The Prize Budget for Boys Bio, Press, and Links 565 Sherbourne St. Suite 107 Toronto ON M4X 1W7 Canada 416-929-1246 http://pbfb.ca budgies@pbfb.ca BIOGRAPHY "Pac-Mondrian combines the transcendent perfection of Pac-Man with the aesthetic genius of Piet Mondrian. There's never been a higher concept video game." Gerry Canavan "The Prize Budget for Boys present The Spectacular Vernacular Revue (Roof Books), from Pac-Mondrian to a hilarious send-up of internet lang-po, this book by the Toronto arts collective is unique, sparks, and right over the edge with the buffalo -- truly revolutionary..." Bob Holman & Margery Snyder 'The Best Books of 2004' Pac-Mondrian is what happened when Andy Warhol met Jeff Koons at Marshall Mcluhan's Internet café. This is Digital Pop. Video games make more money than Hollywood, Pac-Man is the Elvis of video games, and we are the Andy Warhol of the Internet. The Prize Budget for Boys is an arts collective convened in Toronto in 2001 to make new media, performance, video game, literary, and fine art. Their first book, The Spectacular Vernacular Revue, was published in the Fall of 2004 by Roof Books (New York), based on a multi-disciplinary multi-media performance extravaganza that toured across Canada and the US from 2001-3. Their art has been installed at Ars Electronica (Linz), ArtSpeak (Vancouver), Art Metropole (Toronto), Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver), Virus Arts (Toronto), and Antenna (Toronto), and will be featured in the Digital Play exhibit in the William Fox gallery in New York City's American Museum of the Moving Image from March 4-May 31, 2005. The PBFB's work has been featured in ARTnews, Mix Magazine, The New York Times, The Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, News & Observer (US), NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands), Buenos Aires Herald (Argentina), eye magazine, on CBC National Radio 1 & 2 with Lorna Jackson on The World this Weekend, on Belgium Radio 1, SBS Radio (Australia), Radio 1 Germany, and has garnered mentions on boingboing.net (Best American Blog - 2004 Bloggies), metafilter.com (Best Media Blog - Forbes 2003), and the blog of the Guardian UK. New media work by the PBFB has been published by ArtSpeak, Instant Coffee, and Coach House Books. The PBFB have appeared in the literary journals Open Letter, The Capilano Review, The Queen Street Quarterly, OBJECT, dANDelion, numerous housepress publications, and the anthology sidelines: a poetics (Insomniac Press, Toronto 2002). In 2002 the PBFB received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to complete their online clubhouse at http://pbfb.ca/ Interviews or features with the PBFB are forthcoming in the magazines Art-Talk (US), PlayBoy (Germany), PaperCity (US), and jumpbutton (Australia). The PBFB members are Mike Brown, Neil Hennessy, Ian Hooper, Mike Horgan, Tristan Parish, and Chris Walker. ---------------------- PRESS 'Mondrian Gets Game' ARTnews, November 2004 BY Howie Kahn Three summers ago Neil Hennessy, the 29-year-old cofounder of the five-man Toronto art collective Prize Budget for Boys, had a revelation while going through the used-book bin at his local Goodwill thrift shop. He dug out a 1960s-era catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art, flipped to a black-and-white reproduction of Piet Mondrian’s 1942-43 oil painting Broadway Boogie Woogie and thought "Wow! That looks just like Pac-Man!" And so Pac-Mondrian, a video game combining Toru Iwatani’s arcade classic with the design of Mondrian’s most electric canvas, was born. Prize Budget has posted the game on its web site (http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian), where players, using a template of Mondrian’s signature colors and shapes, can design their own boards. After scraping for funds, the collective assembled a Pac-Mondrian game cabinet to take on the road. Hennessy plans to take the machine not only to galleries but to dance clubs. There electronic musicians will create original tracks for the game; and the player, by moving the Pac-Man all over the board, will essentially become the DJ for the night. "That was the whole thing with Mondrian," says Hennessy, "winding up in these clubs dancing to crazy music." "Mondrian would probably approve of something like this," says Harry Cooper, curator at Harvard’s Fogg Art museum and a Mondrian expert. "I think whoever came up with this must have read some of Mondrian’s writings and been pretty sensitive to what he was after." "There is a famous anecdote," says Cooper, "where Mondrian is dancing and the music switches from boogie-woogie to jazz, and he says to his partner, ‘Let’s sit down. I hear melody." As for the game cabinet, Hennessy says, "I’d love to sell it to MoMA. I’d love to dance to the video game right next to the original painting." -------- Dec. 11, 2004. Toronto Star Pac-Man hunted by Mondrian's ghost Artists just waiting for `publicity' of a lawsuit PETER GODDARD As local art hustlers go, Neil Hennessy has to be high up in today's Top 10 when it comes to pure, unalloyed chutzpah. "Modernism is dead," he says. "It's not about making something new anymore. It's about making news. That's where your prices are made, in the press." And Hennessy, 29, part of the Toronto-based art collective The Prize Budget for Boys, thinks he has just the news the art world has been waiting for: Pac- Mondrian. Pac-Mondrian is the meeting ground in arcade-game format between Toru Iwantani's classic 1980s Atari game Pac-Man and Piet Mondrian's oil painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), the motionless but vibrant jangle of red, yellow and blue rectangles representing the expatriate Dutch painter's reaction to the hectic, well-travelled grid of New York in the early 1940s. In Hennessy's artistic merger, players use an arcade console to navigate the little yellow guy through Mondrian's maze, chomping the dots out of his artwork as he dodges monochromatic ghosts. All the while, boogie-woogie theme music plays. This is where the news-making could begin. "We haven't made any money on this yet," says Hennessy. "So no one has come to bug us. But if we're making money and they want to sue us, we'll take the publicity. I don't care. The law is just theatre for publicity. Look what it does for guys like Damien Hirst." Hirst, now a very rich British artist, gave London's tabloids months' worth of outraged copy by winning the coveted Turner Prize in 1995 with a piece comprised of sheep pickled in formaldehyde. But maybe the time has arrived for an art-shock from cyberia. Actually, Pac-Mondrian has been in the works pretty much since the day three years back Hennessy came