looking outwards-07

Ben Fry – Mario Soup/All Streets

This work immediately intrigued me because of its nostalgic draw, but the arrangement and presentation itself make it become a truly standalone artwork. The method of extracting data that Ben Fry uses throughout his work really made me think about how data, in itself, doesn’t really mean anything unless assigned to a certain context or presentation. For example, All Streets is about the concentration and representation of roads in the USA on a map; however, the actual illustration of the data combined with the contextualization of what that data represents geographically, which is in constant engagement with how audiences interact with the map when making sense of it in their intersubjective interpretation of the map (what they call home, what they’ve assumed borders were, what they’ve assumed population/road densities were in certain places).

Thus, in Mario Soup, this method becomes even more meta. The data itself that was specifically made for art is revealed to the audience to be nothing more than pixels of color themselves by the reorganization of that data. Especially interesting is that this was how the data was arranged by the programmers of the game for the utility of the game itself, so utility organization has been flipped on its head as an aesthetic itself when was supposed to be the means of a different aesthetic–that for a game. This was done by decoding the raw data of a Nintendo game cartridge as a four-color image, according to Fry.

https://benfry.com/mariosoup/