2003
In 2011 I made a piece called "Ancient Area Network" which depicts a LAN Party in an old building that wasn't anything like the half-timbered house I lived in for many years, but it was my attempt to capture the atmosphere and chaos these gatherings had. I started this cycle 10 years ago with a depiction of a LAN Party and I'm closing it with another. This time with more delpherian touches to it. Mr. Wanderer is back with a whole duffle bag full of connectivity issues.
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Credit, praise and glory go out to:
Raphael Rau
Moritz Schwind
Alex Rych
Lukas Guziel
Jasmin Einert
OTOY & RNDR
RD-Textures
“When I was 14, the most common LAN theme we had were birthday and weekend LANs that would go for two days and were never attended by more than 8 people. There was one LAN hosted by a student committee at my Highschool with roughly 130 people attending but that was never the norm for us. Most of us were not (yet) nerdy enough for the demo scene and we were too young and poor to attend the big boy LAN parties in early 2000 Germany.”
“The host’s parents would organize soda, snacks and a hearty alternative ("real food"). Every attendee would arrive half an hour apart and the first third of the night was usually spend with troubleshooting the network ("can anyone see me?","okay, let's all set the same workgroup", etc.), the second third was spend sharing porn, DVD rips, MP3s and games and the last part was either playing actual games or a combination of playing games and re-installing windows on someone’s PC because something broke.”
“When I was 12, my mum moved to the countryside and we lived in a very german half-timbered house for about 6 years. I spend big parts of my time there with friends in front of a PC and at one occasion we had a 'big' LAN with 8 guys in my tiny, wooden teenager room under the roof. It smelled like a combination of cheesy dip, nachos and body odor. At the last day, we played a pirated and barely functioning Far Cry 1 alpha version that was only playable in multiplayer mode. After taking advantage of the bad map design and killing my friend Robert more than a dozen times, he started calling me "Eimer" (meaning "Bucket" in German), which then became my nickname until I finished university.”