Overview - VR — Nick Crockett

Introduction

Vietnam Romance recreates and interrogates the fictionalized history of the Vietnam War and its culturally commodified remains through a mash-up of cultural artifacts drawn primarily from Hollywood film culture as well as war literature, comic books, popular music, collectable war memorabilia, and adventure tourist packages.

The project takes various forms: computer game, collectable card game, live performance / puppet show/ dinner theatre, and video installation.

Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and Deathmatch veterans pitting tourists vs. adventurers, history vs. its fantasies, and games vs. cinema. Film critic Ed Halter, described a film version of the project as exploring “a peculiarly American memory-trip, one in which the legacy of a gruesome war has become indistinguishable from pleasurable, if mythic-tragic, entertainments.”

Background

Vietnam Romance is produced by a small, rotating team; many people with different backgrounds and skill sets have touched this project over the years. Eddo Stern has been working on this project since around 2012 or 2013. He works primarily as a producer and designer, collaborating with current and former students like myself.

I joined the project as a programmer after finishing my degree in 2014, and have worked on it off-and-on ever since. As people have joined and left the project, my role has expanded to include production tasks like character animation, UI design, various visual effects, and designing and prototyping many of the game's core features.

When I joined, several other people had built key features of the game, sometimes hacking things together, sometimes engineering very robust systems. This, combined with Eddo's evolving vision of the game (including multiple versions like the standalone computer game, generative software installation, and live immersive theater version) has meant that the development has proceeded for a long time on an ad-hoc basis.

context:
artist assistant to Eddo Stern

roles:

programmer
animation
design

tools:

unity
blender
photoshop
c#

funding / awards:
Vietnam Romance has been generously supported by the Beall Center for Art And Technology through an Andy Warhol Foundation grant, and by The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts and by the UCLA Council On Research.

exhibited:

Dundee Contemporary Arts (Dundee, Scotland) , July 2016
Cirrus Gallery (LA), Feb 2016
UCLA Game Art Festival/The Hammer Museum (LA), Nov 2015
Northern Spark Festival (MN), July 2015
Postmasters Gallery (NYC) June 2015
Babycastles (NYC) June 2015
Angeles Gate (LA), April, 2015
Indiecade East/Museum of the Moving Image
(NYC), April, 2015 -Amaze Festival (Berlin, Germany), April 2015
Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Canada) March, 2015
Beall Center (Irvine, CA) Jan 2015
Beit Ha’ir Museum (Tel Aviv, Israel), May 2014

Video + Images >