22 July – 3 September 2006 HTTP, London

Game/Play is a national touring exhibition that explores goal-orientated gaming and playful interaction through media arts practice. This collaboration between Q-Arts, Derby and HTTP, London has provided a framework to develop a context for creative exchange between visitors to the exhibition focusing on the rhetorical constructs game and play.
Projects fall under three main categories: installations, independent video games and online (networked) artworks.

[giantJoystick > by American 'girl gamer' Mary Flanagan has been specially commissioned by HTTP for this exhibition. Alongside this installation, HTTP presents independently produced video games selected by curator Corrado Morgana for their divergence from commercial game-types and online participatory artworks Tale of Tale’s Endless Forest and Furtherfield.org's VisitorsStudio.

[giantJoystick > offers a humorous reworking of the multi-player game. Visitors are invited to collectively play classic arcade games with a nine foot tall joystick modelled after the Atari 2600 one. The competitive goals of these classic arcade games are already familiar, however the dramatic change in scale of the joystick necessitates both an encounter of the whole body with the artwork and cooperation between a number of players in order to reach them.

Two of the independent video games Kenta Cho's Noiz2sa and Julian Oliver's 2nd Person Shooter are both shooters. Kenta Cho's Noiz2sa is a retro shoot 'em up while Oliver's is a a wry riff on First person Shooters. Oliver's game-demo places the gamer behind the eyes of a murderous bot over which they have no control and which is set on destroying them. Players are not only hunted, but also have to quickly adopt a new logic for operating where their perspective is no longer attached to their body, the customary instrument of their will.

Jetro Lauha’s Truck Dismount presents us with a simple 3 dimensional world including a truck, some ramps, a wall and a crash test dummy called DJ. An example of physics gaming, which use physical interactions as their primary basis, Truck Dismount examines the guilty pleasures of trangressive behaviour.

Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern have fused the hyperlink with the one act drama to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional and interactive character behaviour.

Tale of Tale’s Endless Forest and Furtherfield.org's VisitorsStudio use the Internet as a networked, platform for real-time, collaborative play and online performance and they provide connecting spaces between audiences at HTTP & Q Arts galleries. VisitorsStudio is an online arena for real-time, multi-user mixing, networked performance and play. Endless Forest described by the artists as a “social screensaver”, audiences join other players, in real-time down-time to inhabit the bodies of deer, roaming in a lush virtual landscape.


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HTTP, London
Unit A2, Arena Business Centre,
71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY
www.http.uk.net
www.game-play.org.uk