Ani-Gif 001: Brandon Jan Blommaert

Ani-gif is a new project from Daniel Rehn and Sarah Caluag, that looks really interesting. It will feature a collection of animated GIF’s, made by selected artists. The first work is freshly released, featuring a work from Brandon Jan Blommaert. Parallel to the online-exhibition there is also a biennal planned for 2012, that should be a “massive, real-world exhibition of GIFs”. Oh boy, that sound like a colorful, flickering wonderland.

I expect cool minimal and maximal works from ani-gif, somehow between glitch-aesthetics and experimental, online art-pioneers like for example dextro.

This toy brings everything on a new level: social interaction, music instruments, composition, sound games… In the end this is a real social game. (via Althausen, thx!)

Popularity award of Cologne’s Global Game Jam 2011 goes to Krystian Majewski (I suppose to say so). He made a charmin’ retro-gameboy-looking Julian Assange game. I’ll bet you know this one. Just head over and have a play! Read a bit more about it in Krystian’s blog. (He’s the Trauma guy btw…)

Yes people, I did it! I finished a game for the Global Game Jam! It is a two-player-game and some sort of “space-fighting game”. (The topic of the game jame was “Extinction” by the way). Since I had extremely limited time at this weekend, I decided to make a game I can assemble in 30 minutes or so. In the end it took me about 8 hours.

This game reflects my growing interest in “fighting games“, that developed over the last 10 or so months. I like the idea of games, that do not have a “optimum strategy” to win the game, like “knowing and mastering all secret moves” or “pushing the button faster or harder“. The idea of having a game, where you can combine tactics to always make a turn on the game against your enemy was and still is of high interest. I am also thinking about stuff like the “All in” at a poker game: you can always be the matchmaker and win epic or fail miserably. Ok, enough of the theory.

“An Accident in Paradise” is a 2-player space-fighting game for iPod Touch and iPhone. You play with another human on the iPod as a playboard. The bullet strength is determined by the time-interval between the single shots. Stronger shots extinguish weaker shots. There is no optimal strategy to win, but you have to examine the enemies moves to decide, what works best for you to hit the enemy ship. Unfortunately there is nothing to play on the web right know, because I made this on the iPod Touch device only. I am heavily thinking about polishing the game a little bit and ship it with the Apple App Store. But this won’t be within the next 3 weeks.

Ah, I had a great inspiration this weekend by Sven Väth’s first album “An Accident in Paradise” from 1993. I can still recommend this 17 year old record much, much, much. Here is the title-track “An Accident in Paradise“, but for more popular I suppose is “L’Esperanza“.

Global Game Jam Link: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/accident-paradise

PS: Later this week I will post about other interesting submissions of the Global Game Jam Cologne. Thanks again to the Cologne Game Lab to make this great event happen once again!

You can head over to the mini-site for Paniq’s new album “Beyond good and evil“. Have a listen there, buy the album as 320kbit mp3 or FLAC as pay what you want (no minimum required), of order the CD like shown above. Or order this CD along with a “Fine Arts Calender”. This is meanwhile tha 11th album from Paniq!

I discovered this “chip”music-collection with the funny name “Trikitraki” this week at True Chip Till Death and listened to it many, many times. But still have a hard time to tell, if this is just genious or pure silly. All tunes were made with VST-Plugins and “real” Software instruments (no real chipmusic-equipment): “It can be considerated FAKECHIP sound. It’s basically tiny synth-waves and VST instruments, such as ymVST, magical8bit, medusa, casio vl-tone and tons of samples.“.

Basically I like really like the sound and idea of just mashing up VST with chipmusic production style. Results in cool and lil bit unusual sounds. The tracks itself hmmm… oscillate between sonic mastership and arranged boredom. With some good moments, and some naive sounding parts. At least an interesting records. Do yourself a favour and listen to this. It’s a free download (.zip) in the end.

Beautiful letterprints in pixelstyle with unusual-source-materials is the work from Physical Fiction. They use dices, lego and various modified mosaik-boards, cover them with paint and make unique prints out of it. If you come close, you will also see fine-granular patterns, attached to some of the pixel-tiles. Physical Fiction is the effort of Samuel Cox and Justin LaRosa. (via)