Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Dear all, In the final moments of the year, the debate was rekindled in such a way that foregrounded the heterogeneity of perspectives over the game/ art distinction. This heterogeneity was expected, given the different backgrounds of the participants, and it should be welcome, in as much as it shifts the focus of the whole debate - or rather, return it to the matter of subcultural engagements. By now, we should not be worried whether the game/art distinction holds true, but on what basis we are dealing with this issue or dismissing it altogether. The criteria of gamers, artists and academics to judge the separations between playing and other cultural dynamics (art included) seem to be inevitably distinct. Is there a problem with that? Does anyone have to hold control over the definitions? Who gets to ask questions and give examples? The interdisciplinary confrontation should make us aware that our own theoretical frameworks are, themselves, mere operational platforms and not transcendental underpinnings, applicable to every field of society. In that sense, I'd echo Julian's interest in the mere /possibilities/ of things - and consequently, not in coming up with new paradigms, but in continuously provoking anomalies. So as to give some directions to this, I could end with one practical question: how is it possible to break disciplinary boundaries while maintaining critical effectivity? Would the performance (or interplay) of disciplinarity be a good strategy for that? Again, thanks very much for everyone's participation and a happy 2011! =) Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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
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
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Hey! “Games have repeatedly shied away from tying their dominant value to external systems.” [Daniel Cook] Value is a dubious measure for us to use. On the one hand, it is way too relative and personal; on the other, it seems to me that the art system is more and more aiming towards pure value as its essential specificity (perhaps the only way to subsist as an enterprise). So, why not compare artworks and games according to another parameter? Indeed, artworks may be created by reputation alone. Conversely, in terms of functionality alone, they seem much less dependent of external systems than videogames. To a large extent, a Picasso picture has an intrinsic existence: it is there, it can be hung on a wall. Wherever the viewer is aware of History of Art or not, she can still grasp a Picasso’s general characteristics, since the painting resorts to innate psychophysical mechanisms perception and the shared cultural legacy of western societies. So, it works in a very bare level. It is not the same with a videogame. In order to work on this bare level, it must comply with a lot of things – from genre conventions to technical specifications – the “representation information,” as summed up by Jerome McDonough. Even thought it doesn’t need any validation from a critic or curator, it needs a platform to run – which entail other forms of authorization. (One might say that my comparison here is dishonest; that, to be more rigorous, I should be putting a Picasso side-by-side with a non-electronic game such as Scrabble. I concede. However, I rest my case: a Scrabble board and pieces aren’t self-explanatory – they don’t work *as Scrabble* if you don’t know the rules of the game, an algorithm that circulates printed in the game manual or through the player community - i.e. subject to other authorities.) Is mere consumption truly the driving force of the market? Let’s say there is this amazing game, beautifully crafted, incredibly fun. People would certainly love it to addiction. However, if it is meant for the iPhone and it doesn’t conform to Apple’s specifications, it simply cannot be – and it doesn’t seem to matter how much pressure the consumers put on the company (I cannot remember an example of a game in this situation, but that has recently occurred to Grooveshark, a music streaming platform). Of course, the consumers can always hack their devices and look for alternative platforms. As Rafael Trindade has put it, retrogame emulation has been going around before videogame companies created official virtual console services. For iPhone, there is a very well structure platform for the distribution of applications in Cydia.[1] At the same time, the videogame developers can always learn a different programming language and look for a different platform and userbase. In what is that different from what the artworld has been doing, at least since the modernist avant-gardes? “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.” [Domenico Quaranta] When I said that No Fun exists framed “as art,” I do so in opposition to its framing “as reality,” in the original situation within chatroulette. Did the chatroulette people know they were in front of a performance? Did the piece communicate it? Would it operate differently if it did? (Answer: depends. On what? On the context – i.e. a frame. I think the Mattes kind of address this point directly in the “Freedom” piece).[2] I will again compare it to a machinima, which only exists “as movie” because before it existed “as game.” The presumed “mode of production” of a piece such as Red vs Blue [3], mentioned by Adam, contributes substantially to the meaning and value we attribute to it (its all-togetherness). The repetitive, bland animation of the series is below the conventional standards of 3D movies nowadays. If there were a universal parameter of criticism for animation technique as the one Daniel is asking for, the series would be doomed. However, RvB particular animation is not only excused because of its “tools of production” – it is also praised because of the way it engages with the videogame system and appropriates it for something it wasn’t originally meant to. In that sense, what would be a crappy animation becomes formally relevant, revealing the blandness of the game Halo itself. It seems to me that No Fun uses a strategy not dissimilar. In that case, it is no more an online performance than the making of Red vs Blue is a proper Halo Match. It is all staged, recorded and edited – even the supposed authentic, outraged reactions. Of course, one might argue that the piece is a network of different relations that include all these assumptions as well. In that case, I believe that it is even more important that we take into account the different framings (both technological and cultural) the it might go
