This is the transcript of an artist talk I gave about the end-of-life of Adobe Flash, and digital art preservation in general. It was part of “Gone in a Flash”, a series of events organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre. You can also watch the video here or check …
Category Archives: technology
TweeVee / Interactive Movies
TweeVee is an engine for interactive videos built in javascript. You can create a branching movie in the style of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch starting from Twee files exported from the popular hypertext editor Twine. TweeVee source on GitHub TweeVee was created for a LIKELIKE livestream showcasing four interactive movies, from the pioneering Kinoautomat to the …
Twitch Plays Bees / Twitch Plays Everything / Twitch Plays MIDI
This Fall, due to COVID-19, I’m teaching a class about online multiplayer games. It’s a great excuse to learn new skills and run some little experiments in these long, socially distanced days. As class material, I put together two Processing templates to facilitate Twitch-powered multiplayer experiences. Every Twitch channel comes with an IRC chat and …
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Site Update
This website just went through a major update! Some notable changes: The Flash embeds, which are now automatically blocked in most browsers, have been replaced with short gameplay videos. The games are still playable via browser following a link and the downloadable buttons are more prominent. The English translations in some old games have been …
Notarizing your Flash/AIR applications for macOS
This guide is meant to help you notarize Adobe Flash and AIR executables for distribution outside of the App Store. Distributing within the App Store requires a few extra steps such as packing icons and setting up specific provisioning profiles as well. Some of the following steps are likely to apply to software developed with …
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Analog Pleasures
A LIKELIKE show featuring videogames beyond video.
Phone Story 2019 Donation Update
Phone Story, our short game about the dark side of electronics manufacturing, came out 8 years ago. It was immediately banned from the App Store but it has been exhibited in countless of venues around the world, including at a landmark exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London last year. The exhibitions don’t …
The right to screenshot
Sometimes I get asked for permission to publish screenshots from my games. It annoys me a bit because all my games are released under Creative Commons and, besides, I don’t see screenshots or video recordings ever falling outside of fair use. Streamers, youtubers, and machinima artists can even make a living out of commenting and …
A short history of interactive music videos and other playthings
I was asked by my colleague Jesse Stiles to give a talk about video games, interactive music videos and other playthings specifically created to promote music. What follows is an incomplete list of projects I found, thematically sorted. Thank you tweeple for all the recommendations, let me know if I missed any good ones.
Bumper stickers for self-driving cars
In a world of self-driving cars, what’s going to happen to the art and tradition of bumper stickers? Will our gaze be ever drawn to these cheeky statements while traveling automatically? Is the car going to be less of extension of the self and more of a family member, with its own personality, affiliation and …
p5.play
I just released p5.play, a javascript library for the creation of games and playthings. It’s still a beta but it includes features that are common to most 2D games: Sprites with animation support, collision detection and resolution (limited to Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes and circles for now), a camera and functions to facilitate mouse and …
Phone Story Donation Update
Two years ago the first profits from Phone Story were sent to Tian Yu, one of the Foxconn employees who attempted suicide after enduring illegal overtime and abusive working conditions. Due to the infamous ban from the App Store the game is available only on the web and on the Android Market for $1, which …
Images of Monetization
Around 2010 I noticed the emergence of an iconography tied to the buzzword monetization. Zynga and the Appstore were blowing up and a new parasitical industry began to promise shortcuts to commercial success. Their offers involve selling users, proposing bizantine revenue sharing systems, manufacturing ratings and other sketchy marketing services. One visual trope was dominating …
Gatekeeper and the rise of the Total Apple Consumer
Somewhere in UK, a dialog box pops up on the screen of a Mac computer. The user contacts me asking for an explanation I can’t quite provide. The same file (a downloadable version of Phone Story) works perfectly on my machine, also a Mac. It turns out the “file damaged” message is produced by Gatekeeper, …
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New website?
Sort of. I had to ditch the old baroque, over-themed and essentially un-updatable Drupal-based content management system for a leaner solution based on WordPress. The Italian section (hundreds of nodes), the game pages, and some old content will continue to exist as static HTML – which has the great advantage of not vomiting errors after …