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February 06, 2005
Buy It Use It Break It Fix It
Okay, so it's been a long, but awesome day. More specifically, a long and awesome day in NYC. Madness. Besides being in the most crowded Apple Store I've ever seen and eating at MJ's restaurant from Spider-Man 2, I had a very eventful day of 8-bit geekery.
Almost a year ago I hit up the Whitney Biennial show for some good old fashion "culture." It was pretty sweet. Crazy crazy stuff, as is expected of a Whitney show, I suppose. But one of the things that really stuck out was the 8-bit Nintendo art they had on display. Perhaps it was just due to the juxtapositioning of normal paintings and sculptures and things with crazy computer-hacking art, but I think it really just held up on its own. And after today, I'm sure it can hold up on its own, because that's why I was in New York City.
February 2005 is the month of the 8-bit artshow, apparently, as me and my peeps hit up two separate shows, each featuring the crazy ROM-altering skillz of Cory Arcangel of BEIGE fame. Both shows were crazy, and I could go on about both of them at length, but suffice it to say, they were awesome. The first one had (amongst other things) a huge wall to play Tetris on, and a pseudo-iPod program written from scratch for the NES. Crazy. The other show featured "Super Mario Bros the Movie." Not to be confused with the 1993 feature film of the same name. This was instead a hacked Super Mario Bros. cartridge, reprogrammed to play a 15 minute "movie" using the existing sprite art from the game in a completely new way. Also with kickin' new music. Really, it was crazy.
The month continues in a couple of weeks when Cory is bringing some of his peers to New York for a "Low Level All-Stars" madness. Needless to say, I might have to take another trip down to the city.
Posted by pat at February 6, 2005 02:27 AM