This project consists entirely of a single screen, displayed via an NES. It was be created in 6502 ASM, burned to an EPROM, and inserted into a host cartridge (as demonstrated by Cory Arcangel in his tutorial).

The NES screen is obviously a comment regarding Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" (1928). The pipe, is in fact, not a pipe. It's a painting of a pipe. This painting illustrates the absurdity of "representational" artworks, and their ability to convince (trick) the viewer into believing that they are somehow authentic in their representation.

To address this, I've created a parody of a parody of representation artwork. What is being displayed is obviously not an NES, it's a graphical representation of an NES, viewed through a televisions screen. However, the code, the cartridge, and the NES itself are intrinsically linked. Each part is just as important as the other, and in fact in the operation of a simple microprocessor like the 6502 the code and the hardware are so closely related that they are nearly indistinguishable.

In effect, while the NES displayed on the screen is not an NES, and clearly makes no attempt to be a literal representation of one, by virtue of the fact that it is one part in a machine which is an NES, it is much more "NES-ish" than Magritte's pipe is "pipe-ish". Magritte's pipe represents the idea of what a pipe is, while the NES screen is both representational and literal in it's depiction.

These issues of abstraction and interface aesthetic are directly related to the "opacity" of human-computer interfaces that Andy Clark discusses in "Natural Born Cyborgs". Interfaces rely on our ability to gather and interpolate complex and abstract information through the use of text and glyphs. In this sense, Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" is an interface to pipes. While it's not a physical representation, it is comprised of iconic information about pipes. The NES display, through it's inherent low-resolution display, gives the viewer quite a bit of information about the NES itself in the same way.

The method by which I wrote and tested the 6502 ASM code involves emulation of the NES hardware itself. It is a "translation" of the NES onto my desktop computer. This method allowed me to create programs without having to continually use the hardware.

Download the rom (with NES emulator included)