The Calgary artist's GreyScreen project is a multifaceted artistic endeavor centered around video games and incorporating everything from music to visual installations to poetry.
As a child of the Nintendo generation, multidisciplinary artist Kevin Stebner dreamed of composing music for video games. Although that dream has not yet come true, he has since found another creative outlet involving video games and music with his GreyScreen project. The project is a multifaceted artistic endeavor centered around video games, incorporating everything from music to visual installations to poetry.
Mr. Stebner, a Red Deer native, has been primarily based in Calgary for the past 20 years. He first experimented with creating video game-inspired music during his 2007 teaching abroad in South Korea. He said: “I needed to find a way to make music in my small apartment in the country. [I didn’t] I didn’t know anyone about it, so I learned about Chiptune and started pursuing it further,” he says.
Chiptune is a genre of electronic music in which tracks are created using sound chips from vintage arcade machines, computers, and even classic game consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy from the 1980s and 90s. After learning chiptunes, Stebner took it a step further in his 2013 Nintendo Entertainment System by manipulating his console to create glitchy visuals to go with glitchy music. This visual was shown to maximum effect last fall at Calgary's Centennial Planetarium Theater. At that time, Stebner appeared as a gray screen at the opening of the multimedia exhibition “Jennifer Merman & Daniel Bolins: Three Dimensions”.
GreyScreen began as a way for Stebner to learn video game music, but he now calls it “an attempt to approach video games in a different way than just playing the game: music, visual art, poetry. A project that encompasses the following. His next effort within the GreyScreen realm expanded on that concept with a book in which he featured a series of lipogram poems that all served as Game Genie codes.The title of the book is simple Game Genie: Poetryand will be published this year by The Blasted Tree Art Collective and Publishing Company.
This article appears in the May 2024 issue of Avenue Calgary.
