Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games

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Digital video, glitched Nintendo speedruns, 8:15

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2020

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Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games (2020) is a video work that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. The film was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into a continuously unfolding vista of gameworlds. This landscape has then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. Here, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games envisions a utopia-—a speeding, futuristic landscape—constructed from fragments of childhood nostalgia for video gameplay. Through the viewer’s interfacing with these sublime visions of technology, the installation serves to challenge the knowledge that underlies our perception of scrolling motion. In this way, the work operates through a kind of post-gaming, or rather, it considers the medium of interactive gaming (and particularly the mechanics of scrolling) not through functionality, utility, or its capacities to offer incentive and reward, but as a pure aesthetic form in which we derive pleasure from the dynamics of abstract patterns composed of pixels, tiles, and color palettes.

 

Exhibited at:

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Official selection, Digital Graffiti 2021, Alys Beach, FL. May 2021.

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Official selection, Connect International Video Art Festival, Firehouse Cultural Center, Ruskin, FL, June 2020.

 

Semi finalist, official selection, Pixels Fest: International Festival and Digital Competition, Yeltsin Center, Yekaterinburg, Russia. March 2020.

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Official seleciton, Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival. Online exhibition. July 2020.

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Official selection, London Experimental Festival, Online festival screening. July 2020.