Sound / Music
This link will take you to works that are audio-only.
Video
View my video work here. Most of these involve sound as well.
Writing
If you are tired of looking at pictures and video, follow this link to essays, articles, and poetry.
Photography
Images captured with cameras (primarily digital).
Category-Resistant
This catch-all non-category covers web-based projects, Flash experiments, dance collaborations, and other miscellany.
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My name is Nathan Altice. I am currently enrolled in the Media Art and Text (MATX) PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, VA. For my own studies, the ‘TX’ portion of that acronym tends to focus on video games as both textual and material objects. That is a fancy way of saying that video games are viable objects of critical study; they have cultural and technological histories that a) depend on their hardware/software configurations, and b) extend beyond those configurations to affect other textual objects (including film, the visual arts, and even individual selves).
The ‘MA’ portion of the acronym includes a variety of media. I am primarily a musician, so most of my work involves audio in some capacity. I play guitar, sing, and own a bevy of synthesizers (despite being a poor piano player). I dabble in video, poetry, and all varieties of computer programming (knowledge of many, master of none). Across all media forms, I am generally interested in constrained hardware/software platforms, ‘lo-fidelity’ means of production, software glitches, and obsolete technologies. As a result, my work is continually occupied with vintage video game systems, ‘misused’ consumer-grade technology, and the aesthetics of error and play.
In their book Racing the Beam, professors Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort introduce the field of ‘platform studies.’ A platform is a standardized configuration of hardware (circuits, processors, controllers, etc.) and software (operating system, firmware, file system, etc.) design. These unique configurations influence, control, and constrain creative production, often in subtle ways.
For instance, Bogost and Montfort focus on the Atari VCS (or 2600), an odd but enduring platform designed for playing video games... [More]
Scales is the latest in a series of sound/video works using one or two short, repeated segments of video. This one diverges slightly from the past two, since it does not involve appropriated video.
Scales (2009) from Nathan Altice on Vimeo.
Video was shot on the iPhone 3GS (note the vertical aspect ratio), then edited with Final Cut Pro. Audio was created in Ableton Live.
View the eportfolio video section or my Vimeo site.
Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon established an influential precedent in the history of art, defining a set of formal distinctions for differentiating between sculpture, poetry, and painting. By using a single shared subject matter as a kind of scientific control case, he proposed the strengths and weaknesses of each medium. Mimicry across forms was a limitation, he argued, and each medium should only pursue its particular strength. Thus painting, as a spatial art, should ‘relinquish all representations of time,’ since that was the purview of poetry (Lessing, 90).
In the mid-twentieth century, art critic Clement Greenberg discarded the Laocoon myth as subject matter, but maintained the name and spirit of Lessing’s project. However, in a distinct departure from Lessing’s Laocoon, Clement Greenberg introduced a new kind of narrative to the history of art, wherein painting (and the other plastic arts) follow a trajectory of increasing self-awareness of their own unique boundaries. This narrative is played out as a struggle of competing forms, where the dominant art of an era dictates the structure and possibilities of the other arts. Though Lessing’s argument is not ahistorical—he noted, for instance, the Hellenic preference for beauty versus the 18th century European emphasis on ‘truth and expression’—he constructed no over-arching meta-narrative to explain art’s historical progression. Greenberg more explicitly established a historical path for each medium’s ‘self-purification.’
The purpose of this paper is first to understand Greenberg’s notion of medium specificity as he describes it in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon.’ I argue that Greenberg’s claims continue to be a persistent influence in the discussion of any emergent new media. Second, I will examine videogames as a case study to track contemporary discussions of medium specificit....[More]
Super Mario Bros., originally released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is the second highest selling videogame of all time. For a certain generation, this game has achieved an iconic status—its music, graphics, and level designs are now an essential part of the cultural lexicon of videogames.
Due to its inclusion with the NES console, there are now tens of millions of Super Mario cartridges ‘in the wild’. This ubiquity has made the material object worthless, despite its cultural importance. It sits in countless thrift stores, garage sales, and used game stores, often priced for under a dollar. Its frequent reincarnation in emulation and re-released versions has further denigrated the necessity for its material form.
My project is an attempt to artificially limit the availability of these cartridges by collecting them and making them unplayable. The first stage of the project involves the supply in my immediate community—I will scour used game stores, Craigslist, garage sales, and local eBay listings for copies of the game so I can take them out of circulation. The second stage, where I branch out beyond my local area, will involve a project website advertised 
through various gaming messageboards and social networking sites (Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The website will record each new addition, which will be uniquely numbered and documented. Ideally, the website could also serve as a kind of game, where donors accrue ‘points’ or rewards for sending in multiple copies of the game.
Twenty-five games will be set aside for...[More]
The eyes and the mind achieve distinct perception through comparison and contrast. The value of a chromatic color may be determined by relation to an achromatic color -- black, white, gray -- or to one or more other chromatic colors. Color perception is the psychophysiological reality as distinguished from the physicochemical reality of color.
In other words, the chemical composition of a color and our optical perception of that color are not identical. Color perceptions are relative to surrounding colors, the materials colors are printed or displayed on, their relative sizes, and so on.
If Itten is correct, how does technology further mediate our perception of color? The NES, for instance, has an extremely limited palette 
in comparison to more recent videogame consoles.
NES Color Palette
This already introduces an aesthetic restriction in the reproduction of color. Similarly, the technology used to reproduce and display these colors -- in this case, a CRT television screen -- can vary greatly across models, individual settings, lighting environments, and so on...[More]