Adult Swim: SUPER iam8bit: Old Games, New Art

Zelda's Slumber by Rich Pellegrino

There's not much of a downside to making old stuff new again. (For example: pizza from last week's lunch meeting.) The folks at the Los Angeles-based iam8bit Gallery, however, put the rest of us to shame. They've managed to convince over 100 artists to create original works based on old-school video games for their latest exhibition, SUPER iam8bit. Yes, your doodles of Sonic the Hedgehog in the margins of your math notebook are very nice. Now let's take a look at what the grown-ups are doing, okay?

SUPER iam8bit is on display through September 10, 2011. Check the website for details.

It's hard not to get nostalgic thinking about the games we played as children. They are a welcome juxtaposition to the complications, and frequent public humiliations, of adult life. Then, as now, all we really needed to be happy was a clunky controller in our hands and a few bits of data on the screen in front of us. Questions of logic were irrelevant. Why is the giant lizard dude kidnapping a princess? And why, for that matter, is a fat, hairy plumber trying to rescue her? Isn't she totally out of his league? No matter. We simply accepted the terms and set to work.

It's been over 30 years since the first video games started to pique young imaginations. Over that time, a lot has changed. Graphics have become increasingly realistic and game systems incredibly sophisticated. But the original games still draw our attention, and not just because nostalgia is in fashion. They are a starting point for the imagination to run loose, like a werewolf at a slumber party. With that in mind, in 2005, Jon Gibson decided to start an art show called iam8bit. At the time, video games were more than just a hobby for Gibson; they were also his livelihood. Gibson was working as a freelance games journalist when he got the idea.

"I was pitching stories about games culture," he told us. "I was fascinated by the people who were remixing and taking their own vision of what they loved and played.” The problem was, Gibson explains, he couldn't actually SELL stories about gaming culture. "They wanted previews," he sighed. One day, Gibson came upon a video game store next to an art gallery on Melrose Avenue, and his dream snapped into focus.

Tripping in the Mushroom Kingdom by Jack Teagle

We talked with Gibson outside the back entrance of iam8bit's new gallery space in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. Inside, it was impossible to hear each other over the music and the conversations of the excited fans (AKA “nerds”) who had waited in line for two hours to get in. The crowd was understandably eager. The iam8bit show, usually held annually, has been on hiatus for over two years while Gibson and his three partners searched for, found and renovated a new location for their exhibition. Aptly titled SUPER iam8bit, its new home is five times the size of its last location and packed to the gills with cool art.

The appeal is universal. "The reinterpretation of something that someone loves I feel can be applied across anything," Nick Ahrens, one of Gibson's partners, said. But there is something about the old games that make them particularly attractive as a subject. "The graphics were so bad that the artists kind of need their imaginations to fill in the missing pieces.”

“The graphics were so bad that the artists kind of need their imaginations to fill in the missing pieces.”

Comic book artist Dave Crosland explained the appeal of vintage games as a subject. "Video games were like comic books in that you could jump into them and escape into this weird world where you could just do anything," he said. On opening night, Crosland paid homage to the classic characters that started him on the path to cartooning by creating a live art piece with artist Jose Garibaldi. Over the course of the night, the two covered plywood with their favorite video game heroes, including Megaman and Samus Aran. You know who they are, don't you? Of course you do.

Some artists had darker interpretations of the classic games. Scott Belcastro, whose art is full of silhouettes and vast spaces, chose the Legend of Zelda as the subject for his painting. In it, a shadowy Link hunkers down and draws his bow as he prepares for Ganon to wash over him like a giant, black tidal wave. "It's about the little guy versus the big guy," Belcastro said. The images are sparse on purpose. He doesn't fill in too much detail because he wants the viewer to come up with his own interpretation of the outcome of the scene. After a bit of prodding, though, Belcastro told us how the scene in his painting ends.