Nullpointer is a digital artist whose art projects all depend on original coding, and many of which are related to games in some way. For example, his project QQQ takes the Quake III Arena engine and rewrites the renderer so that instead of generating the familiar hallways and levels of Quake III, it generates rapidly moving abstract images (screenshots here), but without changing the actual level data. Nullpointer has shown the piece as an installation in galleries in both the US and Europe; he set up a Quake server on the net, people played the game not knowing that the date generated by play was being transmitted to Nullpointer’s hacked Quake III code, thus generating imagery in the gallery….

Another project of interest is Endless Fire (a free download at www.codespace.co.uk), a shoot-em-up in the classic arcade game style with two notable aspects; first, enemy ships ‘learn’ over time to respond more effectively to you; second, enemy ships fire in a fractal/spirograph pattern that creates some amazing visuals at higher levels. According to Nullpointer, the creation of these visuals through code is really what he wished to achieve by coding the game–but unlike most ‘digital artists,’ he feels that non-interactive or minimally interactive projects are dull, and feels that providing a point to interacting with this visual engine by making it a game makes it a much more interesting work. Yes i copied those words from costik but i dont think it could be said any better.

July 29th, 2005
Posted in Cool Stuff

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