Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Angelo Vermeulen drops a line to tell us that there’s a YouTube video of Biomodd, his project in which he attempts to “fuse installation art, ecology and game culture into a symbiotic mod.” We posted about it a while back, but a few people have written about it with more eloquence since then. Athens News explains the project thusly: “BIOMODD IS AN interactive art piece, as people must play a video game to keep the plants inside of the case growing. The game is a modified version of Armagetron, an open-source game for Linux that is based on the 1982 movie “Tron.” Most of the materials in Biomodd are recycled, coming from university surplus or thrift stores.”

Biomodd is a work of installation sculpture, biology, case-modding, and game design by a chap called Angelo Vermeulen. The idea is to create an ongoing relationship between an enclosed ecosystem in the case, and the games being played on the hardware. Vermeulen explains his idea in an interview over on WMMNA:

“It’s a human sized transparent structure that contains several suspended computer components and different types of plant life such as green algae and vines. The computer runs Linux (Fedora) and its monitor will be suspended downwards to illuminate a bed of fast-sprouting seeds. Basically, we’re testing how close we can bring together the biological and electronic world. At the same time we’re also exploring potential game concepts.”

It’s a little unclear what the game concepts entail, because Vermeulen’s project is not only interdisciplinary, but also ongoing and nomadic between various installation spaces. Nevertheless, the core idea (as outlined in this video) is to create a virtual work that is linked to and representative of the biological ecosystem in the case. Playing will allow some manipulation of the conditions the organisms find themselves in, and the condition of the organisms has ramifications for what goes on in the game world.