Arts Institute Blog

In time for Halloween, Jason Nelson’s new internet game/artwork “Alarmingly These Are Not Lovesick Zombies” challenges our usual expectations of video game movement, death, and pleasure. Like his popular “game, game, game and again game,” Nelson’s aesthetic combines lo-tech folk-arty scribbles with a sense of multimedia fractured poetics to challenge notions of what a game can be. While many commentators suggest that electronic games are a new type of cinema, or a TV-age replacement for the bildungsroman, Nelson’s work implies something different.

During an undergraduate critique I was trying to describe to a professor the quality of time I wanted to convey with one of the paintings being scrutinized. He responded with something like “the problem is time is not really an aspect of painting because they don’t move. You can talk about film or music this way but it doesn’t really work with paintings.” I disagreed with him but I remember thinking that music and film did convey time better than painting because they physically moved or at least it seemed that way. Now I think all forms have the same potential to contain time but I’m interested in hearing what other people think about this. Is time a bigger factor in film than painting, poetry, music, theater etc.? Does time play a part in this painting?