)
Chaos and Control
Josh Hassin speaks to walking the fine line between edgy and illegal, the gallery world’s seedy underbelly, and how it feels when millions of people see your work -- but not your name.---------------
By Matthew Hansen
July 1, 2006 | San Diego freelancer Josh Hassin had an incredible experience with the collision of wonderful ideas, corporations, and the American legal system. During his tenure at Sony as a game texture artist and animator, Hassin drew upon his skateboarding background and pitched a skating game for the Playstation.
“That’s stupid,” replied Sony. “Nobody’s going to play a skateboarding game.”
Hassin calmly packed up his brilliance and shopped around elsewhere, ending up at Activision. “I worked with them for about three months on that game, at which point they told me they were no longer going to pursue it,” he recalls. “They didn’t see skateboarding as a viable option in the game industry.” Later that year, Activision turned around and released the so-called unviable option, Tony Hawk Pro Skateboarder, without Hassin’s involvement. “I subsequently sued Activision, who subsequently countersued and kept me tied up in litigation. Then I said, ‘Okay, you win,’ and I backed down.”
The imbroglio didn’t deter Hassin from quietly infiltrating contemporary culture with his trademark art. His portfolio today boasts work in fashion design, video game production and direction, graphic design for the likes of McDonald’s and MTV, and album illustration for indie rock darlings Metric.
So how did you start out as an artist? What’s your background?
I went to college at Berkeley in California. I wanted an education, so I decided not to go to a fine art school, which was actually a pretty good idea. I ended up being a fine art major focusing on painting, so that’s where the bulk of my experience in painting comes from.
What did you do after the legal mess with Activision?
I started my own company making online video games -- we made a skateboarding game, a BMX game, and a snowboarding game -- and had roughly half a million people downloading and playing our games. That was pretty rewarding and after that I was asked by Sony to come back to produce and art direct a jet ski racing game for the Playstation 2, which would later be known as Jet X20.
How did working on video games turn into what you currently do, freelancing?
At the same time, I’ve always been painting and showing. It’s kind of like a ying to the yang. I have always tried to keep it as a theme in my life -- to balance computers with natural media -- because you can just go nuts sitting in front of a computer all day long.
As I was making these games and painting and having shows, I started to realize that I didn’t think my purpose here on this planet was to sit around and boss people and make games run faster and all that jazz. I was more interested in the creative side of things, so I quit and basically decided to be a freelancer. And I’ve done so for four or five years now. Like most freelancers, I have a set of clients that I work with and people contact me out of the blue to do various projects. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some pretty big clients. That doesn’t always mean I get paid a lot of money, but it’s high-profile stuff. I got to do the McDonald’s Monopoly campaign; I don’t know how much of my site you looked through…
)
Yeah,
I went through it.
I do everything from fashion design -- I primarily work with a company called Syndrome, they’re based in Chicago and allow me a lot of freedom -- to action sports art. I’ve worked with tonnes of companies like Quiksilver, DC, and Etnies. Living in Southern California pretty much means living in action sports central.
I still do work with Sony quite frequently. I mainly art direct or produce trailers, movies, TV commercials, webspots, or anything else that might be tied to a video game in terms of marketing.
Do you skip from one thing to another or do they all kind of happen at the same time?
Everything goes on simultaneously, yeah. I have a little text file on my desk that tells me what I’m doing, what I need to be finishing, and what I’m looking forward to next. As a freelancer, it’s a feast or famine situation where one week I have so much work I’m drowning and the next week I won’t hear from anybody and I’ll have time to kind of enjoy life again. But I like it, as opposed to working nine to five -- or worse, five to nine -- for a corporation. At least I’m doing this for myself. And I get to experience more realms of design and art than I would solely as a video game designer. I was actually just asked to produce a PS3 video game the other day and I turned it down. While the technology may be better and things can look prettier, I’ve essentially exercised that part of my brain and I want to move on to some different stuff.
I kind of skipped over this, but I also have a very deep passion and interest in music. I work with a lot of musicians.
Page 1 |