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