across an ancient, monochromatic catalogue for the New York Museum of Modern Art in a Goodwill garbage bin. "Wow," he thought to himself. "That really looks like Pac-Man." Finding free access to Pac-Man's source code on the Internet, Hennessy rewrote the graphics to suit the Mondrian painting. The rest, as they might say, is the future. Starting with a reception last Saturday at Art Metropole on King St. W., Pac- Mondrian's formal debut has lasted a week. It ends today at 5 p.m. with the final hours in an eBay auction of the Pac Mondrian Postcard Master Proofs. The reserve bid is $1,000. The proofs can be viewed at Pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian, where you can also download the game and give it a try. In truth, Pac-Mondrian had a life online before it ever came to be inserted into an old, discarded arcade game cabinet that was redesigned by another PBFB member, Mike Brown, to be hauled up Art Metropole's long flight of narrow stairs. When a PBFB proposal about the Pac-Mondrian exhibition on its website last July was linked on a couple of blogs, the secret was out. By August, some 20,000 people had played the game, chewing through Mondrian's colour-charged interstices. New York's ArtNews magazine has since noticed, making Pac-Mondrian an Internet art star. "That's why we chose Pac-Man," says Hennessy. "We wanted to use the biggest art star of the 1980s. It wasn't guys like (New York artist) Jeff Koons or whatever then. It was Pac-Man. He certainly sold more units, if you consider the number of video game cabinets. "But there's another reason, too. Structurally, Pac-Man just goes in four directions, which is why it was so popular. It was simple. Everyone could do it. You just go up, down, left and right. For Mondrian, the perpendicular had this transcendent perfection. That was his metaphysic. The patterns you do with the game mimic what Mondrian was most passionate about. They're thoroughly, aesthetically and kinaesthetically connected." The connection goes even deeper. According to games programmer legend, Pac-Man came to life when Iwantani was eating a pizza. After taking away a single wedge, Iwantani started imagining a character eating its way through a screen-full of food. ("Paku-paku" is the English transliteration of the Japanese word for a mouth opening and closing.) But that wouldn't work, he realized. The mouth wouldn't know which way to turn. So instead of chewing through a single plain of pepperoni-hued colour, Iwantani created a maze shape. "Whoever played the game," he said, "would have some structure by moving through the maze." >From medieval pavement labyrinths in cathedrals, to contemporary land art, mazes and labyrinths have had a rich and meaningful history through art. What extenuates Pac-Man's simplicity is the way it connects the game player with the almost dream-like situation the maze evokes, where the traveller is trapped and journeys seem to go on forever, offering no hope of escape. But Mondrian's ascetic use of primary colours and basic vertical and horizontal lines come to represent the maze turned upside down, the triumph of the will against a chaotic surround. More than the Mondrian connection was driving Hennessy, though. "Far more people play video games than go to movies," he'll tell you time after time. Indeed, since 2000, total sales for video games - software, hardware, and paraphernalia - have exceeded Hollywood's box office totals by about $2.5 billion every year. In short, the video game is the new image bank, the new paint box for the emerging artistic imagination. The smoggy play of light that delighted the techno-beguiled Impressionists living in smoky old Paris or London 150 years ago has been replaced by the entirely fabricated, crudely rendered interior space of fake Iraqi battlefields or synthetic car chases through a cartoon Los Angeles. For a good many, the artistic imagination will have its beginning deep in cyberspace. Can things get any better than this? Absolutely. "We're planning a series of games based on perverting a series of old Atari 2600 games to enact various famous and important pieces of modern and contemporary art," says Hennessy. "It will be all the biggest people, too. Living artists with the biggest prices on the market are the people we are going to rip off. It's like William Burroughs said in his manifesto, Les Voleurs: `Loot the looter.' In a viral equation, (rich artists) are the hosts now. You can be a genius artist and make money. And I'm going to suck on their teats." -------- New Museum for Contemporary Art Net Art News. -- Kevin McGarry December 15, 2004 Pac-Mondrian Over the last few months the Toronto collective Prize Budget for Boys has attracted attention online and off for their project Pac-Mondrian, which transplants the game of Pac-Man into the similarly blippy grid of 1943 hit painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. In their update, Pac-Man's chomping is underscored by the kind of jazzy tune that inspired Mondrian, and each pod consumed triggers a syncopated hi-hat or other percussive flare. Players can put themselves inside the art online, as well as in person through the life- sized arcade cabinet that is currently on the Let's Play Art World Tour. With the conclusion of a recent stop at Toronto's Art Metropole, the artists have kicked off the sale of Pac-Mondrian merch, which appropriately aims to clone and cash in on their creation with such collectors items as authenticated proofs, postcards, and the forthcoming Pac-Mondrian Vacuum Cleaner. ---------------- Chomp if You Like Art NY Times December 27, 2004 By SARAH BOXER The clones have been lining up ever since the Pac-Man video game first popped up in 1980: Bachman, Chomper Guy, Patuman, Pac-Mon, Pac-Manic and Mouth-Man. And this year there is Pac-Mondrian, the cybernetic love child of Pac-Man and Mondrian's painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie." As in Toru Iwatani's original game, the characters in Pac-Mondrian are a chomping mouth and his skittering nemeses Blinky (the red one), Pinky (the pink one), Inky (the aqua one) and Clyde (the orange one). Unlike the original, the maze is Mondrian's 1942-43 painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie" (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art), rather than a blue grid on a black screen. The background sound isn't the familiar electronic zoop- zoop-zoop but rather the piano boogies of Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson, which Mondrian loved to dance to. And each time the mouth gobbles one of the tiny colored blocks of "Broadway Boogie Woogie," a high-hat cymbal crashes. Pac-Mondrian was created