Born in Dublin and living in London, Vivienne Griffin studied fine art at City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Griffin is a recent recipient of an Oram Award, named after legendary producer and electronic musician Daphne Oram, the award celebrates innovation in sound and music. Most recent exhibitions are Manchester International Festival 2021, the AGM in Somerset House at St Mary le Strand 2021, for Montez Press Radio in NYC, Griffin is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast at the Sonic Arts Research Center. They are represented by Bureau, NYC. They are currently working on a video game that functions as a music interface and writing poetry. Their upcoming album Music For Dead People (or requiems) will be out in 2022.
I found Vivienne’s recent work in Unreal Engine somewhat frustrating and more like a gimmicky demo. It’s not that I don’t think of games as art, quite the opposite, I just don’t believe it’s very beneficial to apply the modern art mentality of ‘ready made’-ing everything. I think my background in games, and previous experience in games engines made me feel like the piece was an uninspiring collection of prefab assets and devalued the potential of the medium.
The game Proteus was the first game that explicitly me think about the game environment as a composition tool. You would walk around an environment and in-game assets would add to the music as instruments (such as walking past flowers.)
I previously dabbled with changing the sounds of a platform game I was making. Jumping triggered a kick and landing a snare etc.
For a while, I was very interested in the idea of creating simulated environments in games, and continue to be in relation to sound. This stemmed from watching films by Chantel Ackerman, as well as reading about the One City Block game design concept, and playing the indie game It’s Winter.
I find something appealing about the mundane escapism.