2015 UCLA Game Art Festival: hands-on at The Hammer

Arcade machines, intricate game pieces and a plethora of digital, multimedia and board games will inhabit the Hammer Museum on Wednesday. Among them, something bigger will be at play.

A collaboration between the UCLA Game Lab and the Hammer Museum, the 2015 UCLA Game Art Festival will explore the intersection between art and gaming, said Design | Media Arts associate professor Eddo Stern, the festival’s artistic director.

Stern said the festival aims to explore different approaches to game-making and gaming culture, with works ranging from traditional games to media and performance art.

The works on display for the festival include digital games, cinema and live performances from local UCLA students and alumni and international artists, along with a food games area, the Board Game Lounge and an arcade area. Daily Bruin A&E explores three of the many projects that will be presented at the festival.

Penis Paint

This year’s festival will feature its own celebrity, an internet star in the pop media art world.

On the main stage, YouTube personality Famous New Media Artist will perform a 20-minute live demonstration of his latest art software: “Penis Paint.”

“Penis Paint” allows its users to paint by brandishing a large, augmented-reality penis which translates hip motions made in real life to on-screen paint strokes.

“In my world of media art, there’s a bit of a boys club going on. The same male ego that exists in media art seems to also persist in gaming,” said Jeremy Bailey, the real Toronto-based media artist behind the satirical internet persona.

Famous New Media Artist is a farcical, egotistical character Bailey takes on to poke fun at certain aspects of pop media art and abstract expressionism.

Bailey said as part of the performance, he often invites audience members, especially women, to come onstage and give the phallic art tool a try in order to experience the ridiculous and childish empowerment the software offers.

Bailey said the Famous New Media Artist character developed over a long time as a response to the male ego embedded in online video culture and art. Bailey said as the self-important, attention-seeking YouTube persona, he plays with the aesthetics of narcissism and explores themes like the relationship between technology and its users, the internet and the body, and artistic ego.

“I invented this character to specifically poke fun at the egos in abstract expression and modern art,” Bailey said. “That ego’s still alive today.”

For the festival, Bailey said he will update his performance and re-contextualize it to gaming culture.

Vietnam Romance

Part video game, part live performance, “Vietnam Romance” straddles several boundaries between art, gaming, theater and social commentary.

Set in a modern day, fictionalized Ho Chi Minh City, the performance-game hybrid has players delve into the Vietnam War – not the historical event, but rather the fantasy and Hollywood mythos surrounding it.

“The piece explores (players’) complicity in being seduced by this medium and the paradoxical relationship with the Vietnam War,” said Stern, the game’s creator. “On the one hand, war being turned into entertainment is disturbing, while on the other hand, the mechanisms of mass entertainment are so seductive.”

Players take on the role of four eccentric adventurers and online tradesmen who embark on a tour of Vietnam hosted by a company called Vietnam Romance. The four tourists aim to score Vietnam War paraphernalia to sell in their online store, while undergoing recreations of war scenes that vaguely fall somewhere between fiction and historical reality.

With nods and references to films like “Rambo,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket,” the game is riddled with cinematic inspiration, said Nick Crockett, a UCLA alumnus and collaborator for the project. He said through this influence, it also explores the relationship between cinema and games.

A live performance of the game will take place on the festival stage, in which players can experience one or two levels of the game. There will be physical props and live acting by Lucas Near-Verbrugghe, the game’s voice actor and its fictional tour guide.

On one level, the game serves as a commentary on the relationship between war and its fictionalization. On another level, it’s a rare live tour with Vietnam Romance.

Sneaky Cactus

Crockett said a focus for the Game Art Festival is experimenting with the process and approach of making games.

For his entry to the festival, Crockett chose to toy with player-game interfaces using an unconventional game controller: a cactus.

The stealth-racing video game features digital cacti stuck in a desert, with a luscious oasis on the other side of the screen, out of reach. The goal of the game is to get the cacti to the oasis while avoiding nefarious bugs trying to sap the cacti of their precious juices.

The cacti on screen can be sent jetting off in different directions by tapping their real-life counterparts, which make up the controllers. When the plants on screen rotate upon contact with an obstacle, so do the controllers, which rest on rotating plates. Players must race to get their cacti to the oasis first.

Crockett said he describes himself as a jack-of-all-trades, a quality he said came in handy in creating “Sneaky Cactus.”

The cactus controller relies on the fact that touching a cactus and a conductive handle connected to a power source completes an electrical circuit through the conductive path of the moisture-filled cactus. The signal from this circuit can be used to interact with the video game.

Crockett also said the art for the game is all his original work, inspired by the cartoon “Adventure Time,” and his personal art style of using graphic and pixelated aesthetics. All the fonts and typography are also done by Crockett specifically for the game.

“Sneaky Cactus,” Crockett said, explores the relationship between the player and the controller. In this case, it’s a thorny one.