Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Hello, folks, Not a few times I've prepared myself to post something and got to stop just because your messages did my job better :) I just regret missing this latest topic, for I was afraid that kind of contention would happen. I find it a pity, and I'll try to show you why: The Picasso instance is not - OK, is not to *me* - as silly as might seem to some of you. I didn't reply it before for the reason cited above, and - I believe the main motive amongst us all - vacations! Back to Picasso-gate, what Daniel meant to me is the most pretty obvious thing: the same thing Duchamp and the conceptual artists and lots of people didactically showed us - that there is no such thing as an essentially, trouble-free, object of art. This is not only a contemporary feat; more rigid systems of yore demanded - as today - lots of training, education, sensibility and adequation to norms, institutions, *artes poeticae*, and dialogue with past canons and coetaneous artistic circles. What is to say, even believing so, there was not a pure, isolated, intrinsic aesthetic value in any object in any era. The example can make you cringe, but carries lots of elementary truth. The de-corporification of art, the stress on its relational, institutional, ecological nature does not imply art is valueless or an ethereal fiction. This is a sense a whole century have striven to build; not only about art, but about [social] reality itself. So Gabriel Menotti's response is not in conflict with Danc's sayings. We can find in videogames dependence on circuits, on a whole material ecology, on some modes of reception (recognition of genres), and a will of tradition (like I said weeks ago). Most human experiences are bound to some sort of will-to-canonise (gaming, being part of a gang, any nostalgia), not only the highbrow stuff. So you can relate games and art. BUT they are realities crested on very different social and technological complexes. One cannot fail to notice the enormously difference of weight canons have in arts. As someone - I forgot, sorry! - have told us here, art is, generally, about to associate, to enrich, to open more and more possibilities (according to old prescriptions, as synthetically as possible). This depends on the intrinsic properties of the object, *triggered* by a set of apparatuses linking it to synchronic circuits and diachronical traditions. There's nothing alike in videogames, even the most complex and beatiful; even the most distant from the childishly-irrational, fascinatingly-creative, absolutely freak and impatient mobs that makes, among other reasons, artists interested in 4chan-ness and gaming cultures. Everybody who happen to be into so-called literary fiction is familiar to the formula (which I believe only in some degree): books have to do with books, not with real stuff to which their tales could point at. Heretofore, people had learnt that Romeo and Juliet are not about some Italian couple more than they are about, say, Pyramus and Thisbe; that you cannot (would say some rigid and enthusiastic Victorian teacher) understand Molière without reading Bocaccio (and Scachetti, and Terence, and Menander...). The same has gone to arts. One can say that contemporary painting is not the same activity the pre-Raphaelites have practised, and one is right. But the pre-Raphaelites did not understood art the same way Raphael did, and his Greco-Roman models even happened to know they were real artists themselves. Every tradition is a will of tradition; every transmission is really, really impure. But this constitutes art; those baggages are the very elements which compose Culture with capital letters. By the way, I don't see why refrain from call Deleuze - or any other philosopher - baggage; it sounds very the-great-conversation-ish, and strikingly sounds a bit deleuzian, too (creation of concepts, instead of search for truth etc). I could say it simpler and faster: Art doesn't come with baggage. The history of art, as I understand it, is a very long theoretical exchange. Saying a painting comes with baggage is like saying philosophy comes with baggage. Art has to be in dialog with pervious art that has come before it, just as contemporary theory has to respond to earlier thinkers. What you're saying is like saying that Deleuze's writing about Spinoza is baggage. What's the big deal? Isn't it just what Danc said? Can you say that the history of videogames, as art's, is a long theoretical exchange? So why shallow and ridiculous? I believe games and art are very different realities, which can be compared if we formulate the right questions, and then we can find lots of common traits. This would be desirable depending more on our interests and projects than the inner truth lying within these realities. What really inspires me in discussions like this one in -empyre- is the confluence of these projects, and the possible exchange between them. There's no need to a subversive, inter- trans- or
[-empyre-] baggage and utilitarian tools
