Christof Ressi - Composer - Media artist
Christof Ressi (born 1989) is an Austrian composer, performer, arranger, software developer and multimedia artists. He studied classical composition, jazz arrangement and computer music. As a composer, he works in various fields of music, such as contemporary classical, jazz, dance/theater or experimental electronics. He arranges music for all kinds of ensembles and instruments, including big band and orchestra. Besides writing instrumental music, he has a keen interest in interactive live-electronics and audio-visual art and in his “game over” series he explores the artistic potential of computer games. As a software developer he is involved in several open source projects, like Pure Data and SuperCollider. Together with clarinet player Szilard Benes he regularly performs as a duo, playing both audio-visuals compositions and improvisations. His music has been performed in various countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Mexico, Japan, China, UK, USA and South-Africa.
game_over_v0.3.2
an interactive computer game installation
2019
The player is meant to explore large 2D game worlds and interact freely with the surroundings and inhabiting creatures. The game worlds are collages of well-known vintage video game genres, sometimes even juxtaposing contradictory "game modes", like side scrolling, top-down dungeon crawler or isometric pseudo 3D, creating bizarre and confusing scenarios.
The possibilities for musical discovery are manifold: everything the player touches will either create new sounds or change the overall sound of the environment. There are many autonomous non-player-characters which the player can interact with in various ways, leading to suprising musical patterns. Furthermore, the author intentationally kept certain glitches and loopholes in the game architecture ("easter eggs") which can be discovered by the curious player.
game_over was developed within the artistic research project "GAPPP" at the Institute of Electronic Music in Graz, Austria and was funded by the "österreichische Wissenschaftsfond". It has won the "Student Award for Excellence in the Application of New Technologies in Sound Art and Sound Design" at the international symposium "klingt gut! Symposium on Sound" in Hamburg, Germany, and has been presented at the international conference NIME 2018 at Virginia Tech, USA.