by a Toronto art group, Prize Budget for Boys, for a contest sponsored by the Web site rhizome.org, an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan. It did not win, but two prominent Web sites - metafilter.com and boingboing.net - picked up Pac-Mondrian's Web link. Soon thousands were playing the game and passing it on to their friends. Last month the magazine Art News wrote about it. Strangely, the keepers of the Pac-Man flame are unperturbed. The First Church of Pac-Man, a Web site where fans can worship the "golden pixellated circle" that "did appear upon the darkened screen," has often warned about false idols: "The prophesized umpteenth coming is upon us." But the church has not yet issued any warning about Pac-Mondrian. Not even the Pac-Page, a Web site that keeps track of Pac-Man clones, has taken notice. But a number of arty Web sites and Weblogs have, including eyebeam.org, beadesigngroup.com and even a blog about the Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline. At watercoolergames.org, a site devoted to "video games with an agenda," the comparative aesthetics of the game and the painting were debated. One person suggested that Tetrus would have been a better match for Mondrian. Another countered that there's "a physical shimmering in 'Broadway Boogie- Woogie' " and that "Pac-Man also has an aesthetic of throbbing lights." Why is Pac-Mondrian attracting more art types than gaming types? Maybe it's because Pac-Mondrian has more to say about Mondrian's painting than about Pac- Man. In fact, it qualifies as a coherent interpretation of "Broadway Boogie Woogie." The inventors don't say so, but if you play the game you'll probably discover some features of the painting that you never knew were there, and some that aren't there at all. The first thing you might notice by listening to the high-hat cymbals as you gulp down the small colored blocks of "Broadway Boogie Woogie" is that the yellow blocks are not edible. When the mouth runs into the red, blue and gray bits, the high-hat sounds (slightly differently for each color) and you get 10 points, but not when it runs into the yellow ones. Why? Because the inventors decided the yellow bits are part of the underlying yellow grid on which the other colored bits seem to float. Indeed part of the suspense is to see what "Broadway Boogie Woogie" will look like when all of the square flecks of color are gone and there's nothing left but a yellow grid. The bonus of doing well at Pac-Mondrian is seeing the painting erased. Well, almost erased. The four large blocks of color within color, it turns out, cannot be eaten either. If you run into one of these, you'll pop out of another. And you'll hear saxophones wail. These colored blocks within blocks are doorways into and out of the painting. The painting has depth. The other big blocks of color (those not nested within another color) are not only edible but valuable too. If you gobble them up, three things happen: you win lots of points, the piano boogie changes and the four skittering monsters turn blue, meaning you're free to eat them. The chase music is wonderfully racy. And if you devour one of the blue monsters before they start chasing you, you're rewarded with a brass fanfare and more points. If not, you may be in trouble. A good way to escape them, it turns out, is over the edges and around the back of the painting. Not every yellow line, however, provides this egress. Only the ones that span the canvas do. Under pressure, it's not easy to tell which lines are thoroughfares. The more you play the better you see. But there's an aesthetic downside too. The very idea of treating the painting as a bunch of streets reinforces one of the most common and simplistic interpretations of "Broadway Boogie Woogie" - that it represents the grid of Manhattan. (By the way, the inventors say that they have also made two other versions of Pac-Mondrian based on the maps of Detroit and Toronto.) What's more startling than the suggestion that Mondrian's painting is a map of Manhattan is the inventors' declaration that the mouth of Pac-Mondrian is Mondrian himself, gobbling away at his own painting. This is what they say on their Web site: "Pac-Mondrian transcodes 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' into a Pac- Man video game: the painting becomes the board, the music becomes the sound effects, and Piet Mondrian becomes Pac-Man." As you feverishly hit the arrow keys to drive the munching mouth around "Broadway Boogie Woogie," you also imbibe the notion that Mondrian did not paint what he really wanted. If he had had his druthers, he would have demolished all those annoying flecks of color on the grid. Now that's a nervy interpretation. Game over. You can play Pac-Mondrian and read all about it at: pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/ You can see Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" at: www.moma.org/collection/depts/paint_sculpt/blowups/paint_sculpt_018.html Here are some of the Web sites and blogs that have discussed Pac-Mondrian: www.boingboing.net www.rhizome.org www.metafilter.org www.eyebeam.com www.beadesigngroup.com www.watercoolergames.org Keepers of Pac-Man lore: www.flamingmayo.com/firstchurchofpacman/ www.classicgaming.com/pacman/ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/arts/design/27mond.html?ex=1105159316&ei=1&en=9d6fca0618651270 --------------------------------- After the Times article comes out I got an email from a reporter from the National Post looking for some quotations to fill in a rehash of the NY Times article. It ran on page 2 of the Arts & Life section. To spare you all the repetitive bits, here's the new parts: Old-School Abstract: Pac-Man meets Piet Mondrian in a Toronto group's art world mash-up By Sara Boxer from The New York Times with files from Pierre Hamilton, National Post [snip] Twenty-nine year old artist Neil Hennessy was volunteering at a Goodwill Thrift Shop in Toronto when he had the eureka moment that led to this art/video game: "Pac-Mondrian helps reduce the complexity of the art interface to the simplicity of a joystick. The only thing you have to be able to do to have fun with Pac-Mondrian and to get it, is push up, down, left or right on a joystick that's glowing red. It's time for the video game revolution in the art world, it really is." [snip] But the broader point may be much simpler, as Hennessy explains: "Basically, it's the age-old ploy to raise the low art to the high art. I'm trying to smuggle Pac-Man into the art galleries." ---------- The World this Weekend, with Lorna Jackson January 23, 2005 Lorna Jackson: Boogie woogie game boys. High art meets pop. The pixellated moouth