I’ve spent the afternoon at the Emergences festival, La Vilette in Paris. Some of you might wonder how i can be in New York and Paris and Berlin at the same time. Well… i’m not. Peder is in New York this week, Sascha is in Berlin and Konomi is in Tokyo, they all write for the blog whenever they have time for that (buzy boyz!) Their name is always at the top of each post but i guess we’ll have to find a better way to credit each blogger cuz no one seems to notice who’s writing what. End of the parenthesis.

Beijing Accelerator and Game Over

The festival has selected many playful installations such as the Painstation, the Furminator, and Mr Punch by Fur; Marnix de Nijs’ Beijing Accelerator which was great fun to play; the ReacTable; the very beautiful video Game Over by Yan Duyvendak and i had a very lame try at Motor Karaoke, a bike race powered by screams, the louder you shout the faster the bike on screen will go.

The programme features also works i didn’t know about such as Paris Pong that aims to give a new twist on the relationship between video games and video. Djeff Regottaz uses Pong as an “Engine of Narration�? by coupling the game events as a control element to Jean-Claude Mocik‘s film, Paris Solo version Dix sur Dix (1995). In his experimental film, Mocik used a robot which put 10 different locations in Paris on film using predetermined geometrical shapes. Each of the ten sequences film has been shooted with the same set of geometrical shapes and each one is exactly the same length as the others.

The Vidéo Pong player synchronizes the camera movements with the game events. When you and your opponent play the game of Pong you get the impression that the way you direct the game controls the moves of the camera.

Regottaz was showing another piece at La Vilette, as part of the Eniarof video game room.

Hyper Olympic proposes a novel way to play Konami arcade game “Track and Field�?. The old game silulated the olympic 100m, players had to swing the joystick from let to right and back as soon as possible to recall the athlet running. Hyper Olympic substitutes the joystick for a feet interface, the player becomes the joystick and his moves have to adopt an increasingly frantic rhythm if he wants his character to win the race. The moves of the body control the four positions of the joystick (up, down, right, left).

The Emergences festival ends tomorrow evening (Sunday) so hurry up!