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
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
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
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 Mainstream press coverage seems to help, but it is surprisingly less effective than one might imagine. Even when they deliver the numbers, those numbers don't always translate into engaged players. If there is one term that defines the modern media market it is 'fragmented'. :-) There are many different groups of people, all of whom have unique interests and characteristics. A good part of my day is figuring out how to create a game that reaches into as many of these fragmented groups as possible. It is certainly quite possible to reach millions of people without mainstream press coverage. A recent game of ours (Steambirds: Survival) was played by 1.8 million people within a week of launch. Publicity and press related websites drove less than 1% of that traffic with the majority coming from a rather vast array of portal sites. In generally, I expect to reach a few million people with each project (the biggest has reached 10 million, but I think we can top that). Average playtime ranges from about 25-45 minutes depending on the game. What I find fascinating about this type of distribution is that reputation in particular is not necessary. Reputation is a quality signal. Most sites have built in quality signals in the form of user rating systems or owner curation that are wash out early reputation. Zynga, for all its current reputation, went from zero to a population larger than most countries without relying on reputation. I work with smaller developers, many of whom have never worked on a AAA title. No one knows them...yet here they are reaching millions. At least in new markets, there is no ladder to climb. You don't need to be a tester and then a assistant producer and then a designer, sell a few million copies and then 10 years later have your games written about by a nostalgic critic who has a friend who is a CEO who at the last minute saves your next project by greenlighting it. Just go out and make a great game that is cognizant of what is necessary to spread virally and train new users up to the level of play required. Now, it is certainly nice to have people outside the creative process give kudos and say pleasant things. But it is by no means necessary. take care Danc. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
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. To continue a thought from the previous email and show a bit more of the perspective I'm coming from here, let's imagine an experiment: - We place a painting on a thousand websites that target various communities. Let's assume our population is a statistically balanced spread of humanity in the US. - Pick a work that isn't broadly known. In general we want people to be ignorant of the baggage behind the image. After all, we are testing inherent value, not the value of the organization and context placed around that image. We want it to be naked. - People can look at the picture for as long as they desire. - Then they are asked to rate it. Pick your own scale of meaning: Joy, Delight, Life Changingness, etc. - After you get about 10,000 or so ratings, see how you did. Now we'll do the same experiment with a game with the same scale and compare the ratings. The game, if it is made well, can cheat. It can be built for this very scenario. It prods the viewer to interact in a basic manner. Just click the button, it states. And then that click evolves step by step into a game. You won't get everyone. 40% won't make it past the first action. But the rest will. Games explain themselves. They have inherent value because every game is a tutorial about value structures within a system. A video game has the potential to be a meme that spreads itself. If a painting is a virus that requires the cellular structures to reproduce, a video game is at the very least a bacteria that has all the pieces it needs to go forth and prosper. The painting, in order to cheat, devolves quite rapidly into the base world of advertising and pornography. Context is everything for the painting...the best it can ever be on its own is a shallow trigger for evoking existing value structures in the viewer. A painting that awards the user +10 points for viewing it is an ironic reference, not a system building an internal value structure. As you state, it requires the contemporary art world to keep it alive. More often than not, it requires the contemporary art world to give it meaning. If there is a game present at all, it is the artifice of the museum with its tutorials, PvE events, Exhibit/Level flow and memberships. :-) I of course realize that not all works in modern art are paintings. :-) There are some delightful examples out there of art that prompts the viewer on how they should interact with it, Yoko Ono's instruction paintings come to mind. In the best of these, you have the start of a game. There is a hint of a coherent system of working rules that resulted in a predicted action occurring. In short, it a functional system...which once again leads us back to games, not art as it is typically imagined. As a side note, I see game designers fundamentally as engineers. Except the technology we work with is that of human psychology. Instead of sporadically evoking 'universal truths' in a haphazard process of inspired creation, we engineer emotional reactions into a reproducible system of rules that operate on the underlying psychology of the human brain. This is a vast undertaking that will likely have a meaningful impact on how humanity lives. I often wonder if perhaps a more productive partnership would be not the arts community but instead those who study economics, religion or government. Media is a tool of games, but I don't think you can call what games are evolving into media any more than you can call Boy Scouts media.