that ate pop culture is back. This time Pac-Man has gone uptown, right to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and onto an icon of the abstract geometric movement, Piet Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie Woogie', the Dutch painter's love song to his adopted home in Manhattan. A little prestidigitation, and voila: Pac-Mondrian. The Prize Budget for Boys, a Toronto collective of poet, game designer, aesthetic philosopher, information architect, performance artists came up with Pac-Mondrian. Two of the creators came in to talk about it, Mike Brown and Neil Hennessy, and Neil begins the story. Neil Hennessy: Basically Pac-Mondrian transcodes Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' into a Pac-Man video game, so the painting becomes the board, the music, the boogie woogie music becomes the sound effects, and Piet Mondrian himself becomes Pac-Man. but to me, I think of it more like we're producing an artistic metempsychosis, where we're render... LJ: What? Neil Hennessy: We're resurrecting Mondrian's spirit as Pac-Man to dance through the streets of New York he painted to the music he loved forever. To me it's engaging with his geometric spirituality. He was very serious about that. He felt that he could save the world with this utopian Modernist vision that had to do with basic fundamental geometry. To say that he's now dancing as Pac-Man to that music, that's why I allowed myself to get into the spiritual stuff, because he said his paintings were like modern music that does away with melody, which he considered form or Nature, and he wanted to create something spiritual that was higher, and he said that the way you do that is to oppose pure means and have dynamic rhythm. That's why he loved boogie woogie jazz in particular, as opposed to regular jazz, because it was more percussive, it wasn't quite as melodic, it was based on the blues progression, and it was really driving. LJ: OK Mike, your background is art. Mike Brown: Yes, primarily. LJ: And what do you have to add to all these thoughts? MB: I think the art world's really interested in what's going on with video games right now, and a lot of people that make video games and developers are really interested in the fine arts. Pac-Mondrian is kind of like an "I put my chocolate in your peanut butter" sort of thing. LJ: Pac-Man first appeared in an arcade cabinet. Does Pac-Mondrian have a cabinet? MB: Well, actually, I first saw Pac-Mondrian at a show where he was projecting it onto a screen. It was the first time I met Neil, at an art show. After I saw it, it hit me like it hit him too, and I said Woa, We really have to make this a cabinet, we have to make this physical. It's sort of a retro piece in a way, and so we want to show that in a physical embodiment in an old-school cabinet. I guess old-school is the word. So we got an old arcade cabinet, stripped it out and painted it, gutted it, took all the electronics out, and installed Pac- Mondrian in it. It was really a neat experience. LJ: What's the response when people see it? MB: It's been great. Because not only can you look at it and appreciate it, which you can do with most fine art, you can actually walk up to it and play it, it welcomes you, and it's fun. It's a fun thing to do, so I think it's a unique art piece that way. LJ: It seems to me when I first saw this reproduction of 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' with the Pac-Man people, it's one of those things where I said "Oh, of course! Why didn't I think of that?" When was your moment? NH: It was a totally eureka moment, I was volunteering at the Goodwill Buy the Pound in Toronto, and I picked up a 50's catalogue that was Mastrpieces from the Museum of Modern Art. It was this little soiled old pamphlet that was from the 50's, and when I was flipping through the pages I came across 'Broadway Boogie Woogie'. It was in black and white, and it was a really poor black and white reproduction so all the colours were flattened, and whereas the painting consists of a yellow grid that's the road, and there's grey, blue, and red colour blocks on the yellow road, in the really poorly done black and white reproduction there was just the road, and then one colour of block that appeared on the road. So it was just a binary opposition, you just had the road and then the blocks, and that's what made me think of Pac-Man. Because of course Pac-Man doesn't have the different coloured blocks, and I suppose that was what was the real eureka moment was the fact that there was a glitch in the reproduction, its affinity to the original was lowered to this black and white reproduction and that's what made it look like Pac-Man. So from there I went off and found Pac-Man, the source code on the Internet, reprogrammed it to put the Mondrian painting in, and then I did lots of research in boogie-woogie music, and found music that had all three of the originators of boogie woogie, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson, the Boogie Woogie Trio, all playing together on a track called 'Boogie Woogie Prayer', which I thought was particularly appropriate given Mondrian's spiritual beliefs in his art, because for Mondrian dancing was like praying, it was a spiritual act. LJ: But you learned this all after the fact, didn't you? You had that eureka moment, then you studied Mondrian. NH: Then I went to the library. I did my research. I did my homework. And there's a famous story about Mondrian where he's dancing to boogie woogie jazz with his partner... LJ: In New York. NH: and some kind of regular jazz comes on in New York, and he said "Let's sit down. I hear melody." He didn't like melody, which was natural appearance, he wanted his pure forms in his music as well as in his paintings. Like the Shakers almost, from the 19th century, dancing for them, frenetic dancing was a spiritual act that was raising them to higher forms, and it's the same thing for Mondrian. LJ: This seems like an ever-opening book. MB: It seems like that, doesn't it? LJ: Yeah, it does. MB: He really managed to grab the kinetic quality of New York at that time, and it's still like that, and transfer it into his painting. You can really see that in his work. LJ: Have you seen the real deal? NH: Yeah, I have. I had a chance to go to MoMA [in the Spring of 2002] and of course they had 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' there. I had finished the programminng on the game in the Fall of 2001, so I had actually already finished it before I had a chance to see the original. Seeing the original was spectacular. MB: Oh yeah. NH: There's a physical shimmering in the painting, this kinetic motion, activity, that