Glitches Turn Video Games Into Sublime Art

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Glitches Turn Video Games Into Sublime Art


http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662156/...to-sublime-art

Most people throw their controllers when a glitch ruins a perfectly good game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto. Robert Overweg loves it; he turns it into art.

Overweg is a self-proclaimed “photographer in the virtual world.” In his “Glitches” series, he captures whacked-out characters and snafued buildings in screenshots that look like what René Magritte might’ve produced had he been a big ol’ gaming nerd. These are absurd apocalyptic landscapes rendered even more absurd by shooters suspended in mid-air, as if leaping off a trampoline, while a skyscraper burns ominously in the distance, or, our favorite, by two characters fleeing the zombies of Left 4 Dead 2 and pausing for a homoerotic embrace (top).

How Overweg does it: It’s “a combination of forcing glitches and finding them,” he tells us in an email. So in Left 4 Dead 2, an A.I. companion is programmed to follow you within certain bounds, but step outside the bounds, and the characters go a tad haywire.