Console hacker Paul Johnson projects himself into the game.
Growing up in a Minnesota family of programmers - including a father who worked for McDonnell Douglas and NASA on the Apollo projects - Paul Johnson spent whole afternoons scripting games on his five computers. He wrote his first low-res effort, Blow the Bridge, in Basic on an Apple II+ when he was 10 years old. Now the New York-based artist is applying his tech skills to creating short videos that play on ingeniously crafted projectors. A five-year mini-retrospective of his work, including his latest fascination - game console projectors - is on view this month as part of the Animations exhibit at Brooklyn's P.S.1 gallery (www.ps1.org).
Inspired by a freelancing stint producing on-air spots for MTV, Johnson completed his first video/projector art piece in 1995. It lasted only 28 seconds: "I was commercially inspired," he jokes. "The objects are a vehicle for the video," he says, explaining his focus on projection machines, which he makes out of flashlights, juice containers, PDAs, and small appliances. The Pentium-based game consoles he coded allow people to watch in real time as networked computers fight each other to the death. Of the Age of Empire-inspired games running on his tightly controlled system, the artist remarks: "They're an exercise in artificial intelligence." Johnson designed, built, and programmed everything in his TriBeCa studio. But he didn't always have the right materials on hand: He purchased an analog vacuum-forming machine on eBay from a man in Kansas for $1,000 to coat the aqua-resin moldings.
His next commission - and his first attempt at sculpting sound - is an active noise cancellation installation for the Paris Metro that debuts later this year. He's using ANC technology to block all sound on a section of the subway platform. If it works, he'll try it out in the loudest of cities, New York.
