Creative Cogitation

NOOB is a third paint­ing inspired by online roll play, specif­i­cally first per­son shoot­ers.  I have been around long enough to remem­ber play­ing the orig­i­nal ver­sion of Doom — it was very pop­u­lar among the bud­ding sci­en­tists at my uni­ver­sity. It makes me laugh to see old time com­put­ers in movies from the 80s and 90s, which I remem­ber using.  It is all so very dif­fer­ent now.  You used to need a lot more imagination.

In gen­eral NOOB is an acronym recast from “new­bie,” which can refer to any­one not famil­iar with cyber­space, but in the con­text of RPG it refers to an unskilled player.

NOOB by Jake Beck­man. Two yel­low house finch gamers perch in a tree gaz­ing down upon a fallen com­rade as the first per­son shooter roll play con­tin­ues on.

In this paint­ing I harken to Halo, Half-Life, Call of Duty, and other vaguely mil­i­tary first per­son shoot­ers.  Although their com­rade has fallen, he can rise again and be slain again ad infini­tum. In cyber­space death is a tem­po­rary incon­ve­nience.   I kept the back­ground includ­ing the hel­met that as fallen off the dead bird in shades of soft blue gray to con­trast the yel­low house finch play­ers from the cyber game space.  In the mid­dle back­ground I have placed sev­eral vague mil­i­tary fig­ures engaged in the con­tin­u­ing game play. Update: Some­one sug­gested I put the size of the paint­ing in the blog; size and other par­tic­u­lars are avail­able on the NOOB art page.

Any com­ments? Do you like it, hate it, think its too dark, think its funny?”

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

A friend recently twit­tered me, “Has tech­nol­ogy pro­gressed to the point that I can live out the remain­der of my life with­out face to face con­tact?” I told him he still needed to get his car emis­sions tested in per­son.    But is does raise the ques­tion, are we head­ing for Isaac Asimov’s dystopia, Solaria?

I dunno, but I recently learned a new slang term, e-lationship.  It’s a cyber rela­tion­ship, where friends, lovers and other strangers never meet face-to-face, they just carry on vir­tu­ally, be it via Face­Book, Twit­ter, IM-ing, chat or what have you.  For years peo­ple have known that cyber cutie might be a three-hundred pound guy, an 84-year-old grandma, or a tee­nie bop­per look­ing for a thrill.  But there is the whole other level I had not con­sid­ered and that is peo­ple who really do not want to meet in per­son, but who feel ful­filled with a harem of cyber-mates.  e-lation, it’s a great punny in my opinion.

e-lation by Jake Beck­man. Two cyber-canaries stare dream­ily into each oth­ers eyes.

e-lation was a nat­ural follow-on piece for the social media birds.  I have place two canaries star­ing dream­ily into each oth­ers’ eyes-that alone should give pause for thought-after all you really can’t see the per­son on the other end of the wire.  The back­ground is mot­tled, sug­gest­ing an insub­stan­tial venue.  The birds are perched on a swirly, green, heart-shaped con­tour.  One half of the out­line is over­laid with ASCII binary which reads e-lation.

I had a great deal of fun let­ting the acrylic flow in the back­ground of this paint­ing.  There was quite a bit of splat­ter­ing, drip­ping, flow­ing and all sorts of uncon­trolled activ­ity, which con­trasted strongly with paint­ing binary on the heart out­line (that took me three tries to find a good lay­out).  I hope you like it.

What do you think of the paint­ing, or cyber rela­tion­ships, or …?

Update: Details about e-lation, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.