Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt ourhabitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds ofembodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of ArtModding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-thealteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situatedaround a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds.The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel, JODI, JulianOliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others - were attracted to the architecturesof engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction,technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROMchips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code togenerate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds-tointentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement withinalgorithmic spaces.Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology ofvideo games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, orrather the strangeness of art modding.Unstable Aesthetics provides a thorough and scholarly examination of current and historicalvideo game art modding with a keen understanding of the poetics of the genre generatedthrough both materiality and audience engagement. Abstraction is at the core of Lohmeyer'sinvestigations - pulsing, perceptual spaces made to produce bodily affect. GabrielleJennings, Associate Professor, Graduate Art, ArtCenter College of Design, USFrom Mario Clouds and Ars Doom to Velvet Strike and San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam,Eddie Lohmeyer's Unstable Aesthetics offers a new perspective-or rather, a glitchyanamorphic angle-on the concept of game art through a deeply material analysis of bothvideogame technology and the experience of playing games in galleries, museums, biennials,and festivals. Moving deftly between PRG ROMs and BSP trees on one hand and media theoryand object-oriented feminism on the other, Lohmeyer shows exactly how artists' mods not onlyexpose and expand the capacities of game engines, but also change the ways we play. PatrickLeMieux, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, University of California,Davis, USA