I completely agree with Micha. To consider games as utilitarian tools and to forget about the historical context is as shallow a view as can be. The historical and cultural dimension of software and hardware is most important when the tools are announced to us as being utilitarian, value-neutral, non-historic... That is when ideology slips in big time. Nobody would consider a car as a mere tool to go from A to B and everybody acknowledges the difference of a Ferrari and a Volkswagen in regard to going from A to B. It is not only the speed and the sound, it is the social connotations, historical framing aso. The same is of course true for games. The question that Adorno asked in regard to music is interesting for games as well. Why do I prefer to listen to certain musical styles? Why do I prefer to play certain games? An interesting inverstigation on that is by Garry Crawford and Victoria Gosling: Who plays? But even in Huizinga and Caillois one can find a lot of hints on the aspects of games beyond rules and efficiency. If one sees game designers fundamentally as engineers one does not see how games are received by the players. One does also not see that game designers who consider themselves as mere engineers carry consiousl or unconsciously a huge bag of historical and social framing and that they drop elements of that into the products they create. Mathias Fuchs European Masters in Ludic Interfaces http://ludicinterfaces.com Programme Leader MA Creative Technology and MSc Creative Games Salford University, School of Art Design, Manchester M3 6EQ http://creativegames.org.uk/ mobile: +44 7949 60 9893 residential address: Ratiborstrasse 18 10999 Berlin, Germany phone: +49 3092109654 mobile: +49 17677287011 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] baggage and utilitarian tools
Hey people, I happen to wait for my friends to pick me up yet, so I had time to read your reply. I totally agree with you, but this is just not the case. It's not saying that there is art - a world of complexity and context-based realities - and the rest of the reality, plain-vanilla abjectifiable. Your example of cars is perfect. Fetishisation, industrial production of desires, connoiseurship, historical significance, social apparatuses; but nothing we would say could deny the fact that cars are product of engineering; science applied to mass production. Cars are not simpler just because you state this. *Ergo*, you can talk about the engines on games without being a simpleton just because of that. In fact, most game art that I know (aside the ones which merely cites gaming culture) relate to the artistic possibilities of those very engines (has anybody here talked about super mario clouds?). Now and again, what seems a disagreement, to me, is more like a misunderstanding. You are talking about different things. And they are non-exclusive. My best, rafael On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Mathias Fuchs mathias.fu...@creativegames.org.uk wrote: I completely agree with Micha. To consider games as utilitarian tools and to forget about the historical context is as shallow a view as can be. The historical and cultural dimension of software and hardware is most important when the tools are announced to us as being utilitarian, value-neutral, non-historic... That is when ideology slips in big time. Nobody would consider a car as a mere tool to go from A to B and everybody acknowledges the difference of a Ferrari and a Volkswagen in regard to going from A to B. It is not only the speed and the sound, it is the social connotations, historical framing aso. The same is of course true for games. The question that Adorno asked in regard to music is interesting for games as well. Why do I prefer to listen to certain musical styles? Why do I prefer to play certain games? An interesting inverstigation on that is by Garry Crawford and Victoria Gosling: Who plays? But even in Huizinga and Caillois one can find a lot of hints on the aspects of games beyond rules and efficiency. If one sees game designers fundamentally as engineers one does not see how games are received by the players. One does also not see that game designers who consider themselves as mere engineers carry consiousl or unconsciously a huge bag of historical and social framing and that they drop elements of that into the products they create. Mathias Fuchs European Masters in Ludic Interfaces http://ludicinterfaces.com Programme Leader MA Creative Technology and MSc Creative Games Salford University, School of Art Design, Manchester M3 6EQ http://creativegames.org.uk/ mobile: +44 7949 60 9893 residential address: Ratiborstrasse 18 10999 Berlin, Germany phone: +49 3092109654 mobile: +49 17677287011 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] baggage and utilitarian tools
Baudrillard's concept of sign value, extending the notions of use and exchange value, long ago (1972) accounted for how everything has baggage and just how expert we all are in interpreting it. Best Simon On 30/12/2010 11:37, Mathias Fuchs mathias.fu...@creativegames.org.uk wrote: I completely agree with Micha. To consider games as utilitarian tools and to forget about the historical context is as shallow a view as can be. The historical and cultural dimension of software and hardware is most important when the tools are announced to us as being utilitarian, value-neutral, non-historic... That is when ideology slips in big time. Nobody would consider a car as a mere tool to go from A to B and everybody acknowledges the difference of a Ferrari and a Volkswagen in regard to going from A to B. It is not only the speed and the sound, it is the social connotations, historical framing aso. The same is of course true for games. The question that Adorno asked in regard to music is interesting for games as well. Why do I prefer to listen to certain musical styles? Why do I prefer to play certain games? An interesting inverstigation on that is by Garry Crawford and Victoria Gosling: Who plays? But even in Huizinga and Caillois one can find a lot of hints on the aspects of games beyond rules and efficiency. If one sees game designers fundamentally as engineers one does not see how games are received by the players. One does also not see that game designers who consider themselves as mere engineers carry consiousl or unconsciously a huge bag of historical and social framing and that they drop elements of that into the products they create. Mathias Fuchs European Masters in Ludic Interfaces http://ludicinterfaces.com Programme Leader MA Creative Technology and MSc Creative Games Salford University, School of Art Design, Manchester M3 6EQ http://creativegames.org.uk/ mobile: +44 7949 60 9893 residential address: Ratiborstrasse 18 10999 Berlin, Germany phone: +49 3092109654 mobile: +49 17677287011 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ s.bi...@eca.ac.uk http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