you can't see in a book or on the Web or whatever, you can only really see it in person. MB: The colours vibrate. NH: Yeah, it's just a jangle of motion. MB: And it really grabs your eye, your eye just goes all around the streets and just goes all around it. LJ: It does, it's a wonderful painting. MB: It's hypnotic. LJ: It's deceptively simple. OK, here's the question then, what is art Mike? MB: What isn't art, let's ask that question. I don't know. I've thought a lot about what is art? And art is the process, or art is what is transformed, something that has been transformed. LJ: Have you guys had any lawsuits yet? MB: No. NH: No we haven't. The thing is, we haven't made any money at it yet so there's nothing to sue us for. We do have plans though, to do video games based on lots of famous modern and contemporary artists, some of whom are still living. We're not going to be cheeky about it either, we're going to call them Jeff Koons' Atari Basketball, or Damien Hirst's Shark Attack! We're going to use their names, because in this day and age the last, you know the only people left to steal from are the rich artists. MB: You can break it down to information, and why not just use that in your art. We live in the information age. Why is it a barrier to use somebody's name in our idea? NH: With Pac-Mondrian, we chose Pac-Man and Mondrian [to promote, as opposed to Basho's Frogger, or one of our forthcoming games] because they're big names, they're popular. It's Digital Pop Art. MB: They're icons, really. NH: They're total icons. If you think about it in Warhol's terms, Pac-Man is the Elvis of video games. He's the first character that came off the screen in video games, and became part of lunchboxes and soap. MB: Completely. NH: How different is it from what Mondrian believed when he said his paintings were just a preparation for future architecture. He wanted whole cities to look like these big, wacky Mondrian grids. MB: Mondrian was ahead in the digital world too. Way before we had computer graphics or even the concept of computer graphics, he was doing pixels on a grid, different coloured pixels on a grid. NH: Mondrian, I consider him totally the patron saint of digital art, in the Mcluhan sense, because whenever you look at a computer screen any curve that you look at is just a series of step-wise perpendiculars that your eye tricks you into believing is a curve, but it's really just a grid, and of course Mondrian was fervent about the power, the fundamental power of the perpendicular, and that's what all of our computer displays are based on. If you believe Stephen Wolfram, the guy who published A New Kind of Science, the next major scientific discoveries are going to look more like a painting than an equation. They're going to be based on these grid pictures that he runs based on cellular automata. They've been able to map, they've been able to answer questions like "Why are spotted cats tails ringed?" [So the unified field theory would look like a Mondrian grid painting.] LJ: So what's next for The Prize Budget for Boys and Pac-Mondrian? NH: We do have some stuff coming up. Tristan Parish is doing a performance at the Rivoli in Toronto at the Box Salon on February 23 at 8:00, that's a Wednesday. The Pac-Mondrian cabinet will also be installed at the Rivoli at that time. That'll be the last time you'll have a chance to see it in Canada before it goes international. We're going to be installing it in New York City at the American Museum of the Moving Image from March 5th until May 31st. LJ: The Prize Budget for Boys are Mike Brown, Neil Hennessy, Ian Hooper, Mike Horgan, Tristan Parish, and Chris Walker. Lots more about the boys can be found at www.prizebudgetforboys.com ----------- Interview with Witske Maas, SBS Radio (Australia) 22/02/05 (intro/outro in Dutch) Neil: I was actually volunteering at Goodwill, which is a thrift shop, and I noticed a 1950's era MoMA catalogue in the bookbin. I picked it up, and all the images were in black and white, it was really old and grimy looking; however, when I flipped to the image of Broadway Boogie Woogie, because the colours were flattened down to black and white it really looked like Pac-Man. I didn't see red, yellow, and blue, I just saw black and white and so I had a eureka moment and said "Wow, that looks like Pac-Man!" From there I started doing research into Mondrian and the painting and the music, and went out and found source code on the Internet for Pac-Man that I could modify the graphics for. I did some research into boogie woogie music, and we actually wound up using the boogie woogie music that he would have been listening to and dancing to in New York in the 40s as the sound track for the game. So basically the painting becomes the game board, the sound effects become the boogie woogie music, and Pac-Man becomes Piet Mondrian himself. Wietske: Could you describe what a player would first see and hear on entering the Pac-Mondrian game? Neil: Oh sure. Well, basically, Mondrian is the painter of the grid, and so the paintings that most people will be familiar with have just a black grid on a white ground and red, blue, and yellow colour blocks. Towards the very end of his life he started to do representational paintings. He had done abstract for a long time, and then one of the last paintings he did was this one called Broadway Boogie Woogie, where instead of having black lines that were just abstract, he put yellow lines and those were supposed to be roads. So what you have is like a grid of these streets, so there's yellow lines for roads, and on top of the roads there's little red, blue, and grey colour blocks that are cars, and then bigger blocks which are buildings, and then bigger blocks with other blocks inside of them which are bigger buildings. Basically, when the game starts you're this little Pac-Man guy sitting on one of the roads, and then the intro music plays and then you just go, and so you run around the streets eating up all the buildings and the cars while the boogie woogie jazz plays. Wietske: Fantastic! So the soundtrack is a really crucial element to the game. Neil: Yeah, and that's something that a lot of people have really picked up on and enjoyed, and it was really integral to the whole project, because the reason that he made the painting was that he said he wanted to put a little boogie into his paintings. He wanted to bring the energy and vibrancy of that music into his painting as well and he managed to do it. I also picked the specific song "Boogie Woogie Prayer" because it has kind of spiritual implications which fits with what Mondrian felt about dancing. Dancing to him was a spiritual, almost religious