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Dear Adam, thank you very much for your reply! I do not know whether the Mattes were aware that they created a collection of fictitious enactments of the media-created dangerous video games fiction. Actually, I didn't know about the angry german kid meme, but I'm pretty sure the Mattes did. Talking about their work, this just adds an extra layer to their work and makes it more interesting - at least to me. Talking about my post, this changes little as well. The fact that most of these videos are probably staged (and of course they are: even if they portray actual anger, turning on the camera lacks the spontaneity that anger usually implies) doesn't mean that we don't occasionally get angry with our computers, and that we didn't started considering it as part of our own body Increasingly, we see the art world attempt to colonize the Internet and gaming, imposing aesthetics and structure from the outside, looking for potential stars. I would compare my own (with Jessica Westbrook) curation of Youtube videos in 2007 for Famous on the Internet at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center [http://www.atrowbri.com/swf/FamousInternet.swf] to the Guggenheim Museum's recent YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video [http://www.youtube.com/play]. While we were attempting to take samples from an emerging culture to share in another context, highlighting the new phenomena of becoming famous on the Internet, the Guggenheim offered Youtube video producers the opportunity to submit to art world judges (Laurie Anderson, the band Animal Collective, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, and artists Douglas Gordon and Takashi Murakami) so that they could pick the winners. Predictably, the jury's selection became a set of animations and experimental films that would be acceptable in any city cinema festival. The genius of Youtube -- strange amateur creations, joyful meme one-upmanship and bizarre real life documents -- failed to make the art world's art list. I completely agree with you. Actually, I just published a short article (unfortunately, Italian only) on Youtube Play, saying basically the same things: that the show completely missed the chance to portray online culture and its impact on art. I didn't know about your show, but I made a reference to IOCOSE's project Notube Contest (http://notubecontest.com/) as a far better take on the subject. Maybe Paolo can add some interesting thoughts here. In a similar way, I question the concept of an art game culture that does not begin by recognizing that video games were art before the traditional art world began to sample various elements of video games. I question why the modifier art is necessary in the phrase art games, art mods, art machinima. The most popular and well known machinama, Red vs. Blue [http://redvsblue.com/] does not require any art modifier, it exists as biting parody as well as a gaming-focused, populist Waiting for Godot. I don't agree with you on this point. I know that words such as art games, art mods etc. may seem ambiguous, but they aren't if we digested the never ending debate about what is art and what's not. Photography is art. Cinema is art. Cooking is art. And videogames are art of course. But they are art according to their inner rules, that don't necessarily make them works of art for the so called contemporary art world. On the other side, contemporary art is inherently multidisciplinar, and can be done with every medium, including cinema, photography, cooking and videogames. It has its own rules, however, and if you want your work to be accepted as contemporary art you have to follow these rules. That's why Henry Cartier-Bresson is a photographer (an artist according to the inner rules of his own medium) and Thomas Demand is an artist (a photographer who uses photography according to the rules of the contemporary art world). It's not a question of level (hi vs low), but of frameworks. Red vs. Blue may be an interesting cultural artifact; it's art according to the system of values shared in its very specific art world (machinima, online video or whatever you'd like to call it); and it might even be recognized as art in other art worlds (ie, in the world of tv series); but it's not art in the sense shared in the contemporary art world, and, as you say below, it doesn't even want to be art in that sense. You mentioned before the case of internet semiotics becoming a meme. This is very interesting: the video actually became a meme because it worked as a good representation of the hipster culture online communities are fighting against. 4channers completely identified contemporary art and hipster culture. I don't, but I got their point. Personally, I think that the memefication of internet semiotics is much more interesting than the actual work, a bad incarnation of the idea of art shared in the contemporary art world. But this
