swedish game-magazine Level had a nice article about the relationship between art and games in their July 2007 issue. This article contained an interview with me about the game Rorschach, where I collaborated with Ida Rödén to make a small art-game. This game has been shown in a number of more “traditional” art-forums, for example at Umeå Konsthögskola and the M.A.D.E. festival. Art and games has always had a slightly weird relasionship and as usual opinions drift apart. Personally I see interactivity as the key word, and Rorschach tries to explore the interactivity of conversations; something that games in general have been pretty unsuccessful in.

Rorschach is now available for download and can be found at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/rorschach.

Posted: September 26th, 2007 under Art, Game design, Projects.
Comments: 2

My mom called me the other day. She had seen an article in Svenska Dagbladet where I did an interview about The Darkness (I found it on the web here). The article apparently took up a full page in the culture section of the paper. Pause to think about that for a second. A video game was given that much room in the culture section one of the biggest and most respected newspapers in Sweden. I’ve been traveling Europe and US a bit doing promotion work for The Darkness, and from what I’ve heard that is something that would happen in very few countries. We should be really happy that video games have become so accepted as a cultural media in Sweden. Or as my mom said, “You know, that is where they review Shakespeare plays!”. Of course, we have some way to go before games can be compared to Shakespeare and she also said “I almost missed the article, because half the page was covered with this really disturbing picture”. Well, perhaps next game will make mom proud.

Posted: June 24th, 2007 under Art, Games.
Comments: 1