Julian Oliver: levelHead

Monday 20th October at 7 pm, Kibela - the exhibition of the New Zealand artist Julian Oliver. levelHead, a spatial memory game was presented within the festival Kiblix - Open Code for artistic purposes.

Julian Oliver is a New Zealand born artist, developer, teacher and occasional writer based in Madrid, Spain. He has presented his papers and projects at many international electronic-art events and conferences since 1996. In 1998 he established the artistic game-development collective, Select Parks.

He has given numerous workshops and master classes in game-design, artistic game-development, object-oriented programming for artists, UNIX/Linux, virtual architecture, interface design, augmented reality and open source development practices worldwide. He's a long-time advocate o the use of free software in artistic production, distribution and education.

levelHead
a spatial memory game

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. In one of these rooms is a character By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player's spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.

Read more about the artist: http://julianoliver.com

The exhibition is on display until 25.10.2008.