MAIN SPACE EXHIBITION
MAY 15 – JUNE 20, 2009
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2009 AT 8 PM
LOCATION – STRIDE GALLERY
1004 MACLEOD TRAIL S.E., CALGARY, ALBERTA
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Experience the excitement, glamour, fear, violence and mayhem of a genuine Middle Eastern battle! Better yet, get your shooter-playing ass off the console and onto the revolutionary “Borgcycle”, a sensor-equipped bike that provides a heart-pounding workout while you hunt down baddies. Choose your role: insurgent, invader or onlooker. Change sides if you feel the urge!
Grand Theft Bicycle is intended as an ironic commentary on the connection between gaming and war, but it remains an ass-kicking shooter game that lets users vent their anger at the idiots in charge.
ARTIST BIO
STEVE GIBSON — Concept, Script, Bike Concept, Sound Editing, Music, Textures
Steve Gibson is a Canadian media artist, composer, curator and theorist. He completed his Ph.D. at SUNY Buffalo, where he studied music composition with Louis Andriessen. He also completed postdoctoral research in media and technology with Arthur Kroker at Concordia University. He presently serves as Associate Professor of Digital Media at University of Victoria. He also has been curator for the Media Art event Interactive Futures since 2002. Simultaneously deeply involved with technology and deeply suspicious of it’s effects, Gibson’s work celebrates both the liberation and paranoia of techno-fetishism. Influenced by a diverse body of art and popular movements his work fuses electronica, immersive art, montage and game art. Steve Gibson’s pieces have been exhibited in such venues as: Ars Electronica; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Digital Art Weeks (Zurich & Shanghai); the Banff Centre for the Arts; the European Media Arts Festival; Musée d’art contemporaine (Montréal); the San Francisco Art Institute; 4 and 6CyberConf. He recently co-edited a volume entitled Transdisciplinary Digital Art which was released by Springer in April 2008.
JUSTIN LOVE — Game Modding R&D, Game Scripting and Engine Modification (GTA:SA), Bike Interface Design (BorgCycle).
Justin is a Canadian media artist. He recently completed a combined degree in computer science and visual arts at the University of Victoria. He is an experienced multimedia programmer, physical interface innovator, live visualist (VJ), and multimedia artist. Justin has completed numerous live VJ performances in collaboration with Jim Olson under the moniker of Love&Olson. His performances and installations have been presented at numerous International art events including: Collisions Interarts Symposium (Canada, 2005), Interactive Futures (Canada, 2006), Digital Art Weeks (ETH, Zurich, 2006), and Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico, 2006).
JIM OLSEN — Model Modification, Textures, Graphic Design
Jim Olson is an artist and designer living in Victoria, BC. His interests span across many digital genres including video, gaming, the web and other forms of interactive media. His art practice explores the central theme of technology as society and is influenced heavily by visionaries like Cory Doctorow and Ray Kurzweil, as well as artists such as Chris Cunningham, Jodi, and the Emergency Broadcast Network. Jim has performed and exhibited in many places including Digitial Art Weeks, the CBC, various film festivals and on a great many websites. Since 2005 he has partnered extensively with Justin Love under the moniker Love&Olson creating live video performances and interactive environments. Jim has a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria.
http://www.atworkinthecloud.com
EXHIBITION TEXT
GRAND THEFT BICYCLE
RANDY ADAMS
Grand Theft Bicycle (GTB) is an interactive and immersive installation that uses a bicycle interface (the Borgcycle) to play a modified (modded/mod) version of the popular video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The Borgcycle is an inexpensive 1950s style bicycle with a step-through frame. It is painted drab army-green. The back wheel is attached to a stationary bike stand and the front wheel rests on a “Lazy Susan”. The bicycle is equipped with sensors, control buttons and an analog-to-digital interface that essentially transform it into a joystick.
The Borgcycle faces a large projection screen and is set up so that users can “pedal into” a 3D gaming environment, a recreation of a desert city (Baghdad). The characters of the original version of Grand Theft Auto have been modded into familiar political figures who form warring gangs. The invaders include George Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The insurgents include Saddam Hussein, Yassar Arafat, Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong-il.
The protagonist on the virtual bike resembles Steve Gibson, who developed the concept for GTB. This is particularly apt because the conceptual underpinnings for GTB came to Gibson, an avid cyclist, when a car drove into the bike lane and almost injured him. At that moment, he mused about his bicycle being armed with a rocket launcher.1
Gibson enlisted the aid of two other artists, Justin Love and Jim Olson, and GTB became a true transdisciplinary digital art project, “where there is a direct connection across mediums … where each participant strives to better understand necessary processes and concepts at more than superficial levels.”2 Love chose to modify Grand Theft Auto because “during the time [he] spent researching games and building the bike interface, the mod community for Grand Theft Auto flourished and a number of reverse engineering tools were made available online.” It should be noted that publishers determine the mod-friendliness of games; many openly accept and even encourage mod communities. “It is empowering to leverage the graphic engine, AI, physics, assets, etc. in a game and bend them for your own purpose,” remarks Love. “Hacking code is like solving a puzzle.”
