Fine Art Photography School of Fine Art
Jonathan Pratt
Jonathan Pratt is a new media artist and curator. His work combines compression studies and glitch; in the nuances, anomalies and intricacies of the digital realm, and how this can be visually manipulated, or shown tangibly to an audience. He creates immersive experiences – many of which curated by himself and through collaboration – that invite viewers to reconsider the boundaries between virtual and tangible. Exposing and even appreciating technical errors as a form of art, there is an evident playfulness in presenting digital quirks, flaws and anomalies as an interesting and thought provoking alternative to digital efficiency.
Trees
Playfully satirical reinterpretations on the unconvincing method of billboarding in video games, in which a texture which belongs to no model rotates to face the player at all times. Fascinated by the attempt to convey such a vast entity with a file of such a limited size, these enlarged sculptures hint at the alterations made to the original file through translation from the real world into the digital by pasting the image onto synthetic wood.
LOD
LOD (Level of Detail) refers to the amount of detail granted to a model or texture in a game environment based on its proximity to the player. When far from the player or generally out of site, a model will convert to a lower resolution, lower poly version of its self to conserve processing power and reduce memory consumption. This video work intends to convey this concept in motion.
Screen Peak
A modified rendition of Medal of Honor Underground’s ‘Metro-Plex’ multiplayer map on the original Sony Playstation pays homage to a long since deceased era of gaming. This work further problematizes the issue of screen peaking by granting two players in a 1v1 match the opportunity to see through level geometry, pre-empting their opponent’s next moves as they navigate a stripped environment.
Buildings
To optimize the performance of a game, typically only the textures and geometry that is visible to the player within the conventional, user intended playable areas is rendered to save on memory. The result is the illusion of complete structures, however when viewed from unintended angles, they appear flat and fractured, like model buildings on a film set. They defy laws of physics and space that we would find within our real world.
Your Ad Here
Your Ad Here is a collaborative project, asking other artists to consider how they might each approach producing imagery for virtual billboards that are as large in stature as they are small in file size, questioning our existence within virtual spaces and the lengths individuals may go to when given the opportunity to push their own narratives on the general public.
Each participant was assigned a billboard from a PS2 video game and asked to produce a replacement texture of the same size in pixels as the original, given total freedom over the content they can display.
New York Ad-Block
A single lap of the New York City Circuit in Polyphony’s Gran Turismo 4 with 427 unique advertisements replaced with the Minecraft placeholder texture. This is an accompanying artwork for my ‘Your Ad Here’ project and aims to more blatantly highlight the absurd quantity of advertisements in the media we consume.
The Ghost as Data
A visual translation into pixel information of saved game data from Polyphony’s Gran Turismo 5, belonging to my father. This saved data stores a ‘ghost’, a 1:1 recounting of player actions that can be used to observe high scores in real time, such as the lap times in a racing game. This monolith of code acts as both a memory of my father, but also as a means of interacting with him again virtually indefinitely once re translated into its original form.
