Mobilised Artefacts Post Mortem

Mobilised Artefacts was my entry to a one week project based off an artwork from Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). The project required participants to pick an artwork that spoke to them and create a game based off that particular artwork. The project got underway with a class field trip to the gallery where we got to spend an hour or more traversing the gallery and taking pictures of art that we could turn into games. I had been to GOMA on many previous occasions and it was unfortunate that they had just recently ended a large exhibit so the entire bottom floor was void of any works. This however didn’t stop the ideas flowing as there were many amazing pieces throughout the gallery, many of which that spoke to me were from the Times and Tides exhibit. These pieces from various artists showed culture and heritage in their pieces along with master craftsmanship. The works that spoke most to me were Ken Thaiday Sr’s Dance Machine Headdresses (seen below), specifically the Beziam Headdress which was a model of a shark with fish swimming around and the jaws of a shark as the part you placed on your head.

I originally had two ideas for the work, my first was recreating the artwork in 3D and having the player interact with pulleys to make it move. I found this to be too literal when in an art game jam I wanted to created something which was art itself. The second idea was a 2D pixel style game was a story by fire shadow puppet style game where you would control players and then as you put on the headdresses the players shadows would turn into the animals the headdresses depicted. I really liked this idea but the amount of art i would need to make in one week was pushing the project out of scope. I spent a long time researching my artist and his motivations and beliefs, this lead my project down a completely different direction than I expected but I was really excited about it. I found an awesome shader called MetaBall by Keijiro Takahashi and decided to utilise this to make a organic shark body form up around a mechanical artificial skeleton.

Every design choice I made during development was carefully made to represent the ideals of Ken Thaiday Sr while also being culturally sensitive. Some very subtle things I added I feel actually add a great deal of depth to the project, such as the eerie audio track which is both ambient and slightly unsettling. I chose this track as Thaiday stated that his shark headdress when worn in dance brought violence and danger to his dances. I added an orbital camera so the player could rotate around the entire shark and even added a point light to the camera so that when the player rotates the sharks head around to the camera it recreates the effect divers see when their camera lights shine on a shark coming up close.

Even though it was a one week project I still wanted to try something new, this time it was trying to use that previously mentioned shader. Days of the project were lost to errors caused by the shader and without a master programmers help there was no way I would have got it working. Even when it was working the slightest changes would cause endless errors resulting in hours of lost work. Even though it was difficult it was incredibly rewarding to get to use something that was both new and interesting to me and also added greater meaning to the work I was creating.

Mobilised Artefacts is one of my favourites bits of work I have been able to make during my studies, I looked at a brief in a different way and was able to still meet its constraints. I made something using tools I had never encountered before. I finished a solo project in just one week. There are still bugs in Mobilised Artefacts such as that if the player looks at the skeleton too long without interacting with it the MetaBalls just appear in place instead of floating in giving the desired effect. I will get the help from some programmers to see where I have gone wrong with this specific script to get that ironed out as soon as possible. I don’t think I will continue working on this specific piece but in time would really like to recreate the other four dance machines Ken Thaiday Sr had exhibited and have them all in one project.