Victor Morales 

is a director, performer and designer, whose work includes video animation and design, text, sound design, and movement. His solo work consists of an exploration of video game engines as simulation environments.

Victor Morales born in Venezuela, received a Law Degree from Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, in Caracas, in 1990. During his time there he was an active member of the University Theater Group, where he directed several plays, including writing and directing Mueca 23, for which he won the New Director’s Prize in the Festival de Teatro Para La Ciudad (Caracas).

 

Based in New York City since 1991, he completed a Master’s degree in Technology Applied to the Arts at New York University’s Gallatin Division, in 1992. He is a director, performer and designer, whose work includes video animation and design, text, sound design, and movement. Since 2003 he has been obsessed with the art of video game modifications and has implemented different game engines into most of the works he has participated in or created.

 

In 1992 he worked at the Wooster Group, as a video assistant to Chris Kondek. Later he began collaborating with Kondek (as a video designer and performer) in works such as: The Monkey King (2001), Dead Cat Bounce (2003) (Winner at Politic im Friem Theater, 2005), and Hier Ist the Apparat (2006), which were produced in Germany and the Netherlands, and regularly touring Europe. In 2001 he began collaborating with Joseph Silovsky (Designer/Collaborator Builder’s Association), producing several performance works together in New York including A Fish and a Shoe... Looking Back (Down) (2005), A Day of Leisure (2004), and Zero Mark Zero (2001). On September 2008 he was the video game designer/programmer for Baghdad Brennt at Theater Freiburg and produced the video design for AUTO by Gesine Dankwart, at the Hau Eins in Berlin (January 2009), also in 2009 he produced four solo shows along with the video designs for Ich Cyborg and Die Brüder Lowenherz at theater Freiburg. He was the artist in residence at the Festspielhaus St. Pölten, Austria (2009-2010), where he produced video designs for the Tonkunsler Orchestra and the new opera Playzero by Wolfgang Mitterrer. In the commercial world he has worked as a moving graphics designer for many TV stations and designer houses such as MTV, The Attik, NBC, Nth degree, Rust Company, and Post Works in NYC.

 

His solo work consists of an exploration of video game engines as simulation environments, where death and physics are transformed into dramatic and comedic real time performance. He has performed a number of his solo shows at Performance Space 122, The Little Theater in New York City, The Collapsable Hole in Brooklyn and at Gessner Allee in Zurich, Theater Freiburg and the HAU in Berlin. He is currently settled in Berlin.

 

Source: Victor Morales

 

 

Victor tells us more about his work: "I work with video game engines to make visual art. I usually show my visuals in live performances, generally in collaboration with other artists: musicians, dancers, actors and other visual artists. I like using this medium in performance because of its real time nature, I can trigger my images live, so it is a perfect tool for performance. I like to explore the surreal and psychedelic, and my process of making images is about the pursuit of 'errors, glitches and wrongdoings' within these amazing pieces of software; in other words I try to 'misuse' the software to find unexpected, unnatural and unique moving images. I generally use the CryEngine and it's Sanbox Editor, which in my opinion is the most powerful digital visual tool out there; sometimes I like to use the Source Engine and its developer tools combined with Garry's Mod. I like to modify these engines to get my own look and feel, and, whenever possible, i make original textures, models and write my own code."

 

Source: Triangulation

 

 

Victor Morales, berlin, software, Games, Humor

Reading

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (2007) by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack digital sampling of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world gone wild while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice. (The MIT Press)

 

SEE ALSO

Tarik Barri is an audiovisual composer based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Reflecting his interests in programming, drawing and composing into a coherent multimedial discipline, he developed and uses software that merges audio and visuals into a new audiovisual reality. (Sonic Acts Festival)

Ryoichi Kurokawa (1978) composes time based sculpture with digital generated materials and field recorded sources, and the minimal and the complexities coexist there. Ryoichi Kurokawa accepts sound and imagery as a unit not as separately, and constructs very exquisite and precise computer based works with the audiovisual language. That shortens mutual distance, the reciprocity and the synchronization of sound and visual composition. (Ryoichi Kurokawa)

Digital Harmony (1980): On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art – John Whitney, Sr. wanted to create a dialog between "the voices of light and tone." All of his early experiments in film and the development of sound techniques lead toward this end. He felt that music was an integral part of the visual experience; the combination had a long history in man's primitive development and was part of the essence of life. His theories On the complementarity of Music and Visual Art were explained in his book, Digital Harmony, published by McGraw-Hill in 1980. (Paradise 2012)

‘vE-”jA: Art + Technology of Live Audio-Video (2006) by Xarene Eskander is a global snapshot of an exploding genre of tech-art performance: VJing and live audio-video. The book covers 40 international artists with 400+ colour images and 50+ movies and clips on an accompanying DVD and web downloads. (VJ Book)

Bob Sabiston (*1967) is an American film art director, computer programmer, and creator of the Rotoshop software program for computer animation. (Wikipedia)