If you’ve ever been in the audience for a Gardner Campbell conference presentation/keynote. you know the “more than a slide deck” kind of feeling there. I’ve been there. I like to call him the “Poet Laurete of Ed Tech” (though the ‘tech’ part seems limiting). But, if like me, you’ve been fortunate to be in […]
This story is great, and even greater during Open Education Week and the 25th birthday of the idea for the World Wide Web. Thanks to Dean Shareski for sharing An Oscar Type Moment. Dean shared a message from someone who heard one of a Shareski talk; Preston Tyrrell teaches at Mother of Providence Regional School […]
Oh MOOCs, how I mock thee. It has been a while. But now I am associated with this Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses has just been published by Parlor Press (and is available for free as a downloadable PDF). Steve Krause and Charlie Lowe emailed me sometime […]
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Felix Morgner My experience went very smooth signing up for healthcare via the Affordable Care Act (which is the legal name of the law; any thimblebrains who keep haranguing about ObamaCare are flame throwing herrings). Too smooth. I enrolled online early February, selected a Blue […]
Open Education Week…. It’s so hard to be open? Not around this dog house. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
My family calendar, now on Google, reminds me that tomorrow is the day my mother’s father passed away, in 1957, years before I was even born. I guess you can say he would have been something like 112 years old. I hardly know much about Harry. He emigrated from Poland in the early part of […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Jack Zalium I’m slinging the axe, and going deep into the mine, building a new syndication site for my colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University. It’s a bit under wraps, or so I guess, so I can be deliberately vague. But the idea is to document […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Scott Maxworthy
It’s almost ready to share. I’ve been working on and off since August (a project I thought I could do in a month) on turning the ds106 Assignment Bank into a customizable WordPress theme that could be used for any kind of collection of “Things to Do”.
But I’ve done all I can, and just squashed a few nagging details and formatting. A big one over the last 2 days was updating from using as a parent theme the previous WP-Bootstrap theme (based on Bootstrap 2) to the most current one based on Boostrap 3. If that sounds like gobbledy goop, do not worry.
The parent theme provides the base functionality of the site, and I am using one based on Twitter Bootstrap “the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.” The previous WP-Bootstrap had all kinds of crazy option panels, and the new version is much leaner, makes better use of LESS. The downside was having to do a lot of manual changes to my templates, because the many of the spans, divs, etc have changed.
Enough blah, let’s first look at the exterior and interior, the former you can see as well at http://bank.ds106.us (the content is of course silly filler).
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by mylerdude There’s is nothing like a successful, joyful leap. Mine today was accomplished within the space of my programming editor (still BBEdit, the same text editor I started my first web pages with in 1993). I have to say one of my most favorite things made […]
Technologies: ART EEPROM burner, DASM 6502 BSD, data projectors, NBASIC BSD, Nintendo Entertainment System, RockNES, Super Mario Brothers Nintendo cartridge, video distributor
Current URL: http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/SuperMarioClouds
Wikibook Chapter: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Cory+Arcangel
Not a web-based art form, but yet a compelling example of hacking a console game, Super Mario Clouds presents an example of creation by deletion.
It’s just clouds scrolling by, WTF? But check out what Cory Archangel did to make it
To make Super Mario Clouds, Arcangel hacked Super Mario Brothers, a classic video game that made its debut in 1985. He replaced the program chip from an old Nintendo Entertainment System game cartridge with a new chip that he programmed himself (by borrowing code he found on computer hobby scene Web sites) to erase everything in the original game except the clouds.
Just look at the jagged cuts to get to the chip, and the masking tape labels!
I cannot speak much to the artistic references in the book chapter:
Arcangel’s process of visual subtraction evokes Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), in which the artist famously erased a composition by Willem de Kooning to create a new work of art. Super Mario Clouds suggests a similar sensibility, simultaneously conveying a stripped-down aesthetic and a rebellious, bad-boy attitude that challenges conventional notions of artistic integrity and authenticity.
but the notion of creation by deletion is intriguing for the way it runs 180 degrees to our assumption of what creativity means- making stuff, right? But look at Austin Kleon’s Blackout Poetry– its not just haphazard erasing to make a poem from existing works by erasing portions (maybe easier than hacking a NIntendo cartridge).
While many new media artists fetishize emerging technologies, Arcangel eschews the graphic realism of contemporary game titles like Grand Theft Auto, celebrating instead the crude “dirt style” imagery of early video games
The same might be said today about the environment of Minecraft (which spawns in the world and derivatives elsewhere).
Cory Arcangel provides a detailed illustrated guide to his hack — like
The first thing you will need to get is an original Super Mario Brothers cartridge. Not a “Duck Hunt+Mario Brothers” cartridge, but just a plain old Super Mario Brothers cartridge. Next you should unscrew the plastic back on the cartridge, and inside you will see a circuit board like the one you see below. There are two chips on this board. The CHR chip, and the PRG chip. We are interested in the PRG chip for this project. Also please make sure the cartridge says NES-NROM-01 (01-05 in also fine). This let`s us know it is a 32k Nintendo circut board.
And in a modern spirt, also shares via github the code he used to modify the game.
Even more timely or i time, in reference to the GIF above:
when I originally posted this on the Internet in 02, the web wasn’t actually able to contain video (it sounds funny now, but remember youtube didn’t start making waves till like 05ish??), therefore I made a gif of the video. Of the gazillion bootlegs of this project, most are from this gif.
What’s a video game without the character, action, and scenery? Dreamy?
