Vietnam Romance
Computer game, installation, mixed-media live show, 2014-Overview Video + Images Process Features Demos + Artifacts
Introduction
Vietnam Romance recreates and interrogates the fictionalized history of the Vietnam War and its culturally commodified remains through a mash-up of cultural artifacts drawn primarily from Hollywood film culture as well as war literature, comic books, popular music, collectable war memorabilia, and adventure tourist packages.
The project takes various forms: computer game, collectable card game, live performance / puppet show/ dinner theatre, and video installation.
Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and Deathmatch veterans pitting tourists vs. adventurers, history vs. its fantasies, and games vs. cinema. Film critic Ed Halter, described a film version of the project as exploring “a peculiarly American memory-trip, one in which the legacy of a gruesome war has become indistinguishable from pleasurable, if mythic-tragic, entertainments.”
Background
Vietnam Romance is produced by a small, rotating team; many people with different backgrounds and skill sets have touched this project over the years. Eddo Stern has been working on this project since around 2012 or 2013. He works primarily as a producer and designer, collaborating with current and former students like myself.
I joined the project as a programmer after finishing my degree in 2014, and have worked on it off-and-on ever since. As people have joined and left the project, my role has expanded to include production tasks like character animation, UI design, various visual effects, and designing and prototyping many of the game's core features.
When I joined, several other people had built key features of the game, sometimes hacking things together, sometimes engineering very robust systems. This, combined with Eddo's constantly evolving vision of the game (including multiple versions like the standalone computer game, generative software installation, and live immersive theater version) has meant that the development has proceeded for a long time on an ad-hoc basis.
context:
artist assistant to Eddo Stern
roles:
tools:
artist assistant to Eddo Stern
roles:
-
programmer
-
animation
-
design
tools:
-
unity
-
blender
-
photoshop
- c#
funding / awards:
Vietnam Romance has been generously supported by the Beall Center for Art And Technology through an Andy Warhol Foundation grant, and by The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts and by the UCLA Council On Research.
exhibited:
Vietnam Romance has been generously supported by the Beall Center for Art And Technology through an Andy Warhol Foundation grant, and by The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts and by the UCLA Council On Research.
exhibited:
- Dundee Contemporary Arts (Dundee, Scotland) , July 2016
- Cirrus Gallery (LA), Feb 2016
- UCLA Game Art Festival/The Hammer Museum (LA), Nov 2015
- Northern Spark Festival (MN), July 2015
- Postmasters Gallery (NYC) June 2015
- Babycastles (NYC) June 2015
- Angeles Gate (LA), April, 2015
- Indiecade East/Museum of the Moving Image
- (NYC), April, 2015
-Amaze Festival (Berlin, Germany), April 2015
- Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Canada) March, 2015
- Beall Center (Irvine, CA) Jan 2015
- Beit Ha’ir Museum (Tel Aviv, Israel), May 2014