Invitation design for Jerry Paper’s Nacho Residency
Jerry Paper X Babycastles Residency w/ Bonus Nacho Residency (BNR) by Noah Wall, CEO of the Nacho Research Center. The Nacho Research Center (NRC) is dedicated to the exploration and expansion of “nacho.” Through heated Platonic discussion and experiments in form and flavor, the NRC has made great progress in developing a deeper understanding of Nacho Form™. This “Nacho Residency” focuses on translating common dishes into nachos. By sharing our great work and making the research public, we hope to further awareness of the constantly shifting Nachoscape™.
Every Sunday afternoon in October Jerry Paper performs at Babycastles with a headset microphone before he moves to Los Angeles in November!
Made possible with support from the Nacho Research Center
Starting Next Week… ShortPlayFree8 (SPF8): An International altgames Exhibition
SEPT.10 - SEPT.16, Opening Event SEPT.10 at 9pm
_ Featuring games by artists worldwide, SPF8 is a spotlight on eight freeware, experimental games with peculiar voices and radically innovative styles from the “altgames” movement. Borne out of a convergence of myriad of desires to break free from different aspects of traditional games culture, these games showcase the diversity of this online scene. Described as “punk games” by artists like Zoe Quinn, these games are created by developers, artists, hobbyists from countries as far as Scotland, Russia, and even Australia. The elements these experiences share are short, free, challenge your perceptions about a game and invite interpretation. So please, take a break, spend ten minutes exploring these games, and see what you find. And maybe the SPF8 altgamesunblock will protect you from potentially damaging AAA rays.
~~~~~~~~~~~ G A M E S ~~~~~~~~~~ Lake of Roaches, by thecatamites Blues for Mittavinda, by Jack King-Spooner Oracle/Summon the Apgrod, by ceMelusine Curtain, by Llaura Dreamfeeel duck turnip, by Jake Clover Bernband, by Tom van den Boogaart Moon Valentine, by Da Neel reProgram, by Soha Kareem ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We had the final showcase of Spring 2015 students work at Babycastles Gallery on 5.19 ~5.20.2015. Thanks to everyone who came out and here are some pictures and links to the projects.
“Teaching with Puzzles: Tutorial Design in Mushroom 11”
Making the tutorial for mushroom 11 was a challenging task. With its new mechanics and controls, the game had to teach players the basics, such as moving, shaping and splitting, before ramping the difficulty up. The developers chose to avoid text and hand-holding almost entirely, in favor of using puzzles to teach first time players. Itay and Julia will go over these puzzles, demonstrate their design and evolution, and discuss the lessons they learned (and relearned) as designers.
ITAY KEREN is a Brooklyn-based indie game designer, author of upcoming experimental puzzler Mushroom 11 (IGF 2014 Excellence in Design finalist). Previously, after years as server development lead, Itay quit his job to pursue his childhood dream of making games. Since then he was involved in many successful titles, and later opened studio Untame with his wife Julia, debuting with award-winning rope physics game Rope Rescue.
JULIA KEREN-DETAR is a game designer and developer based out of Brooklyn NY. Currently she is the creative director for Untame, a husband and wife household studio. She is working on Mushroom 11 with Itay Keren, Simon Kono and Kara Kono, contributing to the game design. She’s worked on several casual and indie titles including Untame’s award-winning mobile game Rope Rescue and Arkadium’s hit Facebook game Mahjongg Dimensions Blast. At Arkadium, she was a senior developer at the R&D department, prototyping and designing dozens of games. Julia is also an avid quilter and a hobby game historian.
Babycastles & The Game Innovation Lab at NYU present a lecture series spotlighting developers and designers with insights on games and technology. The series is hosted by Andy Nealen.
“ SPAMM of Virtualism ”, Net Art exhibition offers to connect with a webcam interactive scenography these great capitals, Moscow, Paris and New York, around a digital creation on the Internet and the artistic movement of virtualism. As Art is a source of communication, Art is a communication in itself, this exhibition is a symbol of unity around the sharing tool which is the Internet 2.0 [ D I S P O S I T I F ]
« The virtualism is an artistic movement that defines art forms designed with the help of digital tools. It interprets the notions of gestures and materials in the field of digital: the virtualist work is based on a creative act in power, reflected by the interfaces that reduce the action to simple actions, automated by peripheral tools. » Encyclopedia, « 100 notions of digital art » Editions de l’immateriel
The raw material of digital creations being virtual, the acted gesture of creation redefines the creative act in power. Indeed, what is virtual is inherently powerful and the creative gesture in this case has no tangible impact on the material being worked. The gesture in power is what is observable in the digital, the acted gesture on the interface. The virtualism is a reconsideration of the creative act and its plastic relationship to the material.
The virtualism in the post-industrial context In the 1960s, in the heart of the industrial society, the consumption of goods is the major societal concern. Thus Yves Klein and Pierre Restany develop the new realism theory. By implementing the object of consumption as a subject in itself, this artistic movement is directly related to the context of industrial society. This approach will be extended by the creation of the current sociological art by Fred Forest and the relational art by Nicolas Bourriaud. Thus the history of art is in dialogue with the social context and it should be taken into account this context while writing new theories. The 1980s saw the birth of the concept of post-industrialism, an assumption that the raw material of industrial society would be replaced by a knowledge economy through an exponential growth of tertiary sectors. This theory, rediscovered in the 2000s, is particularly visible in the digitalwhere the information is dominant in a social system. It is in this movement that fits the virtualism, in a society where the digital is spreading in a daily life of virtual reality.
