My first intervention was in the classroom during the intervention showcase. When it was my turn to share, I got up and wrote Humans on the board. I explained that for my project, I wanted to ask random people to give me a word and tell me whether that word represents something that is political or apolitical. One word that had stumped me was “Humans”. Members of the classroom began to ask on the nature of the question. Does “humans” refers to a group of people or an individual? Can we truly say that anything is inherently political or are politics just a phenomenon that occurs? Regardless of what the consensus was in the end, I believe these are important questions to be asking in a world that has become so polarized due to politics.

I wanted to run the intervention again, this time in a smaller group with people who knew each other better. Over the weekend I was meeting a few friends for lunch so I decided to ask them the same question and see if they took the conversation in a different direction than the previous group. After presenting the prompt, my friends took the question as whether a person can live in a way that is unbothered by politics in the current era and what their life would have to look like to accomplish this. Concluding a long conversation, the answer was ultimately no. Even if a person is completely remote, self-sustained, and devoid of any contact with humans or human-made devices the fact that other people in the world can impact their standards of living through environmental impact or invasion means a living person cannot be completely separate from politics.

This project was inspired by Uncle Roy All Around You by Blast Theory and Paper Tiger TV as the goal of the intervention is to get people to ask thought provoking questions in settings that they normally wouldn’t. However, where Paper Tiger TV sought to teach the value of counterculture having a voice, my project is about showcasing the divide between two equal large and increasingly polarizing senses of culture by demonstrating how permeating and inescapable the differences are in our everyday lives. This is similar to Blast Theory’s project as it asks each participate to evaluate their disposition towards strangers but in a political sense as opposed to trust wise.

Photo taken during the second intervention. Permission to post granted shortly after.

Link:

https://noahwc.itch.io/objects-in-motion

Art is dead is a simple 2d sidescrolling platformer where every asset in the game is a company logo taken from the internet. Using the J and L keys, the player can manipulate the rotation of the platforms around them arranging their unique geometry in such a way that allows them to progress. At the end of the game, the player must choose to continue receiving stimulus or finally rest.

When designing this game, I wanted to capture the feeling of growing up in a digital era and tackle the commodification of attention. The two factors of the digital age I chose to highlight are the use of product placement making free entertainment lucrative, and how easy access to the internet at all times often distracts from mundane but necessary tasks such as sleeping. I’m sure we all have had late nights spent on YouTube or Netflix not realizing how many hours it’s been until the sun starts to poke through the window. The constant need to be stimulated isn’t a new experience, but the introduction of the internet has ensured that our engagement with the mediums that are the most stimulating can be commodified and engineered. This work was largely inspired by the Conceptualism movements anti-commodification of art sentiment as well as Vulture’s interview with comedian Bo Burnham where he talks about his take on growing up online (themes also present in his songs “Art Is Dead” and “Welcome to the Internet”).

Link:

https://noahwc.itch.io/objects-in-motion

Demo:

For my express/experience artwork, I wanted to focus on the style of indie game that I was first introduced to as a kid: puzzle games that took simple mechanics and implemented them in ways that were complex. A prime example of this is The Stanley Parable, an indie title featured in the Gameloading: Rise of the Indies documentary. On paper, The Stanley Parable is a walking simulator that takes place throughout an office building with some narration and diverging paths. However, the way these mechanics are implemented provides for a rich and engaging narrative with whimsical and snarky undertones. My hope for this project was to recreate the elegance and creativity that characterizes these games but in an abstracted form devoid of characters and narrative. It’s easy to feel like every indie/art games all need to have deeper meaning or profound commentary to be of worthwhile. In order to shy away from that, I wanted to embrace engineered play by focusing on an interesting mechanic and all the ways it can be used in a simple puzzle game. Objects in motion is a top-down room-based puzzle game where your surroundings change based on which direction you are moving. Throughout the game you will encounter walls, portals, and terminals that rotate the world around you. Navigating through the interactions of these three components is where the complexities lie.

Scripts: