See the video

Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #2 (2020) is a video installation that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. The film was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into produce an unfolding Rorschach of gameworlds. This landscape has then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. Here, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Game #2 resembles a speeding, futuristic landscape constructed from fragments of childhood nostalgia for video gameplay. Through the viewer’s interfacing with these sublime visions of technology, the installation 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 in which we derive pleasure from the dynamics of abstract patterns composed of pixels, tiles, and color palettes.    

Eddie Lohmeyer is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to traditions of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, assemblage, etc., his installations, sculpture, and video stage bizarre encounters with media as a means to unveil our normal attitudes and perceptions toward technologies.