Putting the Mod in Modernist
Sarah Northmore
Prize Budget for Boys demonstrate how to play Pac-Mondrian. Photograph by Paul Alves.
At the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, "Digital Play: Reloaded" bleeped and whizzed into its opening–a museum-arcade of nostalgic cabinets (Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Burnout 3: Take Down) alongside Sony’s Eyetoy for Playstation, and a mod of Dance Dance Revolution (known simply as DDR to those in the know) called Stepmania, that allows internet users to upload songs and screen backgrounds of their choice to the dancing game.
Toronto-based group Prize Budget for Boys was clearly the star of the show, plugging (yes, literally) their arcade mod of Pac Man, dubbed Pac-Mondrian, for their spin on Modernist great Piet Mondrian. The band of programmers replaced the original dashed grid background of the Pac Man game with Mondrian’s seminal piece Broadway Boogie Woogie. Coding for a Java applet of the game was pulled off the internet, and a cabinet was gutted and outfitted with retro arcade stylings to serve as a programmer’s paean to art and gaming, a two-fold nostalgic gesture founding member Neil Hennessey playfully pushed with: "Who says art isn’t fun?"
Although, fun is relative. As with many web-based emerging art projects, the Boys ran into some legal trouble lifting a copyrighted image off of the Internet for their game. No doubt, they publicize their turf war, so to speak, with the Mondrian estate in their promotional materials, protesting the powers that be for a piece which Hennessey feels Mondrian would have approved.
"Digital Play: Reloaded" addresses the evolution of representation in video game graphics but manages to do so without unnecessary didacticism–at one point, walking amongst the typical milieu of art folk, I was shoved across the room by some rowdy gamers. It felt kind of authentic.
