Scrolling Landscapes

Scrolling Landscapes (2020) is a three-channel work of net art that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. For the virtual iteration of the ELO 2020 conference, the work will be presented in a web format with three continuously running video channels. Each film in the series was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes to produce unfolding Rorschach patterns of gameworlds. These landscapes have then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. With each film in the series, the same landscape is multiplied and arranged so that the scrolling patterns become increasingly complex. Through the viewer’s interfacing with these retro visions of technology, the web version serves to challenge the knowledge that underlies our perception of scrolling motion. In this way, the work operates through a kind of post-gaming, or rather, it considers the medium of interactive gaming (and particularly the mechanics of scrolling) not through functionality, utility, or its capacities to offer incentive and reward, but as a pure aesthetic form; sensual pleasures derived from the dynamics of abstract patterns composed of pixels, tiles, and color palettes.