The work consists of a Free Software Game Boy emulator whose rendering system has been (pathologically) rewritten to degenerate over time.

 

Game entities mutate into background and interface elements, or appear as fragments of the games binary code. Text begins to emerge as a jumble of characters, sprites and binary data. Scanline bytes are miscopied, transformed and duplicated.

 

Memory is blitted into sections of the screen, as the inside of the game seeps to the outside. Variations in the rendering behaviour are triggered by user interactions implicit in the game play and are manipulated by a Cellular Automata 'metabolism' giving rise to inter-related rendering symptoms.

 

The emulator displays an unpredictable agency that injects a subjectifying process into the rendering of the software instructions it executes.

2001/02

code as readymade:

As software, the emulator is provided as open source code available for others to extend; the binary, source and documentation can be considered as component parts of the work.

Thanks to Gilgamesh and Laguna for releasing their Free Software 'gnuboy' from which this modification is derived. Rather than a project that has been written from scratch, the code in this sense may be considered a 'readymade' into which an artistic intervention has been made.

 

 

The recast code exists as a dysfunctional branch of the gnuboy emulator's project tree.

The interventions in the code have been documented and commented, allowing for others to add their own attitudinal elements and rendering ailments.