Book launch: How to Play Eddo Stern
Eddo Stern will introduce the audience to a game manual-catalogue-book archive featuring 17 projects
Artist and game designer Eddo Stern teaches courses on game design and culture; computer game development; and physical computing in an art context. His work explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, memory and identification. His work has been widely exhibited at international venues and he is a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation new media fellowship, an emerging fields grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, and a Media Arts stipend from the Edith Russ Foundation.
Part game manual, part catalogue, part archive, How to Play Eddo Stern revolves around a body of 17 works made by Stern along the last two decades which, although developed with different media, can be understood as “games”. The book collects the massive amount of small bits and pieces that make up the folders of Stern’s game projects: 3D models, texture maps and atlases, backdrops, animation frame sequences, code snippets, circuit diagrams, Components, Diagrams as well as emails, design documents, meeting notes, and installation diagrams. Most of the visual digital artifacts such as the models and textures when processed through the game software (or in certain cases built into an analog game) become coherent visual forms, but in their unassembled, out-of-context form these fragments and artifacts maintain visual beauty and poetic truth.
Artist and game designer, Eddo Stern is Faculty at the UCLA Design | Media Arts Department in Los Angeles, CA, and director of the UCLA Game Lab. He works with various media including computer software & hardware, game design, live performance, digital video, and kinetic sculpture. His work explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, memory and identification.
Featuring an essay by Matteo Bittanti, the book has been edited by Domenico Quaranta, designed by Fabio Paris, and co-published by the Link Art Center, Brescia and HeK, House of Electronic Arts Basel. Printed in a limited edition of 100 copies, the book is also available online as a free download pdf and a print on demand paperback through the channels of Link Editions.
The publication is made possible by the financial support of the Foundation Irene Bollag-Herzheimer. — House of Electronic Arts Basel, Opening: Sunday, Jun. 18, 2017
This announcement was originally posted on the House of Electronic Arts Basel website.