L.A.'s underground art scene comes alive in new video game, ‘Blippo+': L.A. arts and culture this weekend

Los Angeles Times

3 days ago

More than 100 artists, musicians, comedians, actors and performers from L.A.'s thriving, multifaceted underground art scene are featured in a new experimental video game named 'Blippo+.' Created by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, with music by Bechtolt and Rob Kieswetter, the trio behind the L.A.-based post-pop band YACHT (Young Americans Challenging High Technology), the game is part video art installation, part interactive theater. It was created for the newfangled gaming console Playdate, which was released in 2022 and purposefully conjures old-school devices like the Nintendo Game Boy, with a black-and-white, 1-bit display.
'This is essentially our bootleg way of making television, by skipping all the gatekeepers and going straight to a distribution platform that is still open to artist's weird experiments, a.k.a. video games,' said Evans, in an interview Thursday in advance of the game's exhibition party at Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Highland Park.
'Hollywood [production] has left Los Angeles, so the people that are here have to scramble to figure out what to do,' added Bechtolt. 'So we moved to where there's lots of funding, and an openness for experimentation. And that's the video game world, indie video games, specifically.'
Playdate's low-res format was ideal for 'Blippo+,' which rolls out in a looping, 11-week cycle, with new programming — original, avant-garde soaps, sitcoms, news, weather and talk shows— arriving every Thursday at 10 a.m. PDT. Bechtolt and Evans collaborated with director JJ Stratford, a longtime video artist and music video maker, who runs the all-analog Telefantasy Studios in Glendale, dedicated to, according to its website, 'bringing the strange, surreal, and speculative to life.'
'She's a scholar of video arts, and an artist herself,' explained Bechtolt of Stratford. 'When all of the TV studios in Los Angeles converted to digital, they just threw out their analog equipment. So JJ has been collecting this stuff for years and years, and now she has a full-on 1982 television studio.'
The programming on 'Blippo+' was filmed over the course of a year using the kind of tube cameras common in television studios before the digital era, and employing the talents of the band's aforementioned artist-collaborators including artists Martine Syms and Maya Man; musicians Staz Lindes (of the Paranoyds), Calvin Johnson (of K Records / Beat Happening) Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie); and comedians Whitmer Thomas, Clay Tatum, Mitra Jouhari, Donny Divanian, Kyle Mizono, Anna Seregina, Steve Hernandez, Tipper Newton and Brent Weinbach.
Post-production took another year, and the game was finally released on Playdate in May. Next month 'Blippo+' will roll out on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Playdate was created by the Portland-based software development and video game publishing company Panic Inc. YACHT originated in Portland and the people behind Panic were longtime fans. They approached the band almost a decade ago at a music festival in North Carolina.
'They gave us this open invitation to make something as YACHT if we ever had an idea for a video game,' said Bechtolt.
Evans added that Panic's interest was likely fueled by the band's reputation for creating experimental multimedia art projects that exist both on and offline, including co-founding the Triforium Project, which worked to restore and revitalize artist Joseph Young's controversial Triforium sound-and-light sculpture in downtown Los Angeles, and resulted in a variety of live art and music performances at the site.
'Blippo+' is a natural extension of YACHT's immersion in underground art and obsession with how analog and digital tools can collide to create new forms and functions for a post-postmodern world. It was also proudly made without the use of AI, Bechtolt and Evans noted.
I'm arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, heading back underground where I belong. Here's your weekly dose of arts news.
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