July 22, 2009 –
Player and avatar exist as one in this work by LaFarge.
Ten million people around the world compete online in World of Warcraft, the extraordinarily popular, multiplayer role-playing fantasy game developed by local company Blizzard Entertainment.
Fifteen years after its debut, the game’s reach extends far beyond the Web. WoW – as devotees know it – is the focus of a 3-1/2-month-long exhibit in progress at the Laguna Art Museum that features the work of two CALIT2-affiliated artists/gaming experts.
Arts associate professors Antoinette LaFarge and Robert Nideffer are among 14 international artists displaying their work at “WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon,” which runs through Oct. 4 at the museum.
The museum’s Web site says the exhibit recaps the game’s 15-year history, examines artistic practices influenced by game culture and explores various resulting forms of cultural production. The exhibit also looks at fan art spawned by the game and the culture of machinima – computer animation that uses video game graphic engines.
Nideffer depicts the struggle between opposing WoW guilds.
LaFarge’s 2×12-ft. piece depicts the relationship that develops between player and avatar – from the avatar’s point of view. “It’s really about how the avatar views the player and the player’s artificial world,” she said. The work also portrays the male gamer and the female avatar as one, existing as a split personality. The overlay of text represents the internal monologue/dialogue of the avatar/player, LaFarge said.
Nideffer’s WTF?!, created with CALIT2 staff programmer Alex Szeto, depicts a WoW knockoff role-playing game in which players meet famous thinkers like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Mary Daly. WTF?! development was supported by a research grant from the Digital Industry Promotion (DIP) Agency in Daegu, South Korea.
Nideffer is also displaying a 9 x 4.5-foot triptych called 2007 BC. The work, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthy Delights” and “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” was originally a digital painting. Now printed on 6-millimeter Baltic birch panels, the piece depicts world creation and the struggle between opposing forces that debuted in a 2007 WoW expansion pack. It “references themes appearing in Bosch’s early work through the lens of an immensely popular contemporary game and social networking platform,” Nideffer states.
WTF?!: a knockoff World of Warcraft game.
He will explore those themes more closely at 1 p.m. Sunday, August 16, when he discusses “Playing with Bosch” at the museum. His presentation will compare Bosch’s paintings with images in World of Warcraft.
LaFarge also will participate in a WoW-related event at the museum on Sunday, Sept. 13 at 1 p.m. She will scrutinize World of Warcraft and other role-playing games as a way of constructing a fictional narrative, examining the mode of fiction through performance, digital media, games and writing.
In addition, LaFarge and Nideffer will be panelists in a forum that includes executives from Blizzard Entertainment. Moderated by David Familian, associate director at UCI’s Beall Center for Art and Technology, it is scheduled Thursday, October 1, at UCI.
