Easel Engine

Part of Museum Without Walls: MoMI x Tezos

Artists are increasingly repurposing tools and environments created for video game production—including engines, software, and hardware—while often choosing to omit interactivity. The five artists in this series have established practices employing techniques such as ROM corruption, 3D asset creation, custom dithering algorithms, and subversion of in-game creative tools—like The Sims’ Easel function—to create artworks that invite contemplation in exchange for play. This series of video works span a multi-generational evolution of digital graphics, from early 1-bit constraints to complex three-dimensional models. By removing the expectation of hands-on interaction, each featured work invites viewers to engage with video game aesthetics from new perspectives. A more passive approach encourages deeper reflection on gaming’s visual language and narrative interpretations, revealing artistic merits that might be overlooked during active gameplay. The integration of video game elements into artistic practice highlights the medium’s pervasive cultural impact. And by appropriating and recontextualizing gaming’s visual language and technologies in nonutilitarian formats, these works offer new perspectives on how these tools can be transformed into vehicles for both creative expression and rumination.

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SEPTEMBER 20–OCTOBER 24, 2024
Ailadi (b. 1981, Italy)
PETSCII Comics x6, 2024
Digital video
1 min, loop

Ailadi produces vivid animations that blend 8-bit video game aesthetics with vertical comic strips. She incorporates PETSCII—the character set from the 1982 Commodore 64 computer—into a custom program developed with partner Pierre Boquet to create her signature style. Fleeting bursts of motion pepper the panels, each looping to its own rhythm, bringing an unsynchronized liveliness to the format.

Central to Ailadi’s practice is maximizing visual impact through minimalism. With only 256 symbols available in PETSCII, this method mirrors the technological constraints of ’80s and ’90s video game design. By embracing limitations—fewer pixels and frames, and reduced resolution—her approach effectively conveys meaning with what she feels are only the most necessary elements, embodying the idea that simplicity enhances communication.

Building on her earlier practice of creating daily 8-bit GIFs based on events from her life, she combines video game aesthetics with common subjects. In this series, animals and water emerge as recurring themes, representative of her stream-of-conscious approach rather than any rigid symbolism. Tiny critters escape the panel borders and roam freely, taking full advantage of the 50-foot projection.

Click here to mint your very own fragment of Ailadi’s Plastic Bag (2024) through October 17, 2024.

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ON VIEW AUGUST 23–SEPTEMBER 19, 2024
Estelle Flores
(b. 1988, Brazil)
Your Home, 2024
Digital video
2 mins, 55 secs, loop

In Your Home, Estelle Flores explores what it means to embody a visual artist in The Sims 4. As one might with a dollhouse, players of The Sims rehearse the routines of living. Yet the only option for fine-art expression is creating paintings using in-game snapshots with the Easel tool. Contemplating the performative act of repeating culturally ingrained behaviors, she enacts an art practice through a virtual avatar, despite inherent limits in the game dynamics. This has manifested as Contains Real Ingredients, an ongoing series of more than 300 paintings displayed within and outside the game.

To Flores, social simulation games blur the usual lines between play and performance. Unlike traditional performance art, video games are designed for instinctive play rather than analysis. The goal of the player is to embody another, not focus on signs and symbols. Under the guise of fun, play allows for deep, existential explorations of desire through the subconscious instead of active explications. Therefore, the house, a Jungian symbol for both family and psyche, becomes the stage for subconscious expression.

Flores chooses a nonlinear output, while also referencing her own processes and history of experimentation in The Sims. This both subverts storytelling expectations and complicates the museumgoer’s expected urge to decode.

Estelle Flores (b. 1988, Curitiba, Brazil) is a contemporary artist whose practice spans video game art, generative code, and interactive installations. With a background in Visual Design from Universidade Positivo (2010), Flores challenges the boundaries of virtual art in her work. Flores is also a founding member of Brutas Collective and Selva Press, Curitiba’s first risograph printing studio, playing a key role in Brazil’s independent publishing scene. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Flores continues to probe the potential of digital and tangible media to evoke memory, emotion, and bodily experience.

Flores lives and works in Curitiba, Brazil. Her work has been featured internationally, including in the Wrong Biennale, Teatro Guaíra Cultural Center, the Curitiba Comics Biennial, and Plana in São Paulo.

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PREVIOUSLY ON VIEW JULY 26–AUGUST 22, 2024
John Provencher
b. 1991, United States
Dungeoneer: Runner, 2024
Generative program (JavaScript, HTML)

What if art galleries were reimagined as maze games? Inspired by the passive navigation of the original Windows ’95 3D Maze screensaver merged with familiar architecture from numerous id Software titles, Dungeoneer: Runner amusingly positions viewers as involuntary FPS protagonists. The work implements ray casting—a groundbreaking technique employed in early ’90s video games like Wolfenstein 3D (1992). This method simulates three-dimensional space in 2D by projecting lines from the player’s perspective, rendering surfaces with minimal hardware.

While the program pseudorandomly guides itself through corridors, seeking the optimal path, navigating through the maximum surface area in the least amount of time, a machine-generated artwork is cast onto the walls and rendered in pixels.

Each conjured level creates unique configurations of halls, color palettes, and art within art. By defining space with pixels instead of traditional 3D objects, Dungeoneer: Runner explores new ways of constructing and interacting with digital environments using precursory techniques.

The restless speedruns draw a provocative incongruity between the frenzied pace often imposed in digital production and the contemplative speed of a museum visit. The machine attempts to beat its own records, highlighting the tension between navigating digital spaces and the traditional expectation of thoughtful engagement with art. 

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PREVIOUSLY ON VIEW: JUNE 28–JULY 25, 2024:
Sabato Visconti
b. 1985, Brazilian
b a r b i e ~ w o r l d ~ b r e a k d o w n, 2024
Digital video. 3 mins 10 secs, loop.

By the early ’90s, video game marketing strategies predominantly targeted masculine interests, often sidelining more diverse audiences. Barbie: Super Model, released for Sega Genesis, SNES, and MS-DOS, emerged as a significant title that defied these norms, challenging the marketing-driven narrative that video games were exclusively of interest to a single gender. Sabato Visconti’s work, featuring ROM corruptions from the SNES version of the console game, critiques this history of narrow, gendered marketing practices through reverence for the 1993 release. Reflecting marketing influence and gender role definition in the gaming industry that persists to this day, the work also mirrors contemporary political tensions. Initiated in 2016 amid global political upheaval, the series features glitched moments, depicting the digital world disintegrating around the protagonist as she attempts to maintain composure.

Sabato Visconti is a Brazilian new media artist and photographer based in Western Massachusetts. Sabato graduated from Amherst College in 2009 with a degree in Political Science and began experimenting with glitch processes in 2011 with the help of a defective memory card that randomly wrote zeroes onto JPEG files. Since then, Sabato has sought to interrogate imaging practices that have become absorbed by digital processes, hybridized media, online networks, and machine intelligence—technologies that have also enabled apparatuses for social conditioning, mass surveillance, and necropolitics, through works that captures the plight of the subject in the face of environmental turbulence driven by systems designed to fail and malfunction. 

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