serial consign

[mateusz skutnik / submachine 5]

It has been an exciting night in the studio. Just as I finished my daily writing session some great new media materialized. The much anticipated fifth installment of Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine point-and-click game series was launched tonight. The Submachine games stand out amongst the rather bloated "escape the room" genre of games due to puzzle-box level design and hyper self-referential narrative. The series is rendered with a bleak graphic novel finesse and the sound design is equally dreary and dissonant. If you're interested in learning more about Skutnik's work I've written about it before, but I suggest you just go explore the gamespace of Submachine 5 yourself.

[ryota kuwakubo / video bulb]

This past weekend I went to the Inter(PR)Axis: Mapping a Practice of Media Art symposium at OCAD. The event was organized by Nina Czegledy and presented by OCAD as well as Interaccess and several other cultural and academic organizations and institutions.

I had hoped to post a more substantial review of the proceedings, but will instead just touch on some of the work discussed in Machiko Kusahara's keynote on "device art". Kusahara is a Japanese scholar who used Inter(PR)Axis as a platform to discuss a field of work that capitalizes on a middle ground between hardware r&d and the world of mass market consumer electronics. She began her talk with an extended cataloguing of various instances of robotics in Japanese culture and then eased into a discussion about pervasive gadgetry. Kusahara then described a handful of artists who were producing work with this market in mind. Of particular interest to me was the lo-fi game related work of Ryota Kuwakubo, the "nonsense machines" of Maywa Denki and the game/instruments of Toshio Iwai.

If you are curious about Kusahara's knowledge in this area please note her essay Device Art: A New Form of Media Art from a Japanese Perspective, which was published in the Pacific Rim issue of Intelligent Agent a while back.