OUCH!

While our viewing practices have been transformed by the aesthetics and logics of the computer-era, so too have earlier approaches to the representation of the real informed the settings, themes and styles of video games. ‘OUCH!’, a composition I have isolated from the early Windows computer game ‘SkiFree’ best exemplifies that practice. Like Mondrian and the other members of the De Stijl movement the figure in ‘OUCH!’ has been reduced to primary colours and spatial illusion to the opposition of a vertical and horizontal grid transcoding the visible world into a geometric pattern. With the painting ‘OUCH!’ I hope to expose the debt, and homage to art historical movements made by video game artists and to take it a step further by re-creating the illusion of a virtual world reduced to an orthogonal grid through the virtual extension of the composition into the surrounding space —or, more precisely, implying that the painting and the white wall of a gallery space is an invisible yet all-encompassing grid that we, the viewer are a part of.