This is a selection of my third year portfolio. Notice the difference between my second year and third year work. The length and style have change dramatically.
Titled "Digital Medicine & the computing culture" it was mainly about the recent ground breaking work in digital therapies for a wide variety of mental and physical illnesses.
Most of the stories came from my coverage of GameCity Squared festival in Nottingham, so there are a few less serious stories thrown in for good measure; hence "Computing Culture".
Anyway, don't bother reading this. Grab yourself a cuppa tea, get comfortable and enjoy the stories.
It has occupied many forms and influenced many era’s, but art has taken a bit of a beating in the last few decades. Sharks cut in half, sculptures made from blood, an oak tree that was nothing more than a glass of water and numerous other ‘masterpieces’.
Mark Bolitho takes his art a little more light-heartedly, and this was pretty obvious when my invitation to meet him had to be folded into a spaceship before we could even begin. Mark is one of the UK’s most respected alternative artists; his chosen material? Paper.
At the forefront of UK origami, he’s had work commissioned by the BBC, Channel 4, MTV and hundreds of others. I found him at one of the UK’s largest gaming events, Nottingham’s GameCity Squared festival, returning to the roots of his passion.
“25 years ago Ian Bell and I were at school together. He’d written a computer game that he intended to sell called ‘Elite’ and he wanted me to make an origami version of the main ship that would come in the box-set. I had no idea at the time how successful it was going to be” Mark explained.
Elite would be a huge influence in the gaming industry setting the foundations for an entirely new genre and was one of the first home computer games to employ wired frame 3D graphics. “The lines of the origami emulate the game style quite well – I think that may have been Ian’s initial reason for why he wanted to add it to the box-set.”
Now, on the 25th anniversary of Elite, GameCity Squared festival would celebrate one of the industry’s most import games of the 80’s and Mark would showcase a new one-night-only exhibit at the Launch party on the festivals first night.
Entering the colossal tent that encompasses the majority of Nottingham’s Guildhall square, I handed over my invitation-come-spacecraft and was in awe of what Mark had created. A net stretched across the underside of the entire canvas roof of the tent and hundreds if not thousands of spaceships, space stations and other sci-fi commodities hung above my head.
“Everything in here is based on the game. There’s a space station; it’s like a cube with the corners chopped off” he exclaims excitedly pointing out a huge 14 sided orb hanging above a table full of guests. “Geez I hope that bad boy doesn’t fall. It’s only paper but that could easily take someone off their feet”
“If you count the time it took to design it, roughly two to three days, then three to four hours to make. It’s made from photographic back drop paper, it’s the biggest I can buy commercially and it took six sheets to build”.
Amazingly there are not one, but two of these monstrosities hanging from the ceiling along with dozens of the games infamous craft; the Cobra. “In the game, the lead spaceship is called a Cobra. It’s got a pointed nose and it’s more of a triangular shape. As the game opened this model would float around and it would say “do you want a new game?” It was iconic. It would do all its turning around and moves then you’d begin”.
The animated splash screen that Elite pioneered became synonymous with quality games and would be one of the numerous reasons for its popularity. Before branching out on to other formats, Elite could only be played on the BBC home computers and at one point the number of copies of Elite sold was equal to the number of BBC home computers, it became a British phenomenon.
Its popularity and importance is the reason Mark would return to display his new exhibit. “It founded a whole new genre. You’d leave the space stations in the Cobra, blow up other ships, beam aboard any of their goods and sell them back at the space station for better weapons. If you captured the escaped pods you effectively had a slave to sell; it had a nice economic style to the game” he jested.
“There’s a few of the blown up ships over there” pointing out a collection of tiny pyramid shaped paper chunks swarming with missiles. “You’d use the missiles to blow up other ships causing space debris” and as I stared as this tiny horde of shapes, I began to understand the overall picture of what was happening above my head. It wasn’t an exhibit of individual works but an epic space battle containing hundreds of tiny spacecrafts fighting for cargo to sell at the enormous space stations. The barrels of goods surrounded by the ships remains scatter across the tent were a minuscule part of a much larger picture.
“The invitation is an imitation of the escape pods, we we’re going to hang them up, but we had so many made by the public today that we’ve just had to give up. I had eight original designs, but this one was the easiest for people to make. It would probably take me 30 seconds” Mark revealed.
If the country’s most respected sportsperson made an outlandish statement like that, obviously you ask them to prove it. Well... “A fold off? You want to challenge me to a fold off?” Mark howled with laughter. Fortunately for my pride that story will have to wait.