Olson approached the project as game art graffiti. He explains, “Certain parts of the models had to be left as they were because of game physics, …so I picked sweet spots – faces mostly.” Olson has also been largely responsible for the packaging of GTB: the intro movie, the website and the marketing material. His experience in advertising and design taught him that “ … anticipation of an event is a powerful tool. The marketing material leads users into looking at the experience…like they are rebelling, taking part in something exciting.”
The elements of excitement and fun are very evident in GTB. “If you are going to make a piece of game art, it [had] better be fun to play,” says Gibson. But the added subversive elements – a world populated by well-known political figures; modded signs and billboards (“Jihad Info”, “Goat Exchange”, “Seven Virgins Quickie Mart”) – turn GTB into a work of tactical media.
Another example of a bicycle interface being used as tactical media is Joshua Kinberg’s Bikes Against Bush, where a Wi-Fi-enabled dot-matrix printer was mounted on a bicycle and could spray anti-Bush messages in chalk on the streets of New York City during the 2004 Republican National Convention.3 However, whereas Kinberg was arrested and his gear confiscated, the creators of GTB have managed to escape censorship. As an associate professor at the University of Victoria, Gibson was “hauled in” to face the university’s lawyers. They feared his use of Stephen Harper as a character might put funding at risk. Gibson refused to remove the figure of Harper from the game, and has yet to face any consequences.
As with most digital or new media art, it is difficult to give a critical assessment of GTB, since the terms for technology-based artworks are evolving along with the practice. GTB is a form of appropriation: not only the game itself, but also the soundtrack, which has been modded from Flock of Seagulls’ Iran and Gary Numan’s Cars. GTB also fits within contemporary art contexts of projected media, participatory art and gaming.
More specifically, GTB can be compared to other artworks that use stationary bicycles as navigational tools, including Jeffery Shaw’s The Legible City (1988-91) in which the participant can “ride” through “computer-generated three-dimensional letters…that form a simulated city”4 ; Nancy Paterson’s BICYCLE TV (1989), with which the rider can “tour” a scenic landscape5; and Rob White’s IBIS la bicyclette interactive (2001), where riders can “bike” through a journey from England to Spain.6
GTB can also be likened to several scientific studies that explore stationary bicycles as interactive fitness applications.7 But GTB is unique in its utilization of a modded video game and, simply put, it’s more fun. Not inconsequential is the value of GTB as a way to “get your fat shooter-playing ass off the console” and get “the endorphins pumping”.8 In GTB, you can immerse yourself in a gaming environment and exercise your body. In effect, you become a performer.
In response to the charge that GTB continues the tradition of video games that media theorist Janet Murray has criticized as simply perpetuating the “bloodletting”, Gibson points out that in GTB you don’t need to pull the trigger.9 In fact, some users simply ride the bike and explore the landscape. As well, the scoring system has been stripped from GTB and the user can’t be killed. Says Gibson, “This makes it different from goal-oriented shooter games and gives it an ironic detachment that is rare, if not absent, from traditional shooter games.”
The concept of the Borgcycle also grew from Gibson’s interest in “garage” digital work, “making the digital as accessible as possible and reducing the elitism of techno fetishism to a bare minimum.” The bicycle as a physical interface fulfills the aspect of Gibson’s art-making aesthetic where interactivity plays a central role. His work draws inspiration from a quote by Myron Krueger: “The only aesthetic concern [in Interactive art] is the quality of the interaction.”10
1. All quotes by Steve Gibson, Justin Love and Jim Olson are taken from live and email interviews during March 2009.
2.Adams, Randy; Gibson, Steve; Müller Arisona, Stefan (Eds.) Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen. Zurich, Switzerland: Springer Science+Business Media, 2008.
3.Kinberg, Joshua. Bikes Against Bush. http://www.bikesagainstbush.com/blog (accessed April 2009).
4. Paul, Christine. Digital Art. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
5. Paterson, Nancy. BICYCLE TV, Vacum Woman. http://www.vacuumwoman.com/MediaWorks/Bicycle/bicycle.html (accessed April 2009).
6. Ctrl-N/ journal. IBIS la bicyclette interactive. www.ctrl-n.net/journal/archives/ibis-la-bicyclette-interactive (accessed April 2009).
7. Silveira, Renato. Low-cost Interactive Bicycle System. http://vimeo.com/2312611 (accessed April 2009).
8. Gibson, Steve. Grand Theft Bicycle. http://grandtheftbicycle.com (accessed April 2009).
9.Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
10. Krueger,Myron. Responsive Environments in Packer & Jordan, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New York, NY: Norton, 2001.
http://grandtheftbicycle.com
WRITER BIO
RANDY ADAMS is a Canadian media artist with a background in creative writing, journalism and the visual arts. He is author of the book Eternal Prairie (1999) and co-editor of Transdisciplinary Digital Art (2008). He has works in Alberta galleries and archive collections. For several years he wrote artist profiles for the Alberta Culture Arts Newsletter and the Edmonton Bullet. He has worked online since 1998 as artist, web designer and professional editor.
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