Tag: eddo stern

The title GodsEye is borrowed from the computer gaming term God’s eye Perspective which positions the player as God/General/Wizard floating above the world and awarded total control over cities, armies and minions.

GodsEye is an installation consisting of four computer sculptures that make up a techno- /neo-medieval landscape built around the functional hardware elements of a computer desktop environment: keyboard, mouse, monitor, tower, etc.

Formally, it draws from the subcultures of custom computer case modifications, hardware hacking, computer game modification and sampling.

Los Angeles based Stern has been involved in video gaming culture as a practitioner and theorist for many years. He is presently on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts. The works in the show are a result of the artist’s obsessive participation in online fantasy games, most recently a yearlong immersion (2000 hours played) in World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) with more than 10 million players worldwide.

His new works – kinetic shadow sculptures and 3D computer animation videos – use a mash-up of documentary material from online forums, clip art, YouTube videos, midi music, electronics, and hand made puppets. They mine the online gaming world at its paradoxical extremes: on one hand, an untenable perversity of life spent slaying an endless stream of virtual monsters, on the other, an ultimate mirroring of the most familiar social dynamics. The struggles with masculinity, honor, aggression, faith, love and self worth are embroiled with the gameworld’s vernacular aesthetics.

Vietnam Romance, recreates and interrogates the fictionalized history of the Vietnam War and its culturally commodified remains through a mash-up of cultural artifacts drawn primarily from Hollywood film culture as well as war literature, comic books, popular music, collectable war memorabilia, and adventure tourist packages.

Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and Deathmatch veterans pitting tourists vs. adventurers, history vs. its fantasies, and games vs. cinema. Film critic Ed Halter, described a film version of the project as exploring “a peculiarly American memory-trip, one in which the legacy of a gruesome war has become indistinguishable from pleasurable, if mythic-tragic, entertainments.”

At Postmasters, the project is presented as a multiscreen projection-mapped installation. The presentation alternates between a computer generated panoramic tour through a Fantastical Vietnam created on the fly from online data scraped from tourist information sites, google maps, Ebay war memorabilia listings, top of the charts music archives, and a Vietnam movie database of characters, actors and extras. In the gallery, Vietnam Romance can be experienced either as a playable computer game or as a generative animation. The imagery in the game is created entirely from Eddo Stern’s watercolor paintings processed into 3D models.

The game includes these playable vignettes:
Scene 1: FORTUNATE SON
Scene 2: MOJAVE
Scene 3: APACHE
Scene 4: IN COUNTRY
Scene 5 : THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING
Scene 6: THE TRACKS OF MY TEARS
Scene 7: THE DEER HUNTER
Scene 8: THE LUNCH LADY
Scene 9: HO-CHI-MINH TO HANOI