Notgames Forum

http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/interactive-painting-shakes-up-the-still-life-genre

Artist Scott Garner has created an interactive still life painting using Unity and a wall mounted, framed display.  Instead of starting with a video game and making it more about art, he has started at the other end with traditional art and adapted it to video game technology.  This caught my eye because I've been wanting to do something similar for awhile, though with more interesting subject matter than simply a physics simulation.  I suppose this sort of work is really an inevitable development - I personally think it has potential.

  I was musing about that, too. That I should sell ASLAP with a frame and a touch screen to mount it on the wall. If you buy paintings from relative unknown artists of that size, you usually can spent $€ 2000-3000 i think you can have the hardware for that prize.

Of course, no other painting should be allowed to be played on that touch screen.

I always think of Dear Esther as the future of landscape paintings.

This work, rather, approaches us saying it is an 'interactive still life painting' and utterly fails to capture what a still life is. What an absurd notion that 'throwing things over' is a digital adaptation of traditional art. It is a digital lack of understanding of art, presented through the technical knowledge of a grown man and the intellect of a 3-year-old child.

Not impressed. This is exactly the sort of predictably unimaginative and boring novelty bullshit that contemporary art churns out. "It's a still life, but it's 'interactive'! Wacky, eh?"

Vanitas is a far more sophisticated, imaginative, and interesting take on this same concept.

I will agree that I don't like the execution of this piece.  It is trivial - I feel like we're in a time when popular opinion loves to glorify things that are clever, at the expense of things that are meaningful.  However, I think this sort of fusion has potential if done well (i.e. appropriate subject matter, rather than trying to shoehorn classic ideas into new clothes, maybe touchscreen, rather than the absurdity of walking up and tipping the picture frame around).  I've expressed before my feelings that the computer box is a basically unfriendly interface.  Taking the the interactive technology we have and finding ways to better fit it into the spaces of life would be a positive step - that's the aspect of it that attracts me.

Our original idea for Vanitas was like this, but running from a Playstation on an HD tv in people's homes. The interaction was about the passing of time, and objects would affect objects in their vicinity (water would make a flower bloom but drown a butterfly, etc). The Vanitas we made for iPod was a mini-version of this idea. I don't think we would have used a classic still life composition, though. The idea of three objects on screen at any one time was already present, then.

Video games and video game technology have been used a few times in contemporary fine art already. To make contemporary fine art. Not to actually explore what the medium can do. Pity. But luckily we have the internet and don't have to deal with the art world.

Yes. Something like that, at least.

Yes, I also like that idea.
You could even start with a landscape painting and then walk into it ...

My current project is partially inspired by this notion:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=24640
http://s9.postimage.org/533fcrrlr/Screen_shot_2012_02_28_at_3_50_14_AM.png

A much more interesting video on that site is an interview of sorts with Graft Architects. It ends with this amazing quote:


Couldn't have put it any better myself ^_^

God at play, this is looking really good! I want more!

Yes! I just left a comment on TIGSource - I think it's so great that you're actually going ahead with trying to put the Ladder of Abstraction approach into practice. Wow!