The Artist Is Present 2 Press Kit

It’s happening! Again! The Artist Is Present! You are present! The artist is you! Put on your red dress and sit in the famous chair! Lock eyes with your audience! Be there now!

Play The Artist Is Present 2

The basics

Who is this Pippin Barr guy?

Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

The Artist Is Present 2 is the non-awaited sequel to one of my earliest games, The Artist Is Present. The original game put the player in the shoes of a visitor to the Museum of Modern Art, attending the performance The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramovic. There they could wait in a very long queue to have the privilege of sitting opposite the artist, just like the real thing. In the sequel, the roles are reversed and the player is asked to take on the part of Marina Abramovic herself, giving the performance by making silent eye contact with each audience member who comes to sit with them.

History

I’ve thought of making The Artist Is Present 2 for quite a while. Clearly the idea itself is a simple inversion of the previous game, so it’s not hard to think of. In fact, I even mentioned the idea to Marina Abramovic when I had the chance to meet her in Toronto back in 2013, but she said she thought it sounded boring. Fair enough. For whatever reason, I only got around to seriously thinking I’d make it at the end of 2019, and slowly creaked into action to produce it over a couple of months. It doesn’t have a particularly dramatic production history because it’s a fairly straightforward piece of work, mostly a remix of the original except that it includes material derived from a documentary (also called The Artist Is Present!) to help render the apartment that Marina was staying in during the performance period.

The Artist Is Present 2 is also another reference point in the detailed process documentation approach called MDMA. You can read a little about the game’s development by reading its process documentation and by going through its commit history.

Technology

The Artist Is Present 2 was created using Phaser 3, my favorite 2D game library for JavaScript. It makes use of Colbydude’s Phaser 3 Palette Swapping Example to do recoloring of the audience members so they look different from one another.

License

The Artist Is Present 2 is an open source game licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can obtain the source code from its code repository on GitHub.

Features

Trailer

The Artist Is Present 2 Trailer

Images

Credits

Contact