experience where he felt that melody belonged to the world of nature and natural appearances, but that percussion or more percussive music was something that was of the spiritual realm, it was this opposition of pure means, dynamic rhythm, that's what he was after in his painting and his music. Wietske: Because rhythm is actually a fundamental access to the transcendental? Neil: Oh, absolutely. That exists throughout tribal cultures, and it's something that's also picked up in contemporary times through the kind of spiritual leanings that started to circle around some rave culture at a certain point in time where you've got this mass psychedelic experience with people dancing to this really rhythmic beat-driven music. Wietske: I have actually read somewhere that you might be introducing Pac-Mondrian into night clubs where the person playing the game determines the music. Neil: If you play the game, it's a game you can already dance to because it's got great dance music in it. We decided that we wanted to take it one step further where the person who's actually playing the game, we'd have the output of the video game hooked into the club's sound system so as the person's wandering around the maze and eating up all the stuff, the people in the club can dance to it. Ian: The interesting thing there is that the dynamics of the gameplay would be a bit different because in Broadway Boogie Woogie every pellet that Pac-Man eats causes a cymbal crash to go. So you could work your gameplay to cause the cymbals to go at a certain time, so rather than the objective being to clear the board as fast as you can, you can do your veering to make the best sound. A video game DJ, if you will. Wietske: But you'd have to be an extraordinarily good player. Get to know your way around boogie woogie really really well. Ian: You'd have to be very practiced. Wietske: Pac-Mondrian is really a unique and well-tailored blend of popular culture and high art. Do you think the game is more about Mondrian than it is about Pac-Man, because it is attracting a huge art audience. Neil: Well, it seems to have caught on more in the art world. The thing is, when I first looked at that and saw "Oh my God, that looks like Pac-Man", the first thing I thought is you know what? How many video games do you see walking into "high" art galleries, you know, big museums. And the answer is none. It's something that's been a cultural force for 20, 30 years now, but it's not represented in the museums and the big white cubes and all that. I think one of the things that people are reacting to is the fundamental aesthetic and kinaesthetic connection between Pac-Man and Mondrian. Mondrian was all about the transcendental perfection of the perpendicular, and when you look at one of the reasons why Pac-Man caught on, previous games had all kinds of complicated controls but Pac-Man, all you had to do was go up, down, left, and right. There's some fundamental connections between the two that maybe the art world people are picking up on. And of course, the way that it works in the art world is that things always start out as low culture and then somebody has to smuggle them into the galleries, and so we're going to do that for video games. Wietske: You're going to actually smuggle the game into the gallery? Neil: Of course, well, we're showing it at the American Museum of the Moving Image just starting in March, Wietske: That's in New York. Neil: So we've already smuggled it into the museums and the galleries. Tristan: I like the idea though, of literally smuggling it into the MoMA... Wietske: Yeah! [much laughter abounds] Neil: I don't know, with all the terrorism and stuff, they'd probably think we were blowing it up. Wietske: Yeah, it's high high high security, but it would be such an event if you could do it. Neil: Well it's something I've thought of doing, at least we're going to be in New York with the cabinet. So I don't think it would take much for us to grab a generator and install it right in front of MoMA. I said in the ARTnews article that I'd love to sell it to MoMA, I'd love to dance to the video game right next to the original painting, and I stand by that. Wietske: Maybe they'll take that on. Neil: We'll see what MoMA thinks. Wietske: Even if it's just for that 5 second boogie next to the original painting. Neil: Yeah, for sure. Wietske: Fantastic. There are 5 of you. Is it difficult to come to a unanimous agreement when you're all working on the same art project? Tristan: We have actually 6 people in total. One fella who didn't make it on the call today Chris Walker, who came on to the group fairly recently. I think that one of the advantages of working as a collective is that you have 6 minds going on a single idea, and it's a lot easier to capture all the angles and nuance that you might otherwise miss if it was just one of you. In terms of coming to unanimous decisions, it's relatively simple. Part of the excitement of being a member of this collective is the whole process of developing the idea. So it's not so difficult, that's part of the fun of the whole thing. Wietske: You have to tell me, how did you get the name Prize Budget for Boys? Tristan: Neil, you wanna field that one? Neil: OK, well, it was your idea. Tristan: You tell the story then, because I can't remember how it went. Neil: OK, we had been invited to do a performance for a spoken word reading night, so Tristan and I put together a performance. I had found another book at the Goodwill called the Prize Budget for Boys that was this boy's annual from the 40s. We loved the graphic on it so much that we used it as the program for our show, and then we were sitting on some steps after the show outside the club and I said "Do you want to use this name for the performance?" and Tristan said, "No, that should be our name for the group." and then I said "Perfect." ------------- Coding Collagers eye Magazine, Feb 17, 2005 The internet is jam-packed with the funny. A clever idea, executed well, can propagate quickly through the blogosphere. So when I first saw Pac-Mondrian, a videogame that juxtaposes the famous mouth against a famous painting, I wasn't bowled over. I did like the incongruous old time jazz soundtrack, however, and the text on their website hooked me: "Each play of the game is an improvisational jazz session. Pac-Mondrian sits in as a session drummer with Ammons, Lewis, and Johnson, hitting hi-hats, cymbals, and snares as he eats pellets." When I got in touch with the creators to set up an interview, I discovered I wasn't the only one to be hooked. I was sent press clippings of stories from the Globe, the Toronto Star and the biggest fish of all: Pac-Mondrian