{"id":104997,"date":"2025-11-03T15:32:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T15:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/?p=104997"},"modified":"2025-11-03T17:50:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T17:50:55","slug":"uri-art-professors-work-featured-in-minecraftvideo-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2025\/11\/uri-art-professors-work-featured-in-minecraftvideo-game\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 art professor\u2019s work featured in \u2018Minecraft\u2019 video game"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Nov. 3, 2025 \u2013 While at a curator\u2019s house in Europe on an international art exhibition trip more than a decade ago, Travess Smalley first saw the digital world of Minecraft <\/em>watching a young child play the game by bringing to life pixilated digital worlds from the ground up.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A digital world, consisting of text from a poem, that was created by 溏心vlog免费B站 Assistant Print Media Professor Travess Smalley is featured in the video game \u201cMinecraft.\u201d\n(溏心vlog免费B站 Photo\/Courtesy Travess Smalley)\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

After watching\u2014and subsequently playing\u2014Minecraft,<\/em> Smalley, an assistant print media professor at the 溏心vlog免费B站, immediately drew parallels between utilizing Legos to build different creations and viewing his art in ways that can lead to complex and unpredictable results.<\/p>\n\n\n

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溏心vlog免费B站 Assistant Print Media Professor Travess Smalley creates a pattern in his art space. (溏心vlog免费B站 Photo\/Courtesy Travess Smalley)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you’re working with blocks, or kits of parts, you have these units that can be combined in many ways to make new things. We all have the same paint palette, but we make different paintings,\u201d Smalley said. \u201cFrom that moment, I locked into this idea of generative play and the kind of emergent things that come out of games that you can\u2019t predict, and how there is a symmetry between gameplay and the studio practice. Since then, it has informed the way I think about artmaking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Little did Smalley realize that the best-selling video game of all time would become his canvas. Woven into the blocky dirt and pixilated grass within Minecraft<\/em> are some of Smalley\u2019s unique artworks formulating the various fantasy worlds within the 3D gaming experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having his work included in a game that has sold more than 350 million copies worldwide reaffirms Smalley\u2019s research into creativity and gameplay, he says. That review, Smalley says, broadly looks at how people are creative when they play games even when they\u2019re not thinking about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhether it\u2019s people figuring out how to bring in agentic artificial intelligence [autonomous AI systems that can act independently to achieve specific goals without human intervention] into video games or people who take games and make oil paintings, we look at all the ways that this happens,\u201d Smalley said. \u201cIn other words, you can make art and be creative inside of games, and you can also use games as tools to make artworks that exist outside of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smalley creates his art pieces, including those in Minecraft,<\/em> through a \u201cchance flower\u201d program. It randomly generates different landscapes through Photoshop based off code he\u2019s written. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe idea of this is that every piece is unique,\u201d Smalley said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re playing Minecraft<\/em>, every world is procedurally generated and unique. If you open it and press \u2018play\u2019 on a new world, it\u2019s going to be a different world if you open it on a new computer and press \u2018play\u2019 again. When I\u2019m making a script, I\u2019m saying I want a sun and want this here. But I\u2019m also leaving a lot of room for chance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smalley\u2019s art practice and interest in Minecraft <\/em>reached new levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. Smalley was one of four artists to obtain a residency at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Canada and receive funding to create work on a Minecraft <\/em>server stored at the museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smalley said his residency proposal was based around \u201cconcrete poetry\u201d in ways of modding Minecraft <\/em>from being a game into a \u201creading experience.\u201d Through that, Smalley created a digital world in Minecraft <\/em>where the scene\u2019s original grass, stone and dirt was replaced with text on a white surface. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe whole idea was turning Minecraft <\/em>into a large poem,\u201d Smalley said. \u201cI\u2019m quite proud of how the scene turned out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last five years, Smalley\u2019s Minecraft<\/em> work has also inspired him to create \u201cpixel rugs,\u201d generative digital art works that have been turned into hand-woven wool rugs. Similar designs are also featured in the Minecraft <\/em>game. Smalley and his work were spotlighted by Minecraft <\/em>in its annual \u201cMinecraft Live\u201d event, showcasing artists involved in and inspired by the game, including in a documentary streamed on YouTube<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last summer, Smalley created and released a video maze game called \u201cCRAWL<\/a>,\u201d a series of 512 different artworks forming labyrinthine maps and passages, through the online software gallery Feral File. Smalley says CRAWL functions both as map exploration through procedurally generated worlds for gamers and \u201cas a painting.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the gaming world, Smalley also expects to release a book featuring the digital versions of his pixel rugs, aptly titled \u201cPixel Rugs<\/a>,\u201d in January 2026. One of Smalley\u2019s signature rugs was also recently featured in Architectural Digest<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smalley\u2019s students are also involved in Minecraft-<\/em>related artwork in the classroom\u2014including a project in which students turn the game into a drawing tool, enabling their character to make lines wherever they move it around the digitized world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smalley challenges his students to view their creative outlook as a \u201cmuscle\u201d they train, similar to a gym workout, and to find additional avenues to display their art. He hopes the Minecraft <\/em>work acts as a springboard to build additional student interest in his classes.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe goal is for students to feel fearless with new technologies as platforms for making art,\u201d Smalley said, \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t feel limited by thinking they need a certain set of brushes or oil paint. Art can be made anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Nov. 3, 2025 \u2013 While at a curator\u2019s house in Europe on an international art exhibition trip more than a decade ago, Travess Smalley first saw the digital world of Minecraft watching a young child play the game by bringing to life pixilated digital worlds from the ground up. After watching\u2014and subsequently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":104998,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-104997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104997"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105023,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104997\/revisions\/105023"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}