She was formerly surrounded by dancers.

A Piece of art that really changed my idea of what art could be, was something that many people do not even consider to be art. The piece I have chosen to discuss is, at it’s core, a video game, called .hack. In the .hack series the player assumes the roll of a young man playing an online virtual reality video game in the near future. At first the game plays out like a standard M.M.O.R.P.G. (massively multiplayer online role playing game) with one exception, the game is not online. When you start the game your character logs into “The World” and controls his avatar called Kite. Within this false online game you receive email from other players that you meet, and it is soon discovered that all is not well in “The World”.  Glitches in the game have caused some players to go comatose and die if logged out of the game. As the games play out your character and his friends use information gathered from on and offline to discover what “The World” and it’s creators are hiding.

To call .hack simply a video game, however, does not do it justice. .hack was a four-part video game series,  four short animated films, several series of graphic novels, and an animated television series.  Each .hack game was packaged with a DVD containing a short anime film that followed several characters who were researching the strange events from outside “The World”. The graphic novels take place with various characters both before and after the events of the games, each shedding more like on the true problems with “The World”. The television series takes place just before the events of the games and includes several characters featured in the games.

.hack was an epic multimedia launch designed to fully immerse the players in a world within a world.  From the view point of the game, it’s easy to forget that the game is not actually online and your party of players are not other players. Each day you log into “The World” to meet up with your “friends” and discuss new developments inside and outside of “The World”. .hack was story telling at its most interactive and in depth, yet anyone could be satisfied with just one medium of the story. If you wanted to know more about what was happening in the world of .hack, you could explore the other mediums and discover more and more. Until the debut of .hack I had never considered a story and a world could be so completely immersive and interactive and despite being somewhat underappreciated by the gaming community I thought it was a remarkable idea.

A piece of art that I consider to be a great work, is Wes Anderson’s film, The Royal Tennenbaums. In addition to a brilliant story and all-star cast, The Royal Tennenbaums has some of the most striking cinematography I’ve see. You can clearly see that each shot was carefully composed. Bright colors are everywhere, but it is shot in such a way that the colors look slightly faded, much like the shining careers and potential of the Tennenbaum family, things look just slightly past their prime.

The soundtrack in the film is, in my opinion, perfect. The music written for the movie is great in and out of the film, and the songs chosen to be prominently featured in several scenes are incredibly fitting and really get you into the mood of the scene.

All in all, The Royal Tennenbaums is a fantastic movie that I consider to be one of my all time favorites.

I found this piece to be very elegant and attention grabbing but also full of potential meaning and symbolism. The fact that I don’t know the title or artist is part of the reason I enjoy this piece. Because I have no context or preconceived notions, the piece could mean literally anything.

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