BOSCH ART GAME
Jheronimus Bosch‘s surreal imagery inspired game designers in various countries over the past months. Sixteen of them entered the international pitch contest. The jury selected six contestants to go on to the next round. They all get the opportunity to develop their proposals into playable prototypes.
The first international art game competition organised in the Netherlands has led to six playable prototypes. Discover the virtual world of the medieval painter Jheronimus Bosch as created by young gamedesigners from Europe and the USA, and experience the surrealistic imagery from Bosch in a new way.
The entries range from an interactive, online time based experience of the triptych Garden of Earthly Delights and an installation that merges novel digital techniques with a traditional mural, up to a visual novel and a more classic adventure game. Hallucinations, time travel, transgression from realistic into surrealistic worlds, bizarre creatures, and of course hell and heaven, all have a place in the designed concepts.
The national Jheronimus Bosch commemoration in 2016 will be the culmination of the international cultural event Jheronimus Bosch 500. The innovative event was kicked off in 2010 and developed further from year to year.
Bosch Art Game is organised by De Digitale Werkplaats [the Digital Workshop] in ’sHertogenbosch, commissioned by the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation. De Digitale Werkplaats is a platform for digital art and innovation.
The six finalists are:
– Brian S. Chung & GJ Lee from Jersey City, United States with The Triptych Game
– Espada Y Santacruz Studio from Madrid, Spain with Demons’ Revenge
– Tjupakabra from Amstelveen, the Netherlands with Everyman
– Urustar Srl from Genua, Italy with Zwan
– We Are Müesli from Milan, Italy with Cave! Cave! Deus Videt!
– YOCTOBIT from Madrid, Spain with They are
On October 11 2013 the winner of the competition has been announced in the Stedelijk Museum ’s-Hertogenbosch, the winner is We Are Müesli from Milan with Cave! Cave! Deus Videt!. In consultation with the winner it will be decided how the game will be developed further, launched and marketed.
Exhibition Bosch Art Game
30th October – 9th November Accademia Albertina of Fine Arts of Turin
via Accademia Albertina 6, Turin
Monday – Firday 10.00 am – 7.00 pm
Saturday – Sunday 3.00 pm – 7.00 pm
Saturday 9th November 3.00 pm – 11.00 pm
http://www.bosch500.nl/en/bosch-art-game
The Triptych Game, Brian S. Chung & GJ Lee, United States
The Triptych Game is a living and breathing triptych, in which the player navigates dense environments inspired by the work of Bosch. By panning, zooming, and clicking, the player embodies the hand of God, and populates the world and influences its inhabitants.
However, the player is bound by temporal reality: the triptych exists in real-time. It opens to reveal the inner panels only from 5 AM to 7 PM. At nighttime, only the exterior is accessible.
The four seasons correspond to the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Hell, and Glory).
The Triptych game is universally accessible from the web (HTML 5), and can be adapted for various scales of experience – ranging from mobile devices to large-scale installations.
Brian S. Chung is a game designer, a freelancer in user experience design & web design, and an event coordinator. GJ lee is an artist and designer with a background in fine arts (painting & drawing) and mathematics.
Demons’ Revenge, Espada Y Santacruz Studio, Spain
Demon’s Revenge is an installation based game. It’s a two player shooter, in which each participant has to kill enemies during a fixed amount of time. The game dynamics are very simple: enemies appear randomly from different trajectories and the player can kill them shooting projectiles.
The installation is composed of a real painting inspired on Christ Carrying the Cross by Jheronimus Bosch, in which a set of heads define an architectural space. The real painting interacts with computer generated images using projection mapping techniques. The virtual images give the illusion of depth and movement to the static tableau. Virtual elements, such as enemies, collide with the real painting, creating a magical illusion.
The game is powered by Unity3D, Arduino, MadMapper and Syphon.
Espadaysantacruz is a hybrid creative studio located in Madrid [Spain]. They develop engaging interactive and audiovisual experiences thanks to continuous research on digital technology and image storytelling.
Everyman, Tjupakabra, The Netherlands
This game is called Everyman, based on the painting(s): “The WayFarer”. Everyman represents not a Saint or Noble, but “the common man”, walking the Path of Life. This Path of Life contains ups and downs, remorse and many seducements of the Devil.
The unique, original aspect of Everyman lies in the fact that this game works like a regular 2D side-scrolling game and it plays like one, but it is in a way an ‘anti-game’ regarding the classical game goals. The player will realise this when he is not rewarded in the same manner as he has learned in mainstream games. The player will have to reconsider what ‘performing good’ means for the character of Everyman and will learn the distinction of good and evil in the worldview of Bosch.
Tjupakabra is a games studio that produces playful and gamification solutions in the field of interactive applications, graphics and most of all games. Using their experience in the educational field they like to look further than conventions.
Zwan, Urustar Srl, Italy
Zwan is an interactive exploration experience where you navigate a slowly decaying world and discover the works of Jheronimus Bosch hidden into it. The main idea is to give life to the works of Bosch, while enacting a metaphor of pain and madness. The more pain the player inflicts to themselves, the more dangerous and wicked the world becomes. The world is a direct representation of some of the most important works by Bosch. The main objective is to enjoy and experience Bosch’s world in a different way, seeing it decaying to hell and being populated by stranger and stranger creatures.
Urustar is an Italian independent game studio based in Genova founded by game designers Federico Fasce, Alessandra Carboni and Marina Rossi. Urustar wants to explore the new frontiers of gaming.
Cave! Cave! Deus Videt!, We Are Müesli, Italy
Cave! Cave! Deus Videt! is an interactive visual novel made with the open source engine Ren’Py and inspired by “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” triptych by Jheronimus Bosch.
It is the story of a young visitor of the National Museum in Lisbon, Portugal — where the painting is currently located — who meets a strange man that seems to know many things about the mysteries of this painting.
The game will lead the player into a magical trip through the possible interpretations of the triptych, conducted through first-person interrogations of its nightmarish inhabitants. Heresy, alchemy, Tarots, ergotism, occultism: will the protagonist’s ride on this conspiracy rollercoaster eventually bring him to solve the core of Bosch’s enigma?
We Are Muesli is an Italian independent duo, made up of visual designer Claudia Molinari and creative writer Matteo Pozzi. They have been working since 2010 on artistic experiments ranging from print to digital projects.
They are, YOCTOBIT, Spain
They Are is a local multiplayer audio game of intuition and reflexes, about temptation, inspired on Hieronymus Bosch’ss fancies and imagery.From an ucronic contextual starting point in which Bosch and Spanish Inquisition clashed to each other, we will set up an experience in which players must find the balance between yielding to temptation and chasing other player’s weaknesses.Through audio landscapes and spoken-voice characters the game provides enough sources to the player to create some enigmatically beautiful imagery and enjoy some sort of arcane experience. The action is driven by audio cues that come up from the mobile to each player’s headphones, but the game actually happens in the physical space out of the devices, and mainly in the players’ minds.
YOCTOBIT Game-Based Experiments is a Game Design Lab and Research Group which consist of different people with various art profiles developing games focused on play as performance and contemporary culture process.