Hi dears,
thank you very much for your feedback. It took some time to go through
all the emails, but I did it.
I know that any discussion on what's art and what's not usually enters
a dead end. I also know that the contemporary art world often works in
a way that makes many people get away from there. One example that I
know quite well comes from the video game collective Tale of Tales.
Tale of Tales (http://tale-of-tales.com/) was founded some years ago
by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn as an indie game studio, and also
as a way to escape the art world and confront themselves with a
different audience. Both Michael and Auriea worked as artists and
designers along the Nineties, playing different identites and rules.
It would be easy to say that they stopped making art because they
started making videogames, or because they started selling their works
on Steam instead of on the art market. But it won't be true.
Gabriel wrote:
> Or its particular meaning and value arises from the fact that it is
framed as art – and therefore deserves a critical consideration that
these other performances don’t (it is reviewed in certain websites,
etc)?
I don't like the expression "framed as art". I know it's difficult to
say what art is, but I'm sure it doesn't depend on a frame. I don't
think that the batman piece will become art if we frame it as art. The
batman piece talks just one language: the language of online
interaction and entertainment. No fun adds a new layer to that - it
appropriates an online genre, but it mixes the online jargon with
another jargon - the language of contemporary art. It doesn't want to
entertain an audience, it wants to provide a veritable portrait of a
community. It turns the double screen interface of chatroulette into a
powerful image. It makes us think about us, about death, about fun and
online relationships. This meta-level is something absent in the other
pieces. It's, of course, full of references to art history (yes,
velasquez!) and to video art and performance art history (Bruce
Nauman, Chris Burden). And of course, it's made by people who consider
themselves artists and it is "framed" as an art piece.
These things (ALL TOGETHER) made me think about this piece of online
video as art. These things (ALL TOGETHER) made me consider Paul Davis'
nintendo hacking as art, and other game hackings as something
different. Only on this basis we can say that Tale of Tales' games are
art in the sense a work of art is art, or that they are art in the
sense a videogame is art.
The following step is social agreement: other people talking the
language of art have to accept it as an art work. And the last step is
certification and attribution of economic value. Daniel wrote:
> And this strikes me as a major difference between games and much of
what goes as art. Games work. They are utilitarian tools. You can
have a functioning game or a broken game and it is not merely a matter
of taste or education or external validation. Games either create the
internal value structure in the player or they do not. They are
exactingly engineered to drive a particular emotion and we can sample
a large enough population to determine if they are success or not in
their stated functional purpose. A functioning game has inherent
value. It does not need to be certified or discovered or framed.
I don't agree with this. Art works as well, and has an inherent value
as well. It does not need to be certified or discovered or framed. But
it does need it in order to survive in time, because this process,
like it or not, is a premise to the process of preservation of a work
of art. It is the way the contemporary art world keeps the meme alive
in time. To buy an art piece is like to buy a videogame: the
difference is that a videogame can rely on a stable industry and be
distributed in thousands of copies, while a work of art relies on a
little niche and is sold at an high price to one or a limited number
of persons.
A last thought about something Paolo wrote (talking about alex
galloway):
> He critiques the lack of interactivity in game art, and argues that
interactivity is the essential quality that makes video games
different from any other experience.
I'd just like to add to Paolo's criticism that game art might not be
interactive, but it is the result of the best form of interaction at
our disposal: the one that doesn't follow the rules for interaction of
a given system, but invents new rules to interact with it.
Bests,
d
---
Domenico Quaranta
web. http://domenicoquaranta.com/
email. i...@domenicoquaranta.com
mob. +39 340 2392478
skype. dom_40
Il giorno 23/dic/10, alle ore 03:34, micha cárdenas ha scritto:
2010/12/22 Daniel Cook <d...@spryfox.com>:
strongly driven by economic processes. What is the economic
function of art
institutes in the creation of games and do we need them?
Historically, it
seems that the modern art world acts as a certification process to
ensure
quality combined with a marketing / distribution network for
promoting and
selling certified works. In emerging markets like social and
mobile games,
where I primarily focus, these functions appear to be extraneous.
The
distribution is weak compared to the digitally facilitated word of
mouth
that drives social networks. The certification is not meaningful
to the
target audience.
Hi Daniel,
I think this is an astute observation about the commercialization of
art, but I think there's a more complex process involved here. Would
you agree that both art institutions and artists and game makers all
rely on reputation building? Some of the strength of art institutions
is just in the sheer capital they have to reach people through
conventional advertising. It's just a myth, IMHO, that anyone can post
a video on youtube and get it seen by millions of people without some
minstream media coverage, except for in a few very rare cases which I
would guess are about the odds of winning the lottery. So, even if you
made a really great game, how many people are going to see it and how?
micha
--
micha cárdenas
Associate Director of Art and Technology
Culture, Art and Technology Program, Sixth College, UCSD
Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, http://is.gd/daO00
Artist/Researcher, UCSD School of Medicine
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net
blog: http://transreal.org
gpg: http://is.gd/ebWx9
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