Creative Performance
David (Jhave) Johnston
City University of Hong Kong
Biography
Jhave uses algorithms as aesthetic tools; and believes that moist matter is quasi- sentient. His work is an attempt to harmoniously reconcile computation, emotion, concepts, and the ancient idea of artist as conduit. Focus: Language-based online digital art. Combinatorial poetics, multimedia poetry.
Abstract
I am currently developing a project in Unity called Angry Words (FPS): an interactive game based on a first-person shooter that occurs in a landscape of words, blood-red words wrapped around the 3D architecture of a quasi-infinite labyrinth.
While development is in its infancy, I have already performed this game by playing it live while narrating and reading aspects, oscillating between being the gunman and being appalled by the infinite existential monotony of being constrained to a singular task: hunting. This performance proved to be both comic (watching absurd battles played out within ideological fields) and seemed tragic (reflecting a vision of humanity as impaled on its metabolism, inexorably drawn toward cyclical violence).
For this presentation, I will perform Angry Words (FPS) as a commentary upon Benjamin’s notion of “the storm … called progress”. Including the rubble of war and sustained aggression into the appalling vision that recedes before us, and ruminating on the disconnect between the daily lives of gamers and the devastating imaginative worlds they participate in.