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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

I always promised myself I’d get round to archiving my old sketchbooks, and this Easter weekend has given me the opportunity to do so. I’ve got about five years of stuff in the attic to go through, so that might take a while but to start, here’s a selection of the best artwork from my trip to Venice in 2005. Reflecting on some of these quick sketches and overpaints, I’m left wondering how I managed to put pen to paper during that week, which seemed to pass by in a sleep-deprived blur.

This was the view from our hotel. I was stupid enough to neglect noting the exact location

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