UNBOUND

In the past ten years, Escape Rooms have emerged from obscurity into the mainstream. Largely inspired by video games and interactive theater, this new form of live, participatory entertainment has been growing in popularity and revenue since its inception. Like the Human Library events discussed previously on Unbound, Escape Rooms have great potential to cross over into library programming.

Players of an Escape Room typically begin the game locked in an enclosed environment, and must solve puzzles as a team in order to make their way out, usually within a set time limit. These puzzles can take many forms and many difficulty levels. For example, players might have to decode a secret message from a poem, or use a blacklight to reveal a hidden key code for a lock.

Continue reading Library Escape Rooms: Keeping Your Patrons Captive

Lori Zippay: Perhaps now we should touch on the Clouds in relation to issues of preservation.

Cory Arcangel: Preservation. What a nightmare. (Arcangel & Zippay, 2005)

Cory Arcangel’s 2002 piece Super Mario Clouds is one of the artist’s most well-known works. It has taken several different forms by now, but its core concept is simple: A hacked version of the popular 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) video game Super Mario Brothers has had all elements removed except for the sky and the clouds, which slowly scroll across the screen forever. The game’s ROM was hacked digitally to create this effect, and then physically instantiated by modifying a copy of its NES cartridge. Arcangel removed the cartridge’s original program chip and soldered in a new chip containing his altered program. The cartridge could then be inserted into an NES console, which would then display the artwork on a connected television.

The piece was first released as web art oriented toward the hacker community. It took the form of a web page containing an animated .gif of the game, photos of the modified cartridge, the complete source code of the hack, the .nes ROM file itself, and a tutorial explaining how the reader could make their own copy of the hacked cartridge (Arcangel 2002). Years later, Arcangel was asked to exhibit Super Mario Clouds as an installation in a gallery setting. He set the piece up as a multi-channel projection, with the projectors hooked up to an NES console, displaying the output from the actual cartridge. The console was intentionally made visible to visitors in order to emphasize the technology behind the installation. As part of the showing, he sold an edition of five physical cartridges of the work, providing the option of purchasing a functional NES console along with it.

Continue reading Preserving the Hacked Video Game Art Piece “Super Mario Clouds”