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ALT + CTRL / A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games
October 5 - November 24, 2004
Opening reception: October 7, 6 - 9 p.m.
In October 2000, the Beall Center's inaugural exhibition, SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games and Art, recognized computer games as a richly expressive medium. As an indie carry-forward, ALT+CTRL is a new festival celebrating the most passionate and experimentally minded game artists in the world and showcasing the most innovative new concepts in game genres, designs, methodologies, and game play. Over 20 works will be shown, including modded games, hot-rodded game machines, net-based games, and installlations. Special screening of machinima films made "on location" in various games highlight the sheer inventiveness with which game artists are expanding their field.
ALT + CTRL fills a vital niche in the nation's fastest-growing entertainment field by providing a juried venue outside the mainstream game industry to showcase the latest independent and alternative games by such up-and-coming talents as Brody Condon, Eddo Stern, and Maia Engeli & Nina Czegledy. The event is designed to attract diehard game fans and game developers as well as those curious to learn more about what is going on in a burgeoning field that is underreported by the mainstream media.
To help the festival reach a broader public, it will feature an online exhibition archive and catalog in addition to the Beall Center exhibition. There will also be a special panel on game culture with contributors to the 2004 anthology First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, moderated by editor Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who is one of the artists included in ALT+CTRL.
ALT + CTRL's custom exhibition environment features visual interpretations of computer games, avatars, and modding by a group of acclaimed Southern California graffiti artists led by Chris Coggan.
ALT+CTRL was organized by a team with proven track records in putting together large-scale game-related events. The festival co-organizers are Robert Nideffer, Antoinette LaFarge, and Celia Pearce. Nideffer and LaFarge are both UC Irvine Associate Professors of Digital Media and were the co-curators of the extremely successful 2000 exhibition SHIFT+CTRL that brought together a selection of contemporary game art for the first time in a U.S. exhibition. Pearce, was responsible for Entertainment in the Interactive Age, a 2001 conference on game design and culture at USC. ALT + CTRL was juried by Nideffer, LaFarge, Pearce, and an outside panel of jurors from the independent game scene, including Rebecca Cannon, Drew Davidson, Erkki Huhtamo, Paul Marino (who led the jurying for the machinima works), Jeannie Novak, and Eric Zimmerman. ALT + CTRL is a joint project of the Game Culture & Technology Lab, The Beall Center for Art and Technology, and Cal-(IT)2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, University of California, Irvine.
In addition to our corporate sponsors, ALT+CTRL has also received in-kind support in the form of public relations assistance from the Entertainment Software Association (formerly the IDSA), producers of E3. The exhibition has also been awarded a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Current participating artists
Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Brody Condon, c-level, collapsicon, delire and pix, Eddo Stern, gameLab, Geoffrey Thomas, Indie Game Jam, Maia Engeli and Nina Czegledy, Molleindustria, Nick Montfort, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenless, and Andrew McClain, Olaf Val Mignon, Pappy Boyington, Rebecca Cannon, RSG, THE JAB, yumi-Co
