Six Sided Strange • 2011

Six Sided Strange is a net-artwork series built from unsolvable Rubik's cubes and hidden narratives, from pixilated game character collages to abstract streams of color and lines. The cube is central to how we organize and understand. It is a puzzle of unsolvable junctures, a humanistic shape created to order and organize.

Six Sided Strange disrupts the cube, wandering inside/around the recombinatory playground of Rubik's 56 squares, exploring how images and designs relate to narrative. These are interactive/dynamic sculptures, brief storylands, and all manner of wonderments. There is nothing to win, but then again there never was. Screen based digital art often suffers from two-dimensional limitations and lacks true interaction. These cubes pioneer the use of true 3-d interactive screen based spaces. And with a total of 12 different cubes, each section explores new ways these spaces can be artistically and poetically used, from abstract to remixing found images.

Published & exhibited

Stuart, Keith. “Basquiat meets Mario Brothers? Digital poet Jason Nelson on the meaning of art games“.
The Guardian. 13. September 2011.

Select impact

Nominated for Webby Awards “weirdest website“.

Select documentation

Kurdi, Samer. 2011. “Two art games by Jason Nelson: Scrape Scraperteeth and Six Sided Strange“.
Published 21. September 2011.

Stalsworth, Joshua. 2019. “Six-Sided Strange“. Published 7. April 2019.

The Next entry: https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/981/26/0/

Playable version: https://conifer.the-next.org/_embed_noborder/elo/six-sided-strange/20210206011340$br:chrome:76/http://eliterature.org/turbulence/jasonnelson/wocu1.html