DIRTSCRAPER - Peter Burr
Through crunchy 2D digital graphics and disorienting text, Peter Burr’s DIRTSCRAPER leverages a video game engine to generate the churn and sustain of a city forever being destroyed and remade. Flashing, jittering, and scrolling with the limited CGA color palate and awkward shape language of 1980s PC games, but fractaled, deconstructed, and relayered, experiencing the DIRTSCRAPER projected in a large dark space can be overwhelming, like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie for the era of stock shorting, house flipping, and crypto advertising bots. One interesting aspect of DIRTSCAPER, though, is that it has been shown in different modes, including interactive installations, performed for an audience, the aforementioned video art-like projection setup, and also as a self-playing live stream. This aspect of the work is particularly interesting to me as a curator and theorist of video games, because it highlights one of the complexities of trying to identify where to place these works in the categories of traditional fine arts (as well as the forgotten history of early digital and algorithmic art that is only now being rediscovered.) As noted below, this work is also an excellent example of how many people often collaborate on these technical marvels. But the meta and backend considerations aside, this is a work of great power and unsettling resonance.
Creator: Peter Burr (Text by Porpentine Charity Heartscape. Programming by Mark Fingerhut, additional programming by Oren Shoham. Music and sound design by John Also Bennett. Additional graphics by Brandon Blommaert, Eric Carlson, and Brenna Murphy.)
Link: https://vimeo.com/298436234
Connections:
Julie Merehtu - Stadia ii
Vera Molhner - Interruptions
p.e. Moskowitz - How To Kill A City
Alighiero Boetti - Untitled (1989)