Hands of Artists Article

On April 19th 2007 I took a trip to New York for the opening reception of the first of three "The Sims: In the Hands of Artists" exhibitions. These EA sponsored events are described as "A student competition & exhibit that encourages students to make art objects inspired by The Sims and highlights the creative use of The Sims™ 2 Movie Making Tool. Along with Machinima, participants are asked to stretch their creativity in painting, sculpture, fashion design, cinematography, interactive displays or any other medium appropriate for the gallery display."

New York is the first location and includes the work of students from Parsons The New School for Design being displayed at the Chelsea Art Museum. Parsons is one of the most well known art schools in the US and EA recruits heavily from this location, so it's no surprise it was chosen to start the project rolling.

I was there for the awards ceremony where the winners were announced and I can tell you that the turnout was higher than expected with over 500 people attending this opening session. Many of those were of course the students who worked on the art, most of whom worked in teams on their projects. So why was I there? Well, The Sims Resource sees itself as a leading community site providing far more than just downloads and we see it well worthwhile travelling across continents to bring you coverage of events like these for the serious Sim 2 players and its community!

My take on an event like this is also likely to be very different to any art critique. My interest, like most readers of this site, is in the gameplay, custom content and the use of community tools by players. I'm certainly no expert where 'Art' is concerned (on the way into the Chelsea Art Museum I saw what to me looked like about 30 sets of weighing scales arranged in a large square. I'm not sure whether that was Art, or if visitors normally pay by the pound!).

The exhibits on display from Parsons were varied to say the least, split into two categories; 'Machinima' and 'Open' where "anything goes, and it certainly did" according to Sven Travis, Associate Professor at Parsons, during his opening speech before the awards were given out. The Machinima category in particular, apparently caused lots of debate among the judges.

But even the Machinima work was not simply graphical content displayed on big screens or projected onto walls and floors, but was merged into physical and often interactive media as well. In fact the winning entry in the Machinima category ("The History of the Luddites" by Glendon Jones) was based on a zoetrope. Turning a handle rotated a series of cogs and wheels which spins a drum with slits cut into it allowing the viewer to see a series of Sims images, producing the illusion of motion.

Pinning Glendon down for a quick chat he told me that he had build the physical machine before he even started to think about the story which he was going to use on it. Once he moved on to that stage he hit the wall of all storytellers in the community of being restricted to the existing game animations. For example, he captured a dancing Sim at just the right angle to provide the animation which looks like a Sim chopping with an axe. In all, Glendon used around 120 frames of low-res images to create his work which can be seen here in action.

The winning entry on the Open category came from Edward Chow who I also managed to have a few words with, and can be seen here with his submission titled "mySIM modular toy". This was a modular and customizable toy designed to simulate buying and trading clothes in the game, for artists to customize and paint as they please. This work apparently exploited 3D printer action, and earned Ed and oversized EA Check for $2500.

One thing that I couldn't help but notice a trend in from talking to some of the people behind the entries was that few of them had actually played the game before this competition was announced. Ed first saw it as a creativity tool but tells me he is now hooked on the game and has been playing it since discovering its depth, especially "Create A Sim".