had made the front page of The New York Times. I headed down to Neil Hennessy's apartment at Sherbourne and Bloor to get the story of local-boys-made-good raising questions about pop culture and high art. Three members of The Prize Budget for Boys collective, the author of Pac-Mondrian, greeted me as I removed my boots. I joined Neil and two Mikes (Horgan and Brown) in the living room and I was offered a beer and asked them how they started working together. Neil explained that The Prize Budget for Boys started out doing multimedia performances called the Spectacular Vernacular Review. Pac-Mondrian was an element of one of the shows. "When I had the idea I was all excited - I have a computer science degree but I hate programming - and so I was really really hoping to find something good to steal from. Then the geek power of the internet came through for me - I found a perfect java implementation with beautiful documentation." Mike Horgan brought Mike Brown, his co-worker at videogame company Digital Extremes, to one of their performances where Pac-Mondrian was being projected. Brown was so taken by it he offered to make an arcade cabinet. And it wasn't like he didn't have enough to do. "Have you heard about the Electronic Arts controversy about people working too much, burning out?" Brown asked. I had heard game companies in general have a reputation for brain sweatshops. "It was like the epitome of that. Working on Pac-Mondrian was the only thing keeping me sane. Getting to work on art, it was fun." "I think what we were taught is that if you love your job, you never work a day in your life," Horgan added. "But I think what we learned was that if you want to hate your hobby, start getting paid for it. The Pac-Mondrian stuff gives us a videogame outlet that isn't so rigid and inflexible." Hennessy agreed. "It's a fantasy world that isn't defined by deadlines and meetings." But without those things, how were you able to get things done? "It's a challenge. For the longest time, the cabinet just sat there. I was unemployed, we couldn't get any grants... but then Mike Brown got a new computer and we used that for the cabinet, and all we needed was paint. A friend was doing an art show at Antenna, and that gave us a target date to get the cabinet done. We spent a lot of nights sitting around smoking dope and watching TV... but the last couple of weeks things started getting done." Pac-Mondrian's rise to fame was as circuitous as a round of the game itself, and not without its missteps. "At one point, because I thought I might be able to get away with it," Hennesey said, "I went to the Self Employment Assistance program and I tried to pitch Pac-Mondrian as an educational CD-ROM that taught art history and videogame history to children." Although that didn't pan out, he credits this false start with helping them tighten up their game. "We had built the project up so it had a lot of different aspects - it was already a multi-faceted project when people caught [on to] it." A visit to http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/ can see these many aspects of the project. Postcard prints made at Coachhouse Books, new level designs with a Toronto techno theme, and an array of merchandise. "There's a rich history of that," Hennessey explains. "Pac-Man was everywhere, on lunchboxes and bedspreads and wallpaper. Mondrian has a lot of merchandise too. We want to do that with Pac-Mondrian but in an art context." Certainly some people are buying the argument: the master proofs of the postcards were auctioned off on ebay for $12,100 Canadian. As substantial as this is, Hennessy admits that it's not universally loved. "The hyperbole is incredible: 'There's never been a higher concept videogame.' but because of the internet I've also read 'This game is a piece of shit.' The art people love it because it's low art meets high art, but the gaming people hate it because it's not playable. That doesn't bother me because there's a long history of really bad Pac-Man implementations-like the Atari 2600 version." But while the project might have focused more on the press copy than programming code, the collective is more concerned with moving on to their next project rather than obsess about perfecting Pac-Mondrian. In what is to be the second in their series that matches an artist with a classic arcade game, Alexander Calder's mobiles are brought together with the space shooter Asteroids: it's called Calderoids. Like Pac-Mondrian, they're adapting code that already exists, in this case a java applet that models Calder's kinetic sculptures. In the beta they showed me sans collision detection, the floating asteroids grew and shrunk as they came 'closer' and 'further' from the camera. I commented that the thrust on the vector-ship has a great feel, and that the physics in the game will give it a good press hook. Hennessy grinned. "If you drop science on their ass, they'll love it." Check out the Pac-Mondrian 'artcade' cabinet before it heads to New York City's American Museum of the Moving Image at The Box on Wednesday, February 23, 8pm. (Rivoli, 332 Queen W. (Back Room) pwyc, $5 suggested donation). Comment on this and other of Jim Munroe's game articles at www.culturalgutter.com/videogames/ ---------- Interview with Jen Vuk to appear in jumpbutton (Australia) 1/ is it true that the pac-mondrian project all started in a thrift shop? do you still frequent thrift shops? any other second-hand finds that have fuelled your art projects...or your wardrobe? Yes, Pac-Mondrian was discovered in a grimy old catalogue from the 50s called 'Masterpieces from the Museum of Modern Art'. In black and white, with the colours flattened, 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' looked like Pac-Man. Lots of material that's in our book came directly from the bookbin at the thrift shop, including our name Prize Budget for Boys, which we took off the cover of a boys annual published in England in the 30s. The thrift shop continues to fuel our art and wardrobe: every canvas on which we print the Let's Play Art World Tour series is a t-shirt found at the Goodwill where Pac-Mondrian was born. Ya gotta play the cabinet to get a t-shirt though. 2/ unfair question # 1: who do you love more pac-man or mondrian? why? We love them both equally. 