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Check out our new blog covering events at the Montreal Biennale!

http://www.technocultureartgames.blogspot.com/

WHAT is TAG:

We are the Technoculture, Art and Games / Jeux research group. TAG brings together academics (and students) from a wide range of disciplines with artists and designers, programmers, and other individuals interested in the criticism, conception, design and dissemination of new and interesting game forms. TAG is based at Concordia but includes people from other universities, as well as from outside the university. For example, several TAG events at the BNL (see below) are in close collaboration with the KOKOROMI a Montreal based experimental game collective of gamemakers and curators which promotes games as an art form and expressive medium worldwide. Kokoromi is Damien Di Fede, Phil Fish, Heather Kelley an Cindy Poremba. (Damien, Heather and Cindy all have other connections to the TAG group and its projects).

TAG at the BNL

May 1 thru 17, TAG is moving its activities to the Bourget Building, three blocks east at 1234 de la Montagne, for the Biennale de Montréal . The theme of the BNL this year is “Open Culture” and, under the title Porous Lab, TAG is treating this an opportunity to OPEN up its activities to a public beyond the university. (See schedule below).

The TAG group creates games in the spirit of open collaboration characteristic of “open culture”. We design and produce games ourselves in order to provoke discussion and to provide alternative, open and experimental alternatives to commercial games. The BNL theme also suggests the provocative and interdisciplinary potential of games more generally -both for contemporary art and the university. The very rapid rise of games culture, and the fact that many artists, curators and academics have only very superficial knowledge of it, continues to mean that games are marginalized in traditional cultural and research circles. Yet games now dominate youth and popular culture and so are the most broadly influential cultural form to have emerged since cinema. They represent the future of highly interactive, interdisciplinary, networked culture. TAG’s inclusion at the BNL addresses the need to pry open “official cultures” so that games can become objects of expression, experimentation and research.

TAG activities at the BNL include:

Opening night- May 1st 7:30 to 10:30: superHYPERCUBE-Experience total indie game immersion on our projection screen, using Wiimote-hacked head tracking, and deliciously lo-fi red/cyan stereoscopic glasses. superHYPERCUBE is a game about holes and the cubes that love them, created by montreal art game collective Kokoromi,

and indie game darlings Polytron, the developers of /Fez/.

First Weekend (and ongoing): Open Gaming -focus on games that challenge clichés about game genres. Come and try some very different types of games, or just watch someone else play, ask questions etc

During the week(s) (Tues. Wed. Th.): TAG lab Working Sessions- Two TAG interdisciplinary research teams are pursuing discussions and planning for research projects to be undertaken over the next year. Come and listen in, or play the games available on site while we work….(Go to full description)

Saturday 9th, 1-4: Workshop on LITTLE BIG PLANET– sign up (morgaken@alcor.concordia.ca) or just drop by and watch participants learn to use LBP in-game design tools, (LBP link) .(Go to full description)

Sunday 10th, 1-4: Games/Art Sensations– show, tell and brainstorm on innovative physical interfaces and sensors in games (Go to full description)

Thursday 14 thru Saturday 16: Events in collaboration with KOKOROMI www.kokoromi.org

Thursday 14th, 7-10: Live Game Sounds -8-bit music and video performance by Montreal chiptune artists Noia and Matt Fuzz

About Noia: http://www.myspace.com/noiasound.
About Matt Fuzz: http://www.myspace.com/mattfuzzetsongameboy
About chiptunes culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune