So today I actually spoke with Marina Abramovic (and Siena Oristaglio) on Skype. This after Marina had emailed me about having played my game version of The Artist is Present. For the record, she tells me that she was queuing and making progress but then went to get some lunch and was pushed out of the queue! How perfect is that?! Imagine Marina Abramovic at a computer with her little avatar in a queue waiting to sit in a chair opposite… herself! It really blows my mind. (Yet another kind of awesome thing is that Marina happened to be wearing red and had her hair over one shoulder, just like in the iconic images of the performance!)
So anyway, this led to us chatting for a bit on Skype this morning. Marina is super nice, very friendly, was sautéing onions at the start of our conversation! Sautéing onions! (The meal she was making sounded pretty delicious actually.) The upshot of the conversation is that we’ll be collaborating in some way in connection with her new and huge project, the Marina Abramovic Institute. Here I pause to point out the institute’s Facebook presence and its Twitter account, they’re kind of ramping all that stuff up at the moment.
I need to remain a bit mysterious about the nature of the collaboration, because mystery is exciting and fun, but the institute itself is super interesting. It was something I’d had an awareness of prior to all this, but hadn’t necessarily delved into all that deeply. But it’s basically this project to bring the experience of performance art and its general weirdness, amazingness, awkwardness, changefulness, uncomfortableness, etc., to… well everyone in theory. The plans they have for it all really sound pretty crazy and ambitious and great. Importantly, they involve getting to wear a white lab coat and getting involved in all this performance stuff yourself.
So I don’t know where it’ll all go, but it’s pretty exciting you guys! More as it happens!
It’s been a week now since the Mumble Indie Bungle went out into the world and it’s been a very satisfying and pleasant experience to see that lots of people enjoyed the various games and had some laughs, maybe even the occasional deeper experience. Of course, one of the things about the Bungle was that it was the first time I charged for any game of mine, so I thought I’d do a quick run-down of what happened (putting aside, as best I can, any embarrassment or other weirdnesses I might feel about the whole thing).
So you should play/read/do Porpentine‘s HOW TO SPEAK ATLANTEAN. I wanted to write something substantial about how it was to experience that adventure, but I’ve been scrabbling around for words for the last little while without much luck. It may be that it’s too hard to find words about Porpentine’s kinds of words. For me, anyway. I have this image of Porpentine’s work as being very well known to people, but on the off chance you haven’t actually dealt with it yourself, this is my recommendation that you do. I think perhaps some people would recommend Howling Dogs more, and it’s also amazing, but HOW TO SPEAK ATLANTEAN seemed more forceful to me, more potent. While this blog post feels very incoherent, I’m sorry. Try it out, all I’m trying to do is recommend you play/read/do something, it doesn’t even take very long!
I realise that there’s nothing “wrong” with this thing, but for some reason the image they have there of applying the strip to the baby just looks so weird to me. So, so weird.
I have confessed more than once to not being a particularly good programmer or software engineer. Perhaps I even confess it too often. It’s not false modesty, though – I’m really not that great at it, I just know enough to muddle through the kind of stuff I want to make. Most of the time this means I feel kind of inept and worry almost on a daily basis about not getting through things fast enough. But I think a case could also be made for my incompetence (and yes, perhaps yours too) being a Good Thing.