Old Home Week

March 2026

The College of New Jersey Art Gallery

Installation features a hand-built synthesizer that controls a video game developed as a satirical re-telling of Paramount Picture’s lost silent film Old Home Week. The film debuted in 1925 at the New York City Rivoli theater the same weekend the theater introduced the first modern air-conditioning to the public.

Old Home Week explores the ways in which early 20th-century introductions of climate control technology have shaped contemporary media and energy consumption in the cybernetic age.

Tom Clark (Amalgamated Oil Company)

Game features hand-drawn frame animation, water color, and digital color fills.

Synthesizer is built from a microcontroller producing generative melodic patterns that trigger discrete functions in the video game.

Game Characters

Small Town Oil Rig