3/ unfair question # 2: can gimmick and art ever co-exist? how? Sure. Art is just something you make or do, and a gimmick is too. Both can surprise and delight. Many people have glibly dismissed Pac-Mondrian as a gimmick after playing it or reading about it in the paper, but few have taken the time to actually read about the rest of the project on the website, which will include concept parties in dance clubs where the cabinet is hooked into the sound system and the video game player becomes the dj. 4/ how difficult was it to make the game cabinet idea into a reality? what processes did you have to go through? The most difficult thing was taking the old monitor out, which can electrocute you if it has a stored charge. One of our members had modified one before, so the most difficult aspect was actually working on it when we got together and not just goofing around. As you can see from the "Production" postcard, we like happy workers. Anyone that wants to modify an old cabinet can find all the info they need from hobbyists on the web. Buying the old Galaga cabinet at auction that we modified was one of the weirder experiences, we came away convinced that the local electronic amusements industry was largely frequented by seedy mafia types. 5/ the game cabinet has been on something of a journey, where have been some of the more kookier places? how difficult is it to transport around? where is it now? It's actually never been out of Toronto so far (we'd LOVE to bring it to Australia with a few artists in tow, anyone, anyone....) and just to galleries and bars, although it was installed next to a stage during an event where local poet and playwright Darren O'Donnell got naked. We tried to install it at a local school for a friend who teaches there, but the principal said they were uninsured and was afraid it would fall over and kill a student or something. It's easy to get around on a dolly, but tough to bring it up or downstairs, several of our backs can vouch for that. Right now it's in the shop in preparation for the next stop on tour at New York City's American Museum of the Moving Image March 5-May 31st. 6/ what has the gallery and gallery-goer responses been like? People laugh when they first see the cabinet, and then laugh some more when they play it and hear all the music and sounds and eat a Modernist masterpiece, which is delightful, since the motto of Pac-Mondrian is "Let's Play Art!!!!!" One of our members keeps dancing beside the cabinet to the boogie woogie game music, but so far he hasn't enticed any other patrons to get down. 7/ how significant is the boogie-woogie soundtrack to the art installation and the project in general? It's crucial! When Mondrian started painting his New York work, he said he wanted to "put a little boogie into his painting." We had to put the boogie into Pac-Man too! Discovering this fabulous dance music through Mondrian was one of the most fun parts of the project. Contemporary techno musicians Algorithm (www.techno.ca/jeffmilligan) and Anonym (www.anonymousrelease.com) are remixing the Pac-Mondrian soundtrack to make dance music for boards based on maps of Toronto and Detroit respectively, then we'll take the cabinet back to the dance clubs where Mondrian danced to boogie woogie jazz, and we'll mix in the rave music that we grew up freaking out to in the house that jack built: "Video games don't affect kids. If Pac-Man affected us as kids we'd all be running around in dark rooms munching pills and listening to repetitive music." (circulated on rave message boards in the 90s) 8/ since pac-mondrian have you discovered (rediscovered?) a penchant for video games? We have a combined total of about 15 years working as programmers and level designers in the video game industry so the penchant's been there for a while. We do plan on releasing further classic video game art mash-ups based on the work of contemporary and modern artists, so get ready for Calderoids, a mix of Alexander Calder's mobiles and Ed Logg's Asteroids, and more! 9/ pbfb has branched out into household objects...is this an attempt to put a bit of zing into everyday life or to simply...ahem... 'suck on the teats' of commercialism? Both! We like to think of Pac-Mondrian as what happened when Andy Warhol met Jeff Koons at Marshall Mcluhan's Internet café. There's been a rich history of both Mondrian and Pac-Man merchandise and housewares, and we have the opportunity to fill in the gaps in the catalogue and improve on the designs of existing stuff. We count an Industrial Design Masters amongst our academic achievements, so this is also what we were trained to do. Besides, we're making Digital Pop art multiples because video games make more money than Hollywood, Pac-Man is the Elvis of video games, and we are the Andy Warhol of the Internet! 10/ unfair question # 3: why no females in your collective? Membership in PBFB seems to be a pretty fast and loose process, if you approach us with an idea or have one that we like then you're a candidate. To date we haven't been approached by any women to join, which may in itself be telling, but there would certainly be no reason not to accept them as members. Having said that, PBFB has grappled long and hard with the politics of identity, particularily in The Spectacular Vernacular Revue, where much of the subject matter is an attempt to articulate a position that reconciles our white masculinity with the violence done in its name. Lately, Percival Peabody's gay drag-queen alter-ego opens the possibility of the Prize Budget for Trans. 11/ your bio mentions an interview on sbs radio in australia... how did this come about? and when can we tune in? Much the same way this interview came about. Wietske Maas contacted us by email to arrange an interview for the show Pulse, which will play in Australia and the Netherlands. She hasn't told us exactly when yet, so stay tuned! ----------- LINKS Pac-Mondrian Play Pac-Mondrian: http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/play.html Read paeans from the blogosphere: http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/read.html The World this Weekend, with Lorna Jackson, CBC radio: www.cbc.ca/insite/WORLD_THIS_WEEKEND_TORONTO/2005/1/23.html Pac-Mondrian online store: http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/buy.html Pac-Mondrian Dance Project: http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/dance.html Pac-Mondrian Postcard Portfolio (ed 300) http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/postcards.html Pac-Mondrian Glitch Prints (ed 200) http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/postcards_glitch.html Friends & Collaborators American Museum of the Moving Image http://www.movingimage.us/ Anonym aka Chris Dallas (providing music to 'Detroit Techno' level): http://www.anonymousrelease.com/ Coach House Press (designed and printed postcards): http://chbooks.com/ Art Metropole (hosted first solo show): http://artmetropole.com/ Algorithm aka Jeff Milligan (providing music to 'Toronto Techno' level): http://www.techno.ca/jeffmilligan/ -30-