originally created in 1999, i was completely surprised to get curated for the microwave media art festival with this piece. i will have to write more about it in the future but for now i made available the slides of my artist talk i gave there.

the catalog text from the microwave festival says:

TeleZone is an award winning installation in the widely known Ars Electronica Centre. It was developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab. TeleZone consisted of an industry robot and a web interface. Web users were able to use the robot to build architectural structures. The whole architecture consisted of tiny cubes that the robot arm could move. The initial setup was built by architects and artists. A copy of the original website can be found here.

In 1999 Martin downloaded the vrml data of the whole setup. He wrote (hacked together) a converter to transform this architectural data into so-called “brushes”, the building blocks of unreal tournament maps. He used the unreal tournament map editor to assemble these brushes piece-by-piece in order to get a landscape consisting of all buildings of the original TeleZone installation. Since it only consisted of cubes and the architecture was never intended for being used like this, the resulting “map” was unplayable in an interesting way. The omnipresent enemy “bots” were stumbling around confused by the abstract architecture. So in a certain way it naturally developed into a kind of deconstruction of the original first person shooter. He also did some minor changes to the way we usually interact with first person shooters like removing the weapons (which proved to additionally disorientate the bots).

computer game mod (telezone vrml files, vireal converter, unreal editor and engine)

produced 1999-2000

show: 2005 microwave international media art festival, hong kong