I try to make whatever I create work on multiple levels. There’s the immediate, visceral appeal of the object. How it feels, how it smells, the thoughts you have the first time you see it. I try to make the things I do enjoyable and accessible on this level, so that even if you don’t know the subtext, you’ll still have a good time. I hope that sometimes you’ll get the subtext (either the one I intended, or one you brought yourself) and the piece will be that much more enjoyable to you, but if you don’t, you won’t feel left out. Often, the subtext is something only I’ll understand or care about, but then, if I’ve managed to amuse myself while entertaining you, that’s not such a bad result!
Case in point, the triptych Good vs. Evil, Tic Tac Toe, and Tic:
On the surface, these are just silly little games. Below the surface there isn’t much more than that, but there is more!
These were inspired by a meeting with Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, better known as the art collective Jodi.org. Jodi.org were pioneers in net.art. Much of their work involves taking existing structures (like websites and video games) and breaking them to reveal the art within. A more recent example of this is Max Payne CHEATS ONLY, which uses the video game Max Payne as a creative tool.
I wanted to see what would happen when you applied the Jodi attitude to non-computer games, in this case, the classic Tic-Tac-Toe. The first, Good vs. Evil, just establishes the baseline. The second, Tic Tac Toe removes a row and a column from the game. The game is still playable, sort of, but it’s awful. Whoever goes first always wins. The third, Tic, just has one square. Whoever goes first wins. I would have done a 4X4 version, but I couldn’t figure out how to fit that into a capsule!
At the same time, I also made a web piece, Sex for Safety. Since Jodi took concrete things and injected meaninglessness into them I want to see what would happen if I injected meaning into Jodi’s work. I took the HTML code from one of their sites (it might have been this one, but I don’t remember now). I replaced all of their graphics with my own, without looking at what the graphics were. The juxtapositions are fascinating. Check it out! After you get there, though, resize your browser window to be about 320 pixels wide. This was really designed to run on a PSP, though it should also work well on an iPhone.
So anyway, that’s why there’s Tic-Tac-Toe and silly variations of it in the capsules!
