X
November 26, 2014 Rhett Jones

Minecraft is one of the most popular video games in the world — it’s available on most platforms and Microsoft seems to believe it has enough longevity to be worth $2.5 billion dollars. It’s fair to say that it is quite a bit more popular that stodgy old paintings from the early 20th century, so it […]

Read More…

September 10, 2014 Sophie Weiner

The Minecraft Geological Survey spent this summer archiving 170,000 Minecraft worlds. To do so, they had to be selective about which information to store. Their records contain only a tiny fraction of the data existing in each player-created world.  The core sample is a semi-random sample of Minecraft chunks, 1% of the size of the original […]

Read More…

August 21, 2014 Sophie Weiner

The phenomenally successful game Minecraft is unique in that it allows players to build things in much the same way that they are built in real life — brick by brick. Among its tons of projects, people have built the entire world of Star Wars, a replica of Manhattan and several art works. Using the in-game material “redstone,” players can […]

Read More…

May 9, 2014 Andy Cush

Recently, developers at the New York Public Library dipped into the institution’s vast archive of historical maps and converted a tract of uptown Manhattan land into a Minecraft world. The video above shows Fort Washington — near 160th Street and the Hudson River — as it looked in 1860, according to the vintage contour map […]

Read More…

March 6, 2014 Andy Cush

Christopher Mitchell, a computer science PhD student, is making it his quest to build a 1:1 scale model of Manhattan in Minecraft. So far, he’s only been able to replicate landmarks using models from Google’s 3D Warehouse and the U.S. Geological Survey, but eventually, he’d like to make a software copy of every single structure on the […]

Read More…

May 28, 2013 Kyle Chayka

In Minecraft, players of the labor-intensive video game’s open world gaming environment are encouraged to “build anything they can imagine,” brick by pixellated brick. It’s quite apparent that artist Jan Robert Leegte may have taken that idea to heart as the artist has painstakingly recreated Robert Smithson’s well-known earthwork Spiral Jetty in great detail.  However, much unlike Smithson’s work this […]

Read More…

March 22, 2013 Marina Galperina

If you know anything about Minecraft, this stuff takes a long time. This is very impressive. This took two months and makes that KATSU Minecraft stunt even more embarrassing, like whoop-de-whoop man, look at all these undulating black-and-white striped landscapes and shit, and the bit-arty Beetlejuice characters moving around like animatrons. No cut scenes in this capture. Just one meticulous Tim Burton tribute, […]

Read More…

February 25, 2013 Marina Galperina

ANIMAL loves F.A.T. artists so much, you know? But here’s F.A.T.’s street artist Katsu braggingabout tagging in Minecraft, all like “The future of graffiti for me will be in the form of black hat tactics” and “MINECRAFT offers me a way to connect with my untainted inner youth and create expressions of criminal activity without the police […]

Read More…