The Technological Deconstructive Art of Connor Gottfried

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Whether dropping the audience headfirst into nostalgia or deconstructing the museum velvet rope edict of “look-but-don’t-touch”, Connor Gottfried’s videogame-inspired sculptures are designed to elicit a visceral reaction. Created from the internal electronics from repurposed first and second-generation video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, Game Boy or TurboGrafx-16, Gottfried’s works mashup pop culture, consumerism, fandom and technology.

This week, Gottfried told Paste about the winding path he took as an artist and student of technology that led him to create sculptures like Liquid Crystal II (a 3-foot playable Gameboy with 19″ screen and controller), Eat My Shorts! (a re-embodiment of the 1994 Nintendo game “Virtual Bart”) and newer works like Unboxing, which tackles the staggering fact that YouTube viewers watch nearly 6 billion hours of unboxing videos each month.

Gottfried said he wants people to “re-perceive these technologies as refreshing psychedelic centrepieces,” inviting interaction and a nostalgic return to time well wasted. Currently, he’s preparing for a solo exhibition at Dopeness Art Lab in Taiwan in the spring of 2025, which will include 25 pieces of work.

With “Unboxing,” Gottfried recreated the unfolded packaging that games like Pokémon originally came in, adding in playable games where the screenshots were printed. In addition, he’s been continuing other series including “Cartoon Acid” and his “Pocket Monsters” series of twisted Game Boys.

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To create the pieces, Gottfried first designs them in Photoshop as a series of layers. He then models the layers in 3D to see how the design will look from every angle, adjusting and redesigning the piece until he is happy with it.

“At this point, the work is printed onto either aluminum composite paneling or acrylic paneling (depending on the size) and is either CNC-routed or laser cut,” he said. “ I separate the layers with acrylic spacers and glue everything together using a secret combination of adhesives. The electronics are all wired in and the piece is ready to go!”

Gottfried said when he started with the iconic original Game Boy design, he wanted to introduce new forms not normally seen in consumer electronic devices.

“For example the asymmetry seen in a lot of the pieces. For me, the asymmetry symbolizes the change from traditional/historical technology to new forms of technology (AI for example) that are complex, chaotic and unpredictable,” he told Paste. “I see these pieces as capturing the “childhood” that we shared with technology itself as well as capturing the transition from childhood to adolescence that technology is currently undergoing. They are sort of ‘bridge’ objects – in the process of becoming.”

A multidisciplinary artist, musician and technologist, Gottfried grew up in Canada and currently splits his time between Calgary, Alberta and Gabriola Island on the Canadian west coast. Growing up, he was heavily influenced by technology. In 1982, when Gottfried was five years old, his father brought home an Apple II computer.

“He somehow convinced the store owner to let him copy every diskette if he bought the computer, so he came home one day with the computer and probably 300 games,” Gottfried said. “After we’d figured out all the games, my brothers and I were always trying to figure out where the hidden rooms were or where the game would glitch out. I started getting into programming shortly after when we got some simple books on BASIC. I was always fascinated by how code could become an interactive experience on screen.”

Gottfried recounted that in the mid to late 80s, the family got a Sega Master System and soon started playing games like Alex Kid in Miracle World. Their cousins had the NES with the first three Super Mario Bros. games and he said he distinctly remembers going into an extended trance playing Tetris at their house. In 1996, while studying Mechanical Engineering in Calgary, he landed a job with a government program that was bringing the internet to small towns in Canada. Gottfried entered the field of eLearning in 1999, founding Leara in 2012.

“Once I saw the Internet and how a single person could develop and distribute a product instantly over the web I never looked back,” he said. “To be able to use code to produce experiences that could be viewed anywhere/ anytime was just too cool.”

Artistically, Gottfried said he started crafting miniature paper snowboards with paper bindings when he was around 12 years old. In the late 90s and 2000s, when he started playing with the improv electronic band Tetrix, he took on work creating packaging design for the project and producing hand-made CD covers.

All of these influences came together in 2016 when he started to work on his first large format artwork, but it wasn’t until 2019 that he added his first screen (a small 7” LCD) into a work of art. In 2021, Gottfried used his first large screen to produce a Zelda Game and Watch replica, which went viral.

“I started experimenting with deconstructing and enlarging other gaming consoles (Game Boys, Game Gears, Neo Geo, etc.) along with doing exposed circuits on cartridges. The series really started to pick up followers on Instagram and I started selling the works,” he said. “In September of 2022, I decided to explore deconstructing the Game Boy in more extreme ways by mashing up the materials.”

By replacing the smooth plastic with organic shapes, changing the shape of the device to be asymmetrical or mashing the device with other devices like the Virtual Boy or Atari, Gottfried said the newer pieces each explore specific themes like complexity, maps or failure.

“I think they are an analogy as well for our society as we incorporate these new technologies and we become more complex and unpredictable,” he said. “I also like to explore the juxtaposition of computer-controlled accuracy with psychedelic chance-based approaches when I am designing the pieces. For the pop-art pieces featuring cartoon characters, I like to imagine these as people in the distant future entering into total-sensory VR experiences where they are being embodied as the characters and are living in the fictional worlds that these characters inhabit. I love the concept of ‘amnestic re-embodiment’, where a person forgets that they are in VR and they continue to exist thinking their VR body is their real body.”

Dana Forsythe is a freelance writer covering tech, comic books and culture. He lives in Massachusetts, enjoys photographing street art, collecting comics and can be followed via Twitter @danafour.