By the time the Pop Art movement had come along in the 1960s, such modification had its own tradition, and the wry irony of the age meant riffing on popular topics could always win an audience. Andy Warhol took industrial designs like Campbell's soup cans from the world of advertising, repeated them on a silkscreen and sold them as his own. Roy Lichtenstein took the Benday Dots technique from mass-produced comics, traced images to begin his most famous works and ended up with giant canvas explosions straight out of 1960s boys' own adventures.
It didn't take long for artists to see the opportunities computers gave them for exploring the changing media world. In fact, computer art and games have always been intricately bound together. Before Spacewar turned heads at science shows, visual screen hacks of varying degrees of use(lessness) had been taking over the million-dollar machines, much to the amusement of the scientists sitting at the consoles. Experimentation with hacking visuals often led to letting people control them. In these early, weird arty hacks, computer games had their primordial soup.
In the 8-bit days of the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, pirates and hackers often distributed copies of games with non-interactive demos and intros, displaying their mastery over the technology.
Meanwhile, the "proper" (or professional, if you like) art world began to show projections of digital art, and some art shows in Europe had arcade machines between the works to contrast the collapse of high and low culture.
But as mods began to impact computer game culture in earnest, artists took up the reins as quickly as those looking to sneak their way into the game industry. This is mostly because the art world is an industry, too, and works using modern technology have always been great for business.
Where mods add costumes, levels and alternate scenarios, art mods often strip things away to bare essentials or even less, or reassemble the game engine around an artistic statement or idea. The varieties of art mods are as varied as the games that influence them. Art mods are sometimes hacked, sometimes simple plug-in extensions and sometimes real-world add-ons to a computer game that permanently change the way you look at them.
Selecting the Players
Brody Condon's use of games in many of his artworks fulfills all the requirements to be called both modding and art, and usually questions the nature of both in the process.
650 Polygon John Carmack of 2004 is precisely what it claims to be; a model of John Carmack as modeled by the Quake III engine, but produced to scale in the physical world with polyurethane. Technically not a mod, it still extends the logic of the game in important ways and works with the same logic; build your own model, use the system of the game, make it playable.
deRez_FXkill < Elvis; of 2004 is a plug-in that uses the Karma physics engine, originally used to generate grisly death sequences in real-time, to make multiple versions of the king of rock 'n' roll twitch and shiver in a very weird floating pink afterlife.
White/Picnic/Glitch of 2001 is a series of 12 highly modified situations within The Sims with heavily distorted character models, acting out bizarre parodies of the suburban dream. Kids twitch in glossolalia in a park, while the father-character flips burgers with his massive, oversized arm.