Re: [-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Hi everyone, sorry for the late reply -Xmas is a really slow time :) there are quite a lot of things to say and comment, and is very difficult to decide where to start from... On 22 December 2010 11:14, Domenico Quaranta qrn...@yahoo.it wrote: Maybe Paolo can add some interesting thoughts here. I'll start from this point where I was personally mentioned and then try to go back 'in topic'. The NoTube Contest is a contest for the most valueless video on YouTube. The participants are asked to find and submit a video that has no value. With 'no value' we mean that there should be no reasons to produce, publish or watch this video. It is a contest about searching, not producing. The point is to look at the YouTube database and find out a video with no narrative, no keywords, no views, no links. What is not supposed to be found, or be viewed, but is still there. We, the artist group IOCOSE, select a shortlist of applicants, and then ask to a jury of 'experts' to choose the final winner. In 2010 we had Bifo, Patrick Lichty and Konrad Becker. http://www.iocose.org/projects/notube_contest_2010 I'm not going any further as it gets very close to self promotion and seriously off topic! But there is a point of connection, I believe, between this discussion about art projects based on YouTube and the general discussion we are having on this list about video game (sub)cultures. The NoTube Contest and the YouTube Play at Guggenheim, and also 'Famous on the Internet' (great project, by the way!), are all representing and looking at YouTube from a particular perspective. They contribute to generate narratives for describing a website (YouTube) and its users. In a similar way, the artistic projects we discussed earlier are all generating and based on narratives surrounding video games and video game culture. 'My Generation' by Eva and Franco Mattes or the very similar 'Angry Gamers' by Nia Burks (http://www.niaburks.com/video/11.html?iframe=truewidth=730height=500) are based on the celebration and glorification of 'internet celebrities'. In these cases we see an artistic presentation of a series of videos which became famous for showing a private, intimate fit of anger from video game players. We know that game players can get very passionate about their games and their own performances, and video games can be very frustrating. The videos, their popularity and the art works in fact reinforce this belief about video games and their players. Also, many game hacks are based on the pleasure of showing the breaking of a supposedly closed system. Paul B. Davis, for example, has been working on hacking Nintendo cartridges. The image of a broken Super Mario cartridge represents his work pretty well (the story is that he couldn't fix the plastic box after his modification and part of it had to be broken). http://www.vbs.tv/en-it/watch/the-creators-project--2/meet-paul-b-davis/comments In this picture there is a perfect synthesis of a dominant narrative in the relation between players and video game software. A supposedly closed system is physically opened and modified. The release of open source engines has often been presented as a concession from a hierarchically superior developer to the players, and also as a sort of revolution in the relation between consumers and producers in the video game industry. But it is also true that video games became a commodity only after some time in their history, as the case of Spacewar shows quite well. Spacewar, conceived at MIT in the '60s, was never 'closed' and finished. It was an always open project, constantly under development. It is only when the video game market officially starts, with Magnavox's Odyssey, that the narrative of a closed system is introduced (Odyssey was codenamed 'the brown box' by his inventor Ralph Baer, and his personal documents highlight his very project: to close video game software in a box in order to make it possible to monetize it). This historical reconstruction shows that video game culture is organized around a series of narratives that describe the relation between games and their players. Game Art, as well, comments on these narratives and contributes to generate new ones. I kind of disagree with Alex Galloway, in this regard, when he critiques 'countergaming' (in 'Gaming. Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006'). 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. A part from the assumption that there is 'an essential quality' in video games (which I don't like, for reasons I will maybe argue in a different email) but he also kind of miss the point that game art is mostly a comment on the video game culture as a whole, and not essentially on games. As such the projects he describes, as well as the examples mentioned in this debate, all provide an insight, they 'say something' about video games,
[-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?
