I first heard about International Teletext Art Festival 2012 through the Teletext Mailing List a couple of months back, but the desire to have works published via public teletext first arose some five years ago, during the research stages of my Pixel is Power dissertation. I considered contacting British teletext broadcasters to discuss the possibility of them carrying my work, but like so many pipe dreams, that idea was slowly pushed to the back of the cupboard as the project progressed and priorities changed. The recent ITAF open call for submissions offered the perfect opportunity to finish what I never really started and finally get some artwork shown on actual teletext and not some second rate backwater internet squat – Pixel is Power would get some long-deserved closure. Well, of sorts, since it’s kind of a never-ending ongoing thing. Yeah, expect to see Harry Yack exhibiting at ITAF2040.
It had been so long since I last opened my teletext editor that I half expected the gears in my computation device to seize up when I double clicked the Cebratext icon, which had been relegated to the ‘Unused Desktop Shortcuts’ folder like a FIFA update that’s out of date before it’s even released. But to my surprise, it worked almost perfectly and I was cutting and pasting those low-res building blocks like it was 2007 once again. Before I knew it I was creating stuff far superior to those experiments I threw together after first downloading the program, and the Pixel is Power was not only back on the road, but thundering along like an HGV stacked to the brim with industrial lard careering down a 50% incline.
Just to tease any lingering bugs out of the Harry Yack-Cebratext machine, I started by chopping up a few recent vector bits and bobs before converting them to the teletext format. Naturally, a lot of these pertained to Illogicopedia, so where better place to start than ‘mascots’ Roberto and Bcbkye? Read the rest of this entry »
Harry Yack takes a trip to the home of donkeys, expensive lighting and billions of bed and breakfasts. No time for sausage ‘n’ chips or walks along the promenade, however, as the 2011 Replay retro video game type thingy was also taking place just down the road at Norbreck Castle.
Well, this isn’t a proper ‘review’ as such, but an exercise in taking video games far too seriously.
Critical piece discussing the fungus fancier’s first console outing, chronicling the conception, controversies and downright LSD-fuelled insanity of Brooklyn’s most prominent pudgy pipe plunger. Nah, not really. I just reiterate the really obvious, half-humorous observations of other people.
Harry Yack takes a look back at a game so culturally significant it hardly matters.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire stood proudly atop the video games sales charts for weeks, nay months, after its release. This delivers false promise, for due to the unbelievable popularity of the TV show, every other parent who got their kid a Playstation for Christmas went out to Dixons and bought a copy. For 35 quid. In actuality, all you get is a bog-standard question and answer affair, and you know how fantastically those types of games translate to the Playstation. Exactly, they don’t.
Teleglitcher, an early video from my 2007 Pixel is Power project, has been featured in a special presentation at the New Zealand Film Archive. Kiwi visual artist Dick Whyte, with the help of Mark Williams, put together a screening of various experimental media, described as such:
“What do Miss Piggy, Britney Spears, Mussolini, Super Mario Bros., Charlie Rose, John Key, Ruth Richardson and Buster Keaton have in common? They are all the subjects of avant-garde films on YouTube. Film maker and academic Dick Whyte presents a screening of recent avant-garde films he has curated from YouTube. All of them re-purpose existing material into new works.
“Whyte says, “Technology has taken a long time to get to the point where video makers can sample with the same abandon as musicians and still image makers. YouTube heralds a new age in avant-garde cinema which is fully engaged with popular media.” The screening will be accompanied by short introductions to the films and their particular strategies, looking at the function of avant-garde moving-image at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” — New Zealand Film Archive
The show was screened at the Film Archive Mediatheatre, Wellington, in January of this year. See all films from the presentation at Whyte’s blog.
