Glitches Turn Video Games Into Sublime Art [Imagecache]

First, he showed us the edge of the world. Now, photographer Robert Overweg shows us some beautiful mistakes.

Most people throw their controllers when a glitch ruins a superbly good game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto. Robert Overweg loves it; he turns it into art.

Overweg is a self-proclaimed ” photographer inside the virtual world.” In his ” Glitches” series, he captures whacked-out characters and snafued buildings in screenshots that seem like what René Magritte might’ve produced had he been an immense ol’ gaming nerd. These are absurd apocalyptic landscapes rendered even more absurd by shooters suspended in mid-air, as if leaping off a trampoline, while a skyscraper burns ominously inside the distance, or, our favorite, by two characters fleeing the zombies of Left 4 Dead 2 and pausing for a homoerotic embrace (top).

How Overweg does it: It’s ” a mix of forcing glitches and finding them,” he tells us in an email. So in Left 4 Dead 2, an A.I. companion is programmed to follow you within certain bounds, but step outside the boundaries, and the characters go a tad haywire. Thus Glitch-hug and Glitch up within the air (below)

Here in Grand Theft Auto IV, Overweg used an invisible gap inside the wall to effectively slip beneath the game.

Not all of the photographs are glitches within the technical sense. Overweg found this facade hacking around Left 4 Dead 2. ” I was told to move in a undeniable direction and I determined to head within the opposite only to search out this pretty building,” he says. ” From a distance and a undeniable perspective this will be a standard building.” Facades and buildings from Half Life 2:

Aestheticizing glitches is nothing new, and in recent times, a complete industry has sprouted up around glitch art, complete with a glitch-art symposium and a glitch-art book. Some of the work appears like a mistake. Overweg’s photos are awesome and creepy because, like Magritte’s bowler-hatted men and day-lit evening streets, they’re deceptively normal.

You could read every kind of meaning into these – they’re a political statement about finding beauty in crossing boundaries; they’re questioning the notion of artistic authorship (Overweg’s photos are unedited screenshots); etc – but we love them because they appear cool. We’ll leave all that other stuff to the glitch-art theorists.

See more at Fast Co.Design [Images via Robert Overweg]

Fast Company empowers innovators to challenge convention and create the longer term of commercial.

Source

This post is tagged: art, Games, glitches, Imagecache, Sublime, video