February 17 - March 24
JOHN KLIMA "Go Fish"
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce John Klima's first solo
exhibition. Titled Go Fish, the show will consist of interactive media
installations connecting computer gaming and real life consequences.
John Klima will also be exhibiting at the Whitney Museum exhibition
"Bitstreams" (March 01) and recently received the "Golden Lasso Award
for Art," Web3d RoundUp SIGGRAPH 2000.
Circa 1980, Brooklyn-based artist John Klima (b. 1965) attempted to code
a 3D maze on a TRS-80 with 4k RAM and failed miserably. He has been
obsessed with 3D ever since. Fascinated by the first primitive flight
simulators and CAD programs, he began to build 3D graphics environments,
and to write source code.
By drawing upon gaming and the various possibilities of manipulating and
transliterating data, John Klima's exhibition occupies completely virgin
ground in new media art. Although there is an obvious connection
between gaming and interactive digital art, and the gaming industry has
played an important role in the development of multi-user environments,
the parameters of this connection are almost never subjected to serious,
aesthetic investigation.
One of the pragmatic aspects of digital practice is that information can
be reified in various forms and modalities – be they physical objects,
3D representations or interactive, networked installations. Go Fish
traces the various manifestations of data in its migration from sound
files to 3D objects and the impact of gaming on actual and virtual life
forms. The question of "remote responsibility" raised by the results of
players' actions so far has been the domain of critical writing rather
than art, yet what was purely theoretical is here rendered utterly
concrete.
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Following are short descriptions of the artworks in the exhibition…
Fish:
Implementing the classic paradigm of the "first-person 3D shooter", Fish
ups the ante by placing the life of a real goldfish at stake. The piece
consists of a virtual gaming environment and its analog physical
installation. The game is played from an arcade cabinet, requiring
players to deposit a quarter. The player's goal is to get their virtual
goldfish avatar, one of four different genetically determined
breed-types to the safety of the "hero tank" by traveling through
treacherous, predator-infested waters. If the game-goldfish makes it to
safety, a live goldfish is automatically released from a holding area
into a large bowl with a living example of the avatar-fish the player
controlled during play. If it doesn't, the live goldfish is released
into a bowl with a live oscar fish, and is subsequently devoured.
Go:
Like Fish, Go consists of corresponding virtual and physical gaming
environments. Loosely based on the Japanese game Go, The goal of the
game is to capture robots and buy drawings. The physical game board is
a 16 x 24 foot map of the earth, made from 16 x 20 inch drawing pads
arranged in a grid on the floor. each page in the drawing pad equates to
a monetary denomination. The drawings on the pads are created by 4 fully
autonomous robot bugs that run on batteries and have pens attached to
them. Individual game board drawings can be purchased "cash and carry."
When a robot's battery is low, it seeks light and moves into one of 8
illuminated robot recharging stations, which are positioned on 8
countries on the game/drawing board.
Suspended above the gameboard is an 8 foot balloon. The virtual gaming
environment, a spinning image of the earth, is projected onto this
balloon. In the virtual game, each country (and its corresponding
charging station) on the physical game board is represented by a disk.
Visitors to the gallery manipulate the projection interface and turn the
charging stations on and off by moving little communication satellites
into proximity with the disks. In this way they determine the path of
the robots and resulting drawings.
Guestbook:
Using the artist's original 20-year-old TRS-80 computer as
the gallery guestbook, the visitor is asked to sign not with their name
but with a valid credit card number. The "mass storage device" on the
TRS-80 is a standard audio cassette recorder, but instead of being
stored to tape, the card number is played as a datasound (similar to
modem noise) through a speaker. A microphone connected to a contemporary
computer records this sound, and translates the sound data into an
unique 3D geometrical object. The visitor may then preview the object,
and (if it meets their approval) purchase the object as an actual,
physical "3D print", known as a stereolithograph, that can be held in
the hands or displayed on a shelf.
