So the crew @ WBIM were kind enough to give me this hilarious compilation of 8-bit covers of Kraftwerk songs last semester called 8-Bit Operators (2007)....I have made public my deep affection for Kraftwerk in classes, conversation, and even a previous blog entry (see the Archive). It's a nice compliment in my collection to the compilation Trans-Slovenia Express (1994), which of course is a set of Slovene artists doing songs like "We Are The Robots" and such. 'FHB used the disc to make a series of station promos before I finally was allowed to abscond with it to my office....
If you're scratching your head going, "Erm, 8-bit?" think of the bleeps and pops you used to get with those 1st-Gen home gaming systems (Atari or Intellivision, anyone?). These systems were going into homes right around the time that Kraftwerk was coming out with records like Computer World (1981). (True fact: I had to read and write about an article in a science magazine for 8th grade science w/ Ms. Guptil, and I managed to get by with writing about a review for Computer World in a computer magazine....Then biked to Park Mall and picked up the record, much to the befuddlement of my Motley Crue-listening friends)....
8-bit seems like a pretty funny / cool mode to work in: using the aural landscape of the early home computing age, ripping it out of original context and re-processing it in all of its lo-fi glory. What a cool idea, I thought to myself. Then, thinking a little more, I realized I had students back in Bloomie two-plus years ago that were already way hip to 8-bit.
The course was "Production as Criticism," and we used Dogme95 as our problematic. For the final project, and in the spirit of Dogma, students had to draft a set of rules / constraints that they agreed to work under--the idea being that contraints can potentially invigorate ideas and creativity through problem solving. Anyhow....
One set of students did a project that looks for anything like a role play game you might have found on your Apple II, called In The Year 20XX (2006). You can cut & paste this link into your browser to see the film (note that the hero is uncoincidentally named Lars):
http://www.archive.org/details/In_The_Year_20XX
Long story short: guess who is behind the curve yet again? But you know, you could die trying and still never have a chance. The fun of teaching is enabling folks to do stuff you would never think up yourself, and see them learn/grow doing it.
Priceless.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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1 comment:
For some reason this post made me start to remember the old days of playing Oregon Trail in the computer class of my elementary school. Sitting there trying to hunt and ford rivers was always fun. Then members of your crew would die from broken arms or Dysentery. Man I loved that game
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