ART PROJECTS
- Photography: a collection of some of my photography projects
- REC: Haw Par Villa: art-philosophy collaboration using photogrammetry
- Something Beautiful: short film based on Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" thought experiment
- The Geometric Electric guitar: an electric guitar design inspired by geometric principles
- Sunday League Striker: Sudden Death: a turn-based football roguelike
- Random Crime Generator: a random sentence generator about crime
Photography
Creators: Eric Kerr
A collection of some of my photography projects.
REC: Haw Par Villa
Creators: Olivier Perriquet and Eric Kerr (2018)
Haw Par Villa (HPV) is a project based on Haw Par Villa, Singapore, that will take the form of a virtual reality experience. The project is based on the architecture of the Tiger Balm magnates the Aw brothers, especially Haw Par Villa in Singapore, originally built in the 1930s. The park is a syncretic patchwork of mythologies, religious instruction, and morality tales embodied by sculptures, dioramas, and gardens. We want to explore how this process unfolds through new technologies of 3D reconstruction and how this might cause us to reflect on our own memories both collective and individual, the suspension of time, and visionary environments.
Demo 1, Demo 2, Demo 3, Demo 4
Position statement presented at the Asia Research Institute
Something Beautiful
Creators: Sarah-Tabea Sammel and Eric Kerr © (2017)
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL is a short film exploring Wittgenstein’s thought experiment, "The Beetle in a Box". Wittgenstein supposed that our minds (by analogy, boxes) carry the concept or notion of a beetle. However, no one can see into someone else’s box. There might be an identical, a different, or no beetle at all in the other's box. The beetle as such becomes constructed and constituted via the language game; comprehension is achieved through communication and exchange that allows for the beetle to become consensus. SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL asks how a word - "beautiful" - is used, floats in-between minds, and gets attached in our society and offers the explanation that beauty is between the eyes of the beholders, onlookers, spectators. What do we agree upon? What is "beauty" put upon? Would something beautiful exist without humans creating and nurturing the term?
Premiere: F3 (Fågelbo Film Festival), Fort Lauderdale, Florida. November 2018.
The Geometric Electric guitar
Creator: Eric Kerr (2022)
The Geometric Electric guitar is a six-string left-handed electric guitar with a Floyd Rose-style tremelo bridge. Here are some photos of the process:
Sunday League Striker: Sudden Death
Creator: Eric Kerr (2018-2026)
Write about what you know, they say. And so: Sunday League Striker. You play as a striker trying to get the ball into the net past an increasingly difficult opponent. The game is built on the bones of a classic dungeon crawler. Instead of a dungeon, however, the player adventures through boggy pitches, corrupt referees, and hungover defenders. It grew out of the libtcod tutorial by João F. Henriques (via the Python tcod tutorial).
Sunday League is pub teams, council pitches, mismatched kits, players with day jobs, and a level of commitment that is, I argue, admirable.
Roguelikes are a genre of role-playing game descended from the 1980 video game Rogue. People like to argue about what counts as a roguelike (relegating allegedly inauthentic efforts as "roguelights") but, for me, not caring too much about gatekeeping, these are the main features which I have tried to convert into the world of casual football that I love.
- Procedural generation. The dungeon, the pitch, is randomly generated. Every pitch you play on will be different with mud patches, puddles, frozen ground, and so on. Get stuck in the mud (or trap defenders in it). Slip in a puddle and the ball might shoot off in an unexpected direction.
- Permadeath. There's no save-and-reload. When the match ends, it ends, and you start a new one. Lose time if you are tackled or the ball goes out of play. Pick up two yellow cards and you're sent off. The Dwarf Fortress crowd call this "losing is fun". We might call it Sunday.
- Unidentified pickups. Pickups appear as coloured "?" marks at first. The colours are shuffled every game, and you only learn what one does by stepping on it. Some will help you: a shield against tackles, a burst of pace, a powerful kick. Some are regular features of Sunday League: cramp, a clash of heads, a yellow card.
- Turn- and grid-based. The pitch is a grid of tiles; each arrow press is a turn, for you and your opponent.
Built with Python and python-tcod. Windows build made with PyInstaller. All code by Eric Kerr.
Random Crime Generator
Creator: Eric Kerr (2017)
There is a degree of randomness in any justice system. My first degree is in Scots Law and so it makes a kind of biographical sense that the first game I'm uploading is about jurisprudence.
This is not so much a game as a random sentence generator (although there are some gamey-elements, so that there is some kind of replayability). An absurd joke about the strange language that legal systems generate, and preserve, almost automatically. In the Court of Random Crimes, all that we know is the name of the alleged crime. No evidence, no witnesses, no testimony.
Many verdicts are possible, including the now obsolete "not proven" verdict from Scots law. A popular joke in Scotland is that if your judge tells you your case is "not proven" they are just politely omitting the "yet".
I think the game highlights a curious feature of language in relation to criminal justice: Almost for any crime the game generates, if you squint a little, it sort of feels right, once you are prepared to allow the odd creativity of legalese. One can imagine what crime might have been committed, in some strange legal system, where the accused is guilty of "stalemating gains while expiring agents" (to cite the example that randomly generated as I was writing this). The grammatical constructions are very simple each time. This has parallels with Derrida's reading of J.L. Austin in which he points out that it cannot be known, just by the words used, whether a given speech act is sincere or ironic, a joke (Derrida 1977). Here, it is impossible to tell, just by the words used, whether the criminal offense is real or fake.
FEATURES
- millions of possible crimes (and billions of possible events)
- defend your client (and risk angering the Lord Ordinary) or remain silent (and risk the crime being written into the books)
- 11 possible verdicts including Scots Law's now-obsolete "not proven"
- win by freeing 10 verbs from the criminal code before the judge becomes completely unreasonable!
REFERENCES
Derrida, Jacques. 1977. Signature-event-context, Glyph 1: 172-97
SCREENSHOTS
LICENSE
Random Crime Generator v0.1 (2017) is written in Python 3. v0.2 (2017) is written in Twine and Javascript. v0.3 (2026) is a major update that adds some game elements. It is an open source programme licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
You can play v0.3 here.
Git is here.