In some ways, I think the question of games as art can be enriched by looking back to poiesis and techne. On the one hand, we are trying to describe formal questions of how someone creates a representation of something (a sculpture, a text, a game, a painting, an utterance) which is expressed via technique. On the other hand, we are talking about what those representations accomplish with regards to the being that engages with this representation. If we step back from the modern conception of art and consider that there are a whole number of crafts that people engage in, and that these crafts have to do with being then we can consider the level of skill with which the craft is accomplished AND we can consider the way that this craft engages with questions of being. What I tend to consider art are those works which engage the user, reader, viewer in reflection upon being. But this is a limited definition, and, really, it is an evaluation of quality: I think good works allow people to see the context in which individual and collective consciousness is thought. The best works enable people to direct their attention differently, productively (and I don't mean productive from a purely economic perspective, though it does intervene in the general ecology of human interaction. It's funny if you think about the relationship between economy and ecology oikos for dwelling with a distinction between nomos and logos, perhaps as the distinction between the law as imposed order versus the word as emergent order or even an immanent order, particular to the logical relationships among those which it contains). In this sense, I owe a bit to Badiou's discussion of art as one of the means for truth: The more important issue today is the main contradiction between capitalistic universality on one hand, universality of the market if you want, of money and power and so on, and singularities, particularities, the self of the community. It’s the principal contradiction between two kinds of universalities. On one side the abstract universality of money and power, and on the other the concrete universality of truth and creation. My position is that artistic creation today should suggest a new universality, not to express only the self or the community, but that it’s a necessity for the artistic creation to propose to us, to humanity in general, a new sort of universality, and my name for that is truth. Truth is only the philosophical name for a new universality against the forced universality of globalization, the forced universality of money and power, and in that sort of proposition, the question of art is a very important question because art is always a proposition about a new universality, and art is a signification of the second thesis. (Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art in Lacanian Ink 23). I suppose what I like most about Badiou's discussion is not that it is a unique point but it resonates with points that I have struggled to understand through my own research and that I have heard repeated by many people in this community (and elsewhere). Many want something from art. Many seek to identify that aspect of creativity which suggests not simply improved efficiencies, but helps us chase down different efficacies (as in exploring new modes of creation and making that empower people to make the world). Certainly, this sense of agency was running through previous discussions of Creativity as Social Ontology. To return to videogames it's probably a lot like anything people make or do. There is a whole lot of worthless and even harmful (either in its mode of production or its content) shit that industry creates. Then there are games which, as Daniel Cook describes, are well-designed and with an internal mode of consistency. I think about how great a deck of playing cards works as a utilitarian object they become a framework for all sorts of human encounters... theology (gambling and divination), work (gambling and hustling), socialization (friendly games peppered with conversation or learning how to deal with disappointment/success without making everyone think you are an asshole), learning (math and memory games), even seduction (strip poker).And then there are games which aren't really games at all but art. They might have formal game-like qualities, but have a different function within social life. In the same way that sometimes TV is art and sometimes some cut up trash glued to something is art. Not all trash is art, but some art is made from trash. I live in an economically depressed community, and even trash day is a spectacle of utopian desire. The comfortable tend to buy lots of shit and throw lots of it away every week. The least comfortable (the evicted) have all their belongings thrown out on the curb at the end of the month. And then, in between, everyone else picks through the weekly trash to find objects that can be resused, refurbished, sold, kept, etc.
