January 13, 2005
'Cause I Got Pac-Man Fever
Pac-Mondrian = the classic video game Pac-Man + Piet Mondrian's painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie" + the boogie-woogie piano sounds of Meade "Lux" Lewis, Albert Ammons, & Pete Johnson. Also equivalent to the term "genius".
Really, this creation from Toronto art group Prize Budget for Boys has got to be one of the coolest and most well-executed cultural mashups that I have ever seen. Forgive me for being several months behind the curve in saying this....I see that Pac-Mondrian has been BoingBoing-ed and MetaFilter-ed and written about on all sorts of art blogs and websites already. But somehow I didn't hear anything about it until last Sunday's News and Observer re-printed a 2-week-old NYTimes article. So I post these links and screenshots here...'cause Pac-Mondrian obviously needs to eat up at least a few more dots in the labrynthine maze of hyperlinks and blog-readers. After all, if any of my friends had stumbled upon this already, they surely would have told me about it, right? I mean, at least the ones who know that I only like pre-1986 video games and that I actually have a MOMA print of "Broadway Boogie Woogie" hanging on my wall!
Well, late boogie-woogie-ing is better than no boogie-woogie-ing at all. The Pac-Mondrian game is written in Java (yay) and seems way easier than normal Pac-Man...maybe because there's so much more space and a lot more avenues and streets to go down. Plus some of the larger "off-road" boxes allow you to "teleport" to another off-road box in a different part of the screen. What really takes the game to the next level is the boogie-woogie music from those very pianists who inspired Mondrian back in the early 40s when he first got to NYC. I love the fact that you get a high-hat sound for every blue/red/gray bit that you eat. And a much faster and more frenetic piano line whenever you consume the magic block that makes the ghosts edible. NYTimes critic Sarah Boxer claims that "the bonus of doing well at Pac-Mondrian is seeing the painting erased" so that there's "nothing left but a yellow grid". No cigar, but I got kinda close this time:
Speaking of video-game-related culture-clashes, if you missed the perfect blending of M.I.A.'s still-smokin' single "Galang" with the theme from Super Mario Bros., the Stickershock crew still has the mp3 posted online. Everybody "speak the slang now"...
Posted by Tim at January 13, 2005 12:29 AM