GAMERSKY

Intention:

Everyone has his or her own passion, and the passion is something that one is very proud of. It is sometimes the case that our passions have no way to be expressed, for example, gamers. Although a great video game is, in some sense, a kind of art but a lot of time, gamers are unable to share their passion with others because a ton of those great games are single player only and, what's more, non-gamers are not able to understand what the gamers are talking about, even if they try their best to express through mouth. So there is a chance that if gamers can express their passion through art, there will be more non-gamers can understand the our inner fire. 

Now, my goal is to express my passion about video games through trying to make an art piece. In this way, I hope I can show people how serious I'm about games and that video games are not just child's play.

Context:

My inspiration comes from Andy Warhol's piece. On the 5th floor of the Andy Warhol museum, there is a corner where a lot of product boxes stack on each other or placed in certain relations and the environment gives those seemingly-random-but-intentionally-placed boxed a sense of art. That piece gave me the enlightenment that industrial productions, if well designed and carefully placed, can get rid of the label of "mass product" and get a layer of scent called "art". So I followed Warhol's idea in that piece and produced by using my own choice of "boxes".

Process:

At first I wasn't aware of the exact approach as Andy Warhol by stacking boxes. So I was trying to use audio softwares to make sound overlaps to produce the effect of that piece I mentioned above. However, simply putting sounds together, even if I edit them carefully, is probably going to give out a sense of humor and make everybody laugh instead of creating a sense of art. Then I tried to use images, but I'm not sensitive enough to choose images and combines them into artistic pieces with the same effect as Warhol's boxes, so I reject that approach too. Finally, when it came the 3:00 a.m. in the morning, I suddenly realized that I can mimic the way Warhol produced his box piece to show my passion. So I got up and pull out all of my video game boxes and came up with a plan to build them up (details are in the next section).

Product:

What I created is a word on the wall built by PS4/3/V disk boxes. Since there the boxes have different size, it's possible to build words by only using them and a lot of tapes. I first came up with a blueprint that indicate detail about how to arrange the boxes into word.

Since the boxes are all straight lines, I choose to design in a kind of "robotic" style where every curve in the word is replaced by simple lines. And, as you can see the difference between the two photos above, in the upper picture, the characters are separated, while in the final version, the word is concatenated, in another word, mixed. 

The four photos above are steps that I was producing my piece- only boxes, tapes, physics and patience are involved.

Critique:

The very first critique I had in mind is this piece is SOOOO rough. It seems carelessness and sloppy as those boxes are not closely put together and, in the final picture, one of the boxes is skewed and it jeopardized the picture. Yes I admit this huge flaw, but this is the first time I'm dealing with this kind of creation so I wasn't skillful enough. Second, the process was much harder than I thought because hanging one box on the wall by tape is easy, but hanging a lot of boxes in certain angles is tough, not to mention putting them closely together while preventing them from collapsing. 

But out of the intention of this piece, I think it matches it perfectly. First of all, the word is "GAMERSKY" which indicate the heart of the producer is a gamer. The expression of passion of game in this work is shown by the material- 28 PS3/4 and 9 PSV game disk boxes. Not only the word directly shows the theme of game, but the material is fully in the theme of game as well, so this whole piece is surrounded by the sense of gaming.

Reflection:

When I was thinking of the approach of the project, I was stuck by the form of expression. I realized I was limited by certain inner constrains which I should get rid of, but I just can't find out what is the constraint. Later in 3 a.m. I suddenly realized that the way to breach my constraint is something I've already seen- Andy Warhol's boxes. After I finished building my wall, I've learned a new approach(it may sounds naive but it's new to me)- object arrangement. It's not the same as image and video editing because the production gave me the sense of creating rather than manipulating. Since I'm not a painter and I haven't experienced street-art-style creation, this project helped me experienced the physical challenge during creation and the fun in it.

P.S. One little thing I learnt is that NEVER even try use your mouth to fix a tangled tape, or a bleeding lips is your cost.