Ecco the Dolphin, the 1993 game for Sega Genesis, turns you into a bottlenose dolphin who travels through time to combat hostile aliens in Earth’s oceans and on an alien spacecraft. I remember its tropical graphics only vestigially, like a dream buried somewhere beneath that seapunk wave. But the dream feeling reverberates through ECCOS, a new video by artist Andrew Norman Wilson. By video, I mean something more like a screensaver: a six-hour-long video that gets trippy with the already-spacey soundtrack from Ecco. Wilson combines this with gameplay video he found on Youtube and then manipulated. It’s game as furniture, not something to watch, but, Rhizome writes, “a backdrop for thought and other activities.”
The project utilizes an input output system, in which he employs the simple “change speed” and “echo” effects in Final Cut Pro and pushes them to their maximum values. Wilson has diagrammed the process, relating it to kindred experiments like Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. In that spirit, ECCOS seeks–and finds–a limit within the music itself.
Videos by VICE
You can listen to ECCOS on Wilson’s Soundcloud page, and Rhizome has a sampling of ECCOS in its monthly Download feature (last month’s featured Paper Rad). Rhizome’s annual benefit auction happens in New York on February 26.
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