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Artist Research: Peter Burr

     Peter Burr was born in 1980 in Brooklyn, NY. He specializes in computer animation and creates abstract environments that draw inspiration from the immersive quality of video games. In the past, Burr produced art under the name Hooliganship and created a video label called Cartune Xprez. He has received many grants and awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a Creative Capital Grant (2016), and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship (2016). He is currently a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Arts in Society.
     Burr's work Cave Exits premiered at Images Festival in 2015. This work plays on the idea of retro dungeon crawler video games. The viewer is surrounded by four screens with constantly changing abstract images and videos. This is a reference to the procedural generation of the levels of those video games. This work has been shown at Fenway Park in Boston, MA; 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center in New York, NY; and The Bank Hill Ice House in Burwick-Upon-Tweed, UK.




Artist Statement:

"In video games, there is the concept of a dungeon that generates itself: an endlessly mutating death labyrinth. Cave Exits sets this living structure inside a 4-channel video cube. Recalling the way we interact with online media – clicking, zooming, scrolling – it turns the visual archetype of the labyrinth into a circuit board for lost, anxious feelings. Viewers are unable to process all incoming information in a single sitting, having to choose between screens if they want to sate their curiosity and learn more about the shifting structure. Unlike choosing between branches in an interactive narrative where the peripheral is an explicit set of controls, here the peripherals are the human neck and eyes, allowing for expression beyond mere hardware."



I really like this work because of its incorporation of video game elements such as the idea of the ever-changing dungeon. I also enjoy the glitch art style.



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