Netherlands - Brody Condon will be presenting new work in Museum Het Domein from 14 October until 12 November 2006: defaultProperties ();, marks Brody Condon’s first computer game art installation based on a historic Christian theme.  Condon has created a non-interactive, animated re-interpretation of the baptism scene from the Triptych of Jean des Trompes by Gerard David (1505) using current game development technology and visual styles.

This ‘self-playing' game depicts a twitching, chubby figure of Asian decent work defaultProperties (); apparently lost in prayer in a Northern European medieval landscape next to a bored man in furs idling by the river with a flaming sword.  Meanwhile the sky is filling with a swirling extra-dimensional portal from which is emerging a astral being of unknown but seemingly royal nature.  The title defaultProperties (); also refers to this other dimension, with an analogy in programming language.  Thematically, with this presentation Condon develops his investigation into the genealogy of ‘New Age’ and Christian thinking, the visual styles of computer games, and with fantasy art and its relations to contemporary culture.  The work includes referencing real world events and characters in computer game environments, or translating game elements into performative events and sculpture.

Brody Condon is currently one of the best known artists who fabricates visual works where computer games and game culture leak into our lived experience.  Condon uses the genre to blur the boundary between fact and fiction and to comment upon it with a sharply ironic, sometimes gallows style of humor.  In Suicide Solution Condon has more than fifty ‘first person shooters’ commit suicide, undermining not just the object of the game but also alluding to charged connotations around suicide (attacks).  The scenes are edited into a ‘self-playing game’ in which, like defaultProperties ();, the viewer/player has no control over the action but is visually immersed in a computer game.   In these works, among other things, Condon references the rather stilted movement of people in 3D animated games while using public figures like Elvis or the nineteen-sixties New Age guru Ram Dass as his main character or protagonist to hover like a logo between fiction and reality.

Born in Mexico in 1974, Brody Condon has participated in numerous international exhibitions including the Stedelijk Museum Post CS as well as the Whitney Biennial 2004 and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.  He also attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2005.

Visit Museum Het Domein at : www.hetdomein.nl/