Brody Condon

Infobox Artist
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name = Brody Condon


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birthdate = 1974
location = Mexico
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field = New Media Art
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movement = Virtual art
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awards = The Franklin Furnace Fund, 2003 [ [http://www.franklinfurnace.org/grants/grants.html Franklin Furnace Archives ] ]

Interpolis N.V. Grant, Netherlands, 2005

Creative Capital Grant,NY, 2006 [ [http://channel.creative-capital.org/sps/swish.cgi Search Results ] ]

Brody Condon (born 1974, Mexico, currently residing in New York), a new media artist exploring the use of computer games as an art medium. Condon received his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2002. His education includes residencies at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Netherlands in 2004 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001.

Artist statement

Condon describes his work as:

I would personally describe my work as visual arts projects that just utilize the materials and strategies of game development in various ways….The goal of my personal work tends to be a process of …trying to understand the links between traumatic events and fabricated memories, spiritual experience, and…constructed realities in contemporary culture.”

—Brody Condon [Michael, David, and Chen, Sande (2005). Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train and Inform, Course Technology Ptr; 1 edition (October 19, 2005). ISBN 1-59200-622-1, ISBN 978-1592006229]

Selected overview of his work

Condon’s work explores the use and hacking of the video game engine as an artistic medium. Through image motion or active participation using standard video game hardware, he forces the viewer out of the position of a passive audience member and into the game as a living participant. In pieces like Adam Killer [ [http://www.tmpspace.com/ak_1.html Untitled Document ] ] he uses the pure repetition of game space violence to confront us with the reality of death and killing. While in other pieces like Velvet Strike [http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike Velvet-Strike ] ] and Worship [http://www.tmpspace.com/worship.html Untitled Document ] ] , the art tends to look askance at the game space, asking the viewer and the participants to reflect on what they are doing.

Adam Killer [http://www.tmpspace.com/ak_1.html/, movie url: http://selectparks.net/movies/vcdpal/BrodyCondon_AdamKiller_VCDPAL.mpg] (1999-2001) – “Adam Killer is a series of eight conversions of the popular first person shooter game Half-Life ….The player/performer navigated through the game “level” filled with multiple copies of the same Adam character standing “idle” on a white plane…As the characters were shot and bludgeoned with various weapons, an exploited glitch in the in the game’s level editing software created a harsh trailing effect. This turned the environment into a chaotic mess of bloody, fractured textures.”—Brody Condon [Condon, Brody, Where do Virtual Corpses go, http://www.cosignconference.org/downloads/papers/condon_cosign_2002.pdf ]

Worship (2001) - In Worship Condon creates on online character within the massively multiplayer online game Anarchy Online. In the game the player faces away from the game environment towards the screen and continually prostrates himself as other gamers continue play in the background.

Velvet Strike (2002) - in collaboration with Anne-Marie Schleiner and Joan Leandre, the team created “a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game "Counter-Strike".”Schleiner , Anne-Marie. http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/about.html] Here the goal was not to promote an anti-violence movement, but instead “the work prompts us to wonder what exactly is at stake in the fictive virtual worlds in which both soldiers and civilians immerse themselves, at a time when real-life warfare increasingly resembles games and games increasingly resemble real life.” [Tribe, Mark, and Jana, Reena, New Media Art (Wiki), https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Anne-Marie+Schleiner%2C+Joan+Leandre%2C+and+Brody+Condon ]

At this point Condon’s work begins to integrate more closely with contemporary times. His next few pieces approach modern tragedies by using the game space to transport the gamer into the event itself. The events chosen, the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Waco Siege, address head on the question posed in Velvet Strike by Anne Marie Shleiner: “But now, in the wake of Sept 11, are these games too "real"? Or is the real converging with the simulation? Who defines what is real?”