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
..on Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 01:14:11PM -0500, davin heckman wrote: In some ways, I think the question of games as art can be enriched by looking back to poiesis and techne. I must admit to finding this entire thread largely redundant. Surely the very attempt at discerning whether or not videogame and art can find peace is indication that they already do. When friends and I established the game-art collective Select Parks back in 1998, in the interests of documenting and 'archiving' game-based artistic experiments, we certainly did not need the canonical annointment of the fine arts to steer our judgement. Rather, we were interested in work that was merely interested in the /possibility/ that they might be considered as such. This is an important distinction, one that falls wide of the need for authenticity as such. My own early mods have themselves been exhibited in museums since 1999/2000 and at no point was the question as to whether they were or not artistically valid itself /intrincally/ important. Once they're there -once the question has opened- it's already too late for qualifying discourse. Many of my peers share the same disinterest in this debate; 'Art' is merely the name we give to discourse after cultural transformation, a muffled echo at best. All the best for the new year, -- Julian Oliver home: New Zealand based: Berlin, Germany currently: Berlin, Germany about: http://julianoliver.com follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 5:05 AM, Rafael Trindade trirraf...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, folks, Not a few times I've prepared myself to post something and got to stop just because your messages did my job better :) I just regret missing this latest topic, for I was afraid that kind of contention would happen. I find it a pity, and I'll try to show you why: The Picasso instance is not - OK, is not to me - as silly as might seem to some of you. I didn't reply it before for the reason cited above, and - I believe the main motive amongst us all - vacations! Back to Picasso-gate, what Daniel meant to me is the most pretty obvious thing: the same thing Duchamp and the conceptual artists and lots of people didactically showed us - that there is no such thing as an essentially, trouble-free, object of art. This is not only a contemporary feat; more rigid systems of yore demanded - as today - lots of training, education, sensibility and adequation to norms, institutions, artes poeticae, and dialogue with past canons and coetaneous artistic circles. What is to say, even believing so, there was not a pure, isolated, intrinsic aesthetic value in any object in any era. The example can make you cringe, but carries lots of elementary truth. The de-corporification of art, the stress on its relational, institutional, ecological nature does not imply art is valueless or an ethereal fiction. This is a sense a whole century have striven to build; not only about art, but about [social] reality itself. So Gabriel Menotti's response is not in conflict with Danc's sayings. We can find in videogames dependence on circuits, on a whole material ecology, on some modes of reception (recognition of genres), and a will of tradition (like I said weeks ago). Most human experiences are bound to some sort of will-to-canonise (gaming, being part of a gang, any nostalgia), not only the highbrow stuff. So you can relate games and art. BUT they are realities crested on very different social and technological complexes. One cannot fail to notice the enormously difference of weight canons have in arts. As someone - I forgot, sorry! - have told us here, art is, generally, about to associate, to enrich, to open more and more possibilities (according to old prescriptions, as synthetically as possible). This depends on the intrinsic properties of the object, triggered by a set of apparatuses linking it to synchronic circuits and diachronical traditions. There's nothing alike in videogames, even the most complex and beatiful; even the most distant from the childishly-irrational, fascinatingly-creative, absolutely freak and impatient mobs that makes, among other reasons, artists interested in 4chan-ness and gaming cultures. Everybody who happen to be into so-called literary fiction is familiar to the formula (which I believe only in some degree): books have to do with books, not with real stuff to which their tales could point at. Heretofore, people had learnt that Romeo and Juliet are not about some Italian couple more than they are about, say, Pyramus and Thisbe; that you cannot (would say some rigid and enthusiastic Victorian teacher) understand Molière without reading Bocaccio (and Scachetti, and Terence, and Menander...). The same has gone to arts. One can say that contemporary painting is not the same activity the pre-Raphaelites have practised, and one is right. But the pre-Raphaelites did
