Antiques Collectables and Fine Art

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<p><img src="http://rhizome.org/imagebase/netartnews/20080620.gif" align="left" hspace="5"><p>Clicking through Portland artist <a href="http://www.myspace.com/tabor">Tabor Robak's</a> site <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/">Reality CPU</a> feels like stumbling upon a scrambled memory bank of images captured sometime around 1993: a dream-arcade of faux vector graphics, neon color schemes, Uzi-blasting last action heroes and gratuitous drop-shadows. Though connected stylistically, and through semi-random branches of downplayed links, each page presents a micro-logic unto itself, miniature systems crafted from carefully chaotic layers of animated gifs. In his <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/homezone/statement.html">artist's statement</a>, Robak refers to the structure of pages as "levels," and gaming provides an operative iconography for Reality CPU as a whole. Abstracted fighter-ships battle a wireframed boss in <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/gif/Master%20Computer/web-content/index.html"><i>Master Computer</i></a>; in <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/flash/def/defcon.html"><i>Defcon</i></a>, a green-screen interactive global wargames map declares "Game Over" after only one thermonuclear hit; <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/44/44.html"><i>4x4</i></a> and <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/flash/suprise/suprise.html"><i>Surprise Attack</i></a> resemble fractured intros for old coin-ops. But there's more to Robak's design than a mere retrogaming vibe; metaphors for human consciousness are at play. The elegant pink-and-blue <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/FTP%20Folder/FTP/ftp.html"><i>FTP</i></a> illustrates a basic act of inter-entity communication, <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/flash/spirit/spirit.HTML"><i>Spiritual Healing</i></a> mimics a John Whitney-style computer mandala, and the coolly hypnotic, quasi-Kubrickian <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/hard/CHOOSE.html"><i>Life in Space</i></a> combines four cinematic screens with looping monochrome overlay into an evocative, frozen moment. Robak writes that, as if moving through video game levels, the experience of each viewer will be singularly their own, due to "the limitations of the simple web technology being used to display many animations at once." The effect, he says, "is similar to an individual's unique perception of reality." - Ed Halter</p>
<i>Image: Tabor Robak, <a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/flash/suprise/suprise.html">Surprise Attack</a></i>
<p><a href="http://www.realitycpu.com/">http://www.realitycpu.com/</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rhizome-news/~4/316047378" height="1" width="1"/>

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Source: Rhizome News
Rhizome News from Rhizome.org -- A Daily News Service Covering the World of New Media Art.