Dear Empyrers, I've been a lurker on this list for a long time, always reading interesting discussions. And I'm really happy to have been invited to contribute to one of them. As an art critic, I've always been interested in the impact of new technologies on artistic production and dissemination. My interest in games comes from this broader approach. I've never been an hardcore gamer myself, and my interest in media studies and game studies is instrumental to my work as an art critic. That said, I found the conversation up to now really useful, and I'd like to push it further submitting you some thoughts on so called Game Art. Let's start from an example. My Generation (2010, available here: http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/mygeneration/index.html) is one of the last works of the artists' duo Eva and Franco Mattes. The work is a crashed yet still working computer displayed on the floor, and featuring a video. The video is made of found footage of young people playing video-games – at least until they get so angry with the machine that they start crashing it. They do it in the same way in which we sometimes start hitting ourselves, or any part of our body (our head, our hand, our legs), when they don't seem to work properly. Looking at this video, a statement made by artist Miltos Manetas in 2004 comes to my mind. In the attempt to show that “copying from video-games is the art of our times”, Manetas starts claiming that a video-game character is a truly animated character, because it “is a combined creature: the cartoon plus the player. It’s the player’s energy what “powers” the puppet: if you don’t play with him, he falls asleep:” Mario”, is nobody else but you.” [Miltos Manetas, “Copying from Videogames is the art of our time”, 2004, online at http://www.manetas.com/txt/videogamesis.html .] Thus, the rage against the machine displayed in My Generation is, more properly, a rage against ourselves, and against our way to live into the game. Both the Mattes and Manetas belong to a generation of artists who grew up playing videogames. They may or may not be hardcore gamers, but the fact is that their first encounter with a computer was probably due to a game. For the current generation of digital natives, the situation is different: their media experience is much more complex from the beginning, including mobile phones, tablets, home computers along with consoles; furthermore, for them gaming is embedded in almost any media experience. On the contrary, for the generation that grew up along the seventies, the computer was, first of all, a gaming platform: the arcade they played in public spaces, the C64 they played at their friend's home, the Gameboy they played on the bus. For most of them, the computer as a working environment or as a source of information came later. The impact of this common background on the art field has never been studied in deep. If we look back at the first generation that grew up with television – first introduced in the US along Thirties and Forties – we may see this impact working on a double level. At a first level, artists rewrote the relationship between avantgarde and kitsch, and between art and mass culture, putting into question the way this relationship was previously discussed by critics such as Clement Greenberg [Clement Greenberg, “Avantgarde and Kitsch”, Partisan Review, 1939. Available online at http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html .]. Pop Art was born. At a second level, the experience of television had an even deeper and broader impact, ferrying art, as Rosalind Krauss noticed, to the post-medium condition: “In the age of television, we live in a post-medium condition”. [Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London, Tames Hudson 2000, p. 31.] My question is: can we claim a similar, double-layered impact when we speak of the relationship between video-games and art? This question may seem quite out of topic in this debate. So, it may be useful if I explain shortly why I'm asking it in this context. The fact is that, since artists started – at the beginning of the Nineties – to show some kind of interest to this relationship, their work has always been described in terms of “subculture”. Let's take, for instance, the broader term “Game Art”. When artists and theorists started using it, in the Mid-Nineties, they did it to bring attention to an interesting phenomenon: that video-games where something you should know when talking about contemporary art. That was happening not only because many artists were starting introducing references to video-games in their work, for example painting, as Manetas did, video- game characters or appropriating game footage in their video works; but also because some artists were starting using it as an art medium, for example
