pixel art

ARTICLE: MARIO PAINT AS AUTOFICTION

VRAL is currently showcasing Lars Preisser’s HOME/NOME as part of Season Four. In order to better contextualize this work, we will highlight some of Preisser’s most fascinating works. Today we are focusing on Animated Urban Space.

“The right to the city is like a cry and a demand... a transformed and renewed right to urban life.” (Henry Lefevbvre)

Created in 2020, Animated Urban Spaces (AUS) is intimately connected to HOME/NOME, both technically and thematically. The two works were created using the same software, Nintendo’s Mario Paint, yet they diverge in form; the former is a proper machinima, while the latter primarily exists as a video installation. Thematically, Preisser’s focus extends beyond the urban landscape of Berlin to encompass broader themes of memory and recollection, transformation and persistence.

Technically, the two artworks are linked through Mario Paint, a groundbreaking creative software developed by Nintendo in 1992 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Designed as an art tool, it offered a playful and interactive approach to digital art, particularly appealing to children and Nintendo fans. Mario Paint provided a range of drawing and painting tools, featuring familiar characters and icons from the Mario universe. Notably, it also included a basic animation feature, fostering creativity and storytelling.

Preisser’s engagement with Mario Paint dates back to 1995. His experience with the software during his childhood in Berlin forms a material and technological link to the past, as he explained in his interview.

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Lars Preisser, Animated Urban Spaces, digital video, color, sound, 9’ 16”, 2021, Germany.

Sound and image captured via OSSC scales, OBS software and USB3HDCAP capture device, edited in Adobe Premiere Pro

Mario Paint music composed by Horokazu Tanaka, Ryoji Yoshitomi, Kazumi Totaka

video excerpt

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EVENT: LARS PREISSER (NOVEMBER 10 - NOVEMBER 23 2023, ONLINE)

HOME/NOME

Video installation, SNES game consoles, animation, video, Hi8, miniDV, Bang & Olufsen 90s TV sets, hereby presented as digital video, color, sound, 4’ 16, 2021-2022, Germany

Created by Lars Preisser

NOME/HOME is an immersive video installation exploring the relationship between memory, interior design, and video games. Specifically, NOME/HOME recreates Preisser’s former Berlin apartment through the pixelated rendering of Mario Paint, breathing renewed life into the spaces he once inhabited. Participants traverse disorienting rooms as Preisser’s own voice echoes hauntingly around them. This audible tableau juxtaposed with the visual fragmentation of the gaming software creates a palpable sense of nostalgia and loss. Visitors are transported into uncanny reimaginings of real spaces that over time have been distorted by the urban forces of gentrification. By reviving the past through both analog and digital artifacts, Preisser contemplates the ephemerality of memory and the erasure of history in the built environment. NOME/HOME provides an entry point to meditate on the entwined nature of place, recollection, and selfhood within the ever-changing terrain of the city.

Lars Preisser is a multidisciplinary German artist whose work spans various media including weaving, drawing, and moving images. Born in 1984 in Lindau, Preisser holds degrees in textile art and media art from Otago Polytechnic and HGB Leipzig. His research-intensive projects result in intricate formations that address issues like gentrification, technology, climate change, and post-colonialism through a personal lens. Preisser’s family heritage and background in industrial machinery inform his practice. The artist has exhibited internationally at venues like Bauhaus Dessau, nGbK Berlin, and the contemporary textile art biennial Contextile among others. Preisser spent formative years in New Zealand before returning to Berlin where he currently lives and maintains an active studio practice.

ARTICLE: NO, IT’S NOT “JUST A GAME”

VRAL is currently showcasing Firas Shehadeh’s Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Rehearsal (2023). To contextualize his work, we are looking at some of his most significant projects. Today we examine his 2013 multimedia project Guerrilla 8-bit.

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

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PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

In a thought–provoking blend of historical narrative and video game aesthetics, Firas Shehadeh’s Guerrilla 8-bit showcases in a nuanced, perhaps counterintuitive style the parallel evolutions of two seminal yet apparently disconnected events: the formation of the Black September Organization (BSO) and the birth of 8-bit computing. Conceived in 2013, this brief yet impactful video installation – clocking at one minute and forty-seven seconds – is augmented by a series of digital prints that beckon viewers to reevaluate the intricate relationship between technological and socio-political upheavals.

The BSO, which emerged in the waning years of the 1960s, was a militant collective committed to the liberation of Palestine. Composed of an undefined number of libertarian fighters hailing from Palestine and beyond, the organization aimed not merely to free their homeland but also to protect refugees and internationalize the Palestinian cause.

Coinciding with this socio-political ferment was the advent of 8–bit computer processors, a technological milestone that would later serve as the catalyst for a worldwide digital revolution. Guerrilla 8-bit ingeniously unites these seemingly disparate timelines, employing 8-bit technology as a medium to reexamine…

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Matteo Bittanti


Work cited

Firas Shehadeh

Guerrilla 8-bit, digital video (4:3), color, sound. 1' 47", series of digital prints, 2013, Palestine

All images and videos courtesy of the Artist

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