Last month, the Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts gallery in Winnipeg, Canada exhibited A Slow Year, a video game designed by Ian Bogost, professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media. The gallery visitors were invited to sit in front of a cathode-ray tube TV which was hooked up to a vintage Atari game console.

“[The piece] draws its inspiration from poetry, from haiku and imagism, the idea of precision in the image,” explained Bogost.  “When you program with the Atari, you have to program within these very stringent technical constraints, and I saw a connection with the material constraints of poetry.”