9-11 Survivor [http://www.selectparks.net/911survivor/index.html (site is no longer supported)] (2003) - Condon as an instructor aided three University of California, San Diego students, John Brennon, Mike Caloud, and Jeff Cole placing gamers in a virtual World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks. The game “provoked an immediate outcry on the Internet. Infuriated e-mail correspondents accused the game's makers of lacking taste and moral decency by exploiting a tragedy.” [Mirapaul, Matthew, Online Games Grab Grim Reality, [The New York Times] , September 17, 2003. url: http://www.nytimes.com ]

Waco Resurrection [ [http://www.tmpspace.com/waco.html Untitled Document ] ] (2003) – Condon, as part of a six-member team called C-Level [ [http://c-level.org/ welcome to c-level ] ] , recreates the ending of the Waco Siege. “In the game, Koresh can run, jump, shoot and hide. Like traditional video games, players have special weapons and can energize themselves. Koresh's energy comes from massive Bibles that rain from the sky. Those Bibles also rain bullets and turn federal agents into Davidian followers.” [Douglas, Jeff, Associated Press, Game resurrects Waco tragedy and challenges video game conventions, The Wichita Eagle, Jul. 03, 2004, url: http://wacoresurrection.com/media/ap/9071356.htm]

After such direct confrontations with modern history, Condon’s pieces now move away from the need of historical context and he begins viewing the concepts of death and killing in a more abstract, yet more directly human way.

The game environment in Suicide Solution [ [http://www.tmpspace.com/suicides.html Untitled Document ] ] (2004) provides Condon with a location to explore the many methods of self destruction within multiple games. While in Untitled War [ [http://www.tmpspace.com/uw.html Untitled Document ] ] (2004) Condon takes the online game into the real world in a live performance piece. This time Condon “invited fighters from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a group that seeks to live and fight according to the technology and values of the Middle Ages, to do battle in the manner of online first-person shooter competition” [Bearman, Joshuah, Frag or Be Fragged, LA Weekly, July 29, 2004http://www.laweekly.com/columns/a-considerable-town/dump-bush-er-never-mind-/9099/?page=2] all in the space of an art gallery.

Moving now more towards the abstract in Condon’s piece KarmaPhysics < Elvis [http://www.tmpspace.com/elvis.html Untitled Document ] ] (2004), the game environment virtually disappears as we “see a hovering Elvis Presley, floating through space in slow motion like a congealed Barbie doll, making spasmodic gestures. This work was recently purchased by the Stedelijk Museum.” [Stedelijk Museum. http://www.stedelijk.nl/oc2/page.asp?PageID=1419 ] The convulsions are according to Condon “controlled by the original game’s Karma Ragdoll real-time physics system - generally used to simulate the physical dynamics of game character death.”

In a later piece along the same vein, Condon created the piece KarmaPhysics
Ram Dass, the character Condon draws upon in his game, is the former Richard Alpert, Ph.D. … KarmaPhysics< Ram Dass demonstrates the more aggressive video game casualty. In this work, duplicate Ram Dass figures are piled together taking on an overall spherical shape complete with legs and arms jutting out from the mass. Consecutively and frequently, Ram Dass spews balls of fire and what appears (sic) to be bits and pieces of his silver robe.—Janna Schoenberger, NY Arts Magazine [Schoenberger, Janna. From Game World to the Real World, NY Arts Magazine, September/October 2006 http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5023&Itemid=183]

Recently Condon’s work has turned more reflective as demonstrated in his later piece 3 Modifications [http://www.tmpspace.com/resurrection.html, http://www.tmpspace.com/baptism.html] (2007). In 3 Modifications he uses the game environment to “update Northern European masterpieces by Dieric Bouts, Gerard David and Hans Memling. Mr. Condon’s digital tableaux vivants — he calls them “self-playing video games” — draw unexpected connections between the iconography of Flemish masters and the quasi-religious fantasy worlds on our screens.” [Rosenberg, Karen, Art in Review, New York Times, November 23, 2007, url: http://www.nytimes.com ]

Rather than using the harsh, extreme activity of the standard first person shooter game Condon now creates “slowly animated, transfigured works that are like moving paintings. The subversive tactics of hacking … have given way to a critical examination of the politics of representation. … Shown as projected moving-image installations from small custom-made computers, these “self-playing” games run continuously like games waiting for the viewer to pick up the controller.” [ [http://www.artcal.net/event/view/1/5808 ArtCal - Chelsea - Virgil de Voldere Gallery - Brody Condon, 3 Modifications ] ]

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