Thingthingthing prototype. Image courtesy of the artists.
Image of Thingthingthing prototype.

Workshop


ThingThingThing: Unity Workshop and Collective Creation

April 14, 2018 – April 15, 2018
AAA in A, '09-'21

43 Remsen St. Brooklyn, NY

An art video game is like daydreaming – a dream that one can go back to over and over again. Objects within the Game are external manifestations of their creators’ spirits. While their creators are tied up with the reality of life, these tiny Objects awaken in this wondrous space of “grandeur” (Gustave Bachelard, 1948), brought to life through the imagination of the Game creators. They twist, turn, wiggle, roll around. On a sunny day, they wander within the Game land, make a friend, sing a song by the river. Gently, they bring together heaven and earth, and open their creators up to the future of reality.

ThingThingThing is an experimental collaboration between Asia Art Archive in America and the artist duo ZZYW, formed by Yang Wang and Zhenzhen Qi. Participants spent two action-packed days at AAAinA, learning the fundamentals of video game development and making a collective art game along the way. At the end of the two days, the result is a film of the Game that generated its own plot in real time, created by all of the participants using Unity, a video game development platform, and C# as the programming language.

Zhenzhen Qi is a new media artist and educator. She is fascinated by employing new media technology to create alternative realities that are slightly bizarre, where patterns are shifted, expectations are broken, and larger systems unravel. Zhenzhen is currently a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, studying and practicing new media art education. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Baruch College, teaching Digital Interactivity since 2015.

Yang Wang is a new media artist, a creative coder and a visual / interaction designer. Half of his time he works as an independent new media artist, creating computational media art installations. The other half of the time he works as a creative coder and a freelance designer, participating in both the design and development process of large scale interactive installations for art museums and cultural institutions around the world.

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This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.