When Christo and Jeanne-Claude unveiled The Gates, a massive collection of saffron-colored flags covering Central Park, last year, public reaction was mixed. It’s pleasant enough, the consensus seemed to be, but . . . why? Why, some wondered, did The Gates exist? What purpose did it serve? The rebuttal, which seemed sufficient to those who offered it, was that it was art. Its purpose was to be art. Hardly a satisfying answer for those of us who think of art as what you call something you can’t think of any other name for.
Which brings us to Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS. Not so much a game as an interactive, multimedia art experience, Electroplankton defies easy description. It’s nominally a music-based game, but it has little in common with the Guitar Heroes and Dance Dance Revolutions of the world. None of the usual video-game vocabulary applies. There are no difficulty levels, no puzzles, no bosses. You can’t even win or lose. Instead, you select one of 10 kinds of the eponymous creatures and begin to, well, explore the studio space.
Electroplankton is the brainchild of Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai, who’s spoken of in glowing terms in the instruction manual and on the back of the box. In the manual, he sheds a little light on his inspiration for each electroplankton. Of the first, he says, “I created Tracy thinking about how fun it would be if the lines I drew with a stylus turned into sounds.” He does not mention what hallucinogens he was taking at the time, or where I could get some.
But, true to his vision, when playing with the Tracy plankton, all you need do is draw lines for them to follow and they’ll make noise. The sounds vary depending on the shape of the lines and the speed with which you draw them, and you can manipulate them further with the D-pad. There’s a lot you can do from that point, like discover what sounds they make when you write your name or draw anatomically accurate pictures. Thing is, it usually ends up sounding like a bunch of droning gibberish, not unlike what passes for trance these days.
The variety of electroplankton means that though you’re bound to find something here that appeals to you, you’re more likely to find things that don’t. The “Beatnes” allows you to scratch over a looping Super Mario Bros theme, except instead of manipulating vinyl you’re tapping on snake-like creatures. Trust me, it works. I also enjoyed the “Rec Rec,” which is nothing more than four recordable audio tracks; you record your voice or other sounds using the DS’s built-in microphone and then listen to the results on loop.
Some others, such as the “Lumiloop,” seem pointless and don’t offer such simple pleasures as hearing yourself say the word “balls” over and over in three-part harmony. The Lumiloop are five electroplankton that you can spin around by quickly drawing circles with the stylus. When you do so, they emit tones! Imagine that!
