ABSTRACT LOHMEYER, EDWIN LLOYD. Unstable Aesthetics: The Game Engine and Art Modifications (Under the direction of Dr. Andrew Johnston). This dissertation examines episodes in the history of video game modding between 1995 and 2010, situated around the introduction of the game engine as a software framework for developing three-dimensional gamespaces. These modifications made to existing software and hardware were an aesthetic practice used by programmers and artists to explore the relationship between abstraction, the materiality of game systems, and our phenomenal engagement with digital media. The contemporary artists that I highlight—JODI, Cory Arcangel, Orhan Kipcak, Julian Oliver, and Tom Betts—gravitated toward modding because it allowed them to unveil the technical processes of the engine underneath layers of the game’s familiar interface, in turn, recalibrating conventional play into sensual experiences of difference, uncertainty, and the new. From an engagement with abstract forms, they employed modding techniques to articulate new modes of aesthetic participation through an affective encounter with altered game systems. Furthermore, they used abstraction, the very strangeness of the mod’s formal elements, to reveal our habitual interactions with video games by destabilizing conventional gamespaces through sensory modalities of apperception and proprioception. In considering the imbrication of technics and aesthetics in game engines, this work aims to resituate modding practices within a dynamic and more inclusive understanding of video game histories, digital media, and the avant-garde. © Copyright 2018 by Edwin Lohmeyer All Rights Reserved Unstable Aesthetics: The Game Engine and Art Modifications by Edwin Lloyd Lohmeyer A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Raleigh, North Carolina 2018 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ _______________________________ Andrew Johnston Stephen Wiley Committee Chair _______________________________ _______________________________ Nicholas Taylor Chris Ingraham DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my dog Bandit for his unwavering loyalty and support during the writing process. ii BIOGRAPHY Eddie Lohmeyer is a Ph.D. student and media artist in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to theories of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, and assemblage, his installations stage bizarre encounters with nostalgic media objects to unveil our normal attitudes and perceptions toward technologies. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank the members of my committee including Andrew Johnston, Steve Wiley, Nick Taylor, and Chris Ingraham for their support and encouragement throughout the dissertation process. I especially want to thank my chair Andrew Johnston for his exceptional guidance and mentoring during the researching and writing of this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................... vi Introduction: An Anatomy of Art Modding .............................................................................. 1 Technicities of Modding .................................................................................................... 6 Aimlessness and the Formation of Sensory Experience .................................................. 10 Theoretical Approaches to Video Game Art and the Avant-Garde ................................. 13 Methodologies.................................................................................................................. 16 Chapter One: A (Scroll) Down Memory Lane: Non-Play, Commodity Aesthetics, and the Vitality of 8-bit Engines in Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Bros. Mods ........................... 31 The Technics of the NES and Arcangel’s ROM Hacking ............................................... 35 Speculative Ontologies of an 8-bit World ....................................................................... 46 The Vitality of Glitch ....................................................................................................... 51 The Démodé Object, Pop Art, and the Repetition of Smiling Clouds ............................. 60 Proprioceptive Non-Play and Engines of Difference ....................................................... 70 Chapter Two: Slaying Machines: Embodied Mimesis in ArsDoom ...................................... 80 Developments in Game Engine Technology ................................................................... 82 Doom and Epistemologies of Modding ........................................................................... 88 The Archive of the Engine ............................................................................................... 99 ArsDoom and Mimetic Vectors of Play ......................................................................... 104 The Strangeness of Institutional Critique ...................................................................... 115 Chapter Three: “Perspective Engines” and the Strangeness of 3D Space in JODI’s Untitled Game... ........................................................................................................... 122 The Work of Anamorphosis........................................................................................... 124 A Grammatology of the Quake Engine ......................................................................... 133 The Formal Materiality of Untitled Game ..................................................................... 148 Flicker Mods and the Modulation of Bodily Space ....................................................... 156 Chapter Four: Generative Mods and the Violence of Sensation ......................................... 172 The Quake III: Arena Engine ........................................................................................ 176 Volatile Machines and Physical Systems ...................................................................... 185 The Meat of the Glitch ................................................................................................... 193 Conclusion: Intractable Spaces .............................................................................................. 205 References ................................................................................................................................. 212 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Horizontal scrolling thresholds in the SMB engine from Nathan Altice, I am error: the Nintendo family computer/entertainment system platform (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 153 .............................................................................. 39 Figure 1.2 Hacked Super Mario Bros. cartridge with exposed PRG-ROM chip (Cory Arcangel, 2002). Photo courtesy of the artist at http://www.coryarcangel.com .................................................................................. 42 Figure 1.3 Continually-scrolling clouds in Super Mario Clouds (Cory Arcangel, 2002) ......... 44 Figure 1.4 Strobing patterns of glitch in the deteriorating gameworld of Super Mario Movie (Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad, 2005) ..................................................................... 55 Figure 1.5 Puppet and dolls animated using stop-motion techniques in Street of Crocodiles (Quay Brothers, 1987) .............................................................................................. 57 Figure 1.6 A sequence of glitched tile patterns resulting in Mario’s flight through the gameworld of Super Mario Movie (Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad, 2005) .............. 59 Figure 1.7 Cutout demode commodities animated through stop-motion techniques from Pony Glass (Lewis Klahr, 1998) .............................................................................. 61 Figure 1.8 The traumatic image of Marilyn Monroe in Marilyn Diptych (Andy Warhol, 1962) ............................................................................................... 64 Figure 1.9 The scrolling repetition of game icons in Super Mario Movie (Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad, 2005) ............................................................................................... 67 Figure 1.10 Mario transforming into the energy of the system in Super Mario Movie (Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad, 2005) ................................................................................ 68 Figure 1.11 Super Mario Clouds exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002. Photo courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York ............................ 69 Figure 1.12 Super Mario Movie exhibited at Deitch Projects in 2005. Photo courtesy of Deitch Projects ......................................................................................................... 71 Figure 1.13 Super Mario Clouds exhibited at Arcangel’s Masters show at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2012. Photo courtesy of Tom Little ............................................ 74 Figure 2.1 Wireframe environments from Akalabeth (Richard Garriott, 1980) ......................