QuakeIII intervention. Presentation format: Three prints and live computer screen.
> julianoliver.com/images/projects/ioq3apaint/galleries/

Whoever said computer games were only for playing? Or, why not use computer games for something other than their intended purpose? In a series of works that began in 2002, Julian Oliver explores the potential of computer games—especially the legendary game Quake which was instrumental to 3D gaming for years—as tools for artistic creation. In the auto-generative software Ioq3aPaint, the most recent manifestation of the series, Oliver uses the Quake III engine to generate a principally endless number of unique images. By integrating bots in the game, which serve as “digital brushes,” changes and moves in the game are registered and visualized as graphic marks. The resulting abstractions of stretched time and space subversively recognize the art history of modernist painting, taking it and the real life imagery of Quake for a spin into a creative maelstrom of hitherto undiscovered, unintended, aesthetic potential.