Game Art, unlimited.
GameScenes chronicles the ever-changing landscapes of Game Art.
Background info: Originally, a videoludica's channel, GameScenes.
Now (= 2009), a full-fledged blog (!).
Written and edited by Matteo Bittanti.
Key contributor: Mathias Jansson.
Special thanks: Domenico Quaranta, Valentina Tanni, Paolo Ruffino.
Would you like to play with us? Drop me a line
This interview took place in March
of 2010 via email and it's part on an ongoing series written by Mathias
Jansson on the key events in the history of Game Art (for
additional information, check the links at the bottom of this entry).
In 1999, Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski deeloped an artistic modification of Bungie's first-person shooter Marathon titled “Bio Tek Kitchen”. The modification was originally presented at “Cracking the Maze”, a seminal exhibition curated by Anne-Marie Schleiner.
GameScenes: Was “Bio Tek Kitchen” your first game-based artistic intervention?
Josephine Starrs: I made "Bio Tek Kitchen" in 1999 with Leon Cmielewski, my collaborator on several media art projects. Before that, in the early 1990’s I was a founding member of VNS Matrix, who launched the Cyberfeminist movement with our Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, and explored the language and structure of the early computer games in our artworks. As cited by Rachel Greene in her book Internet Art, our artwork predated the vogue for game art. We began by making up game narratives around our female protagonist All New Gen. This was before Lara Croft, when no-one thought it was possible to have a female hero in a computer game. We created game stills for light boxes, narrative sound and video works and interactive art installations. We received enormous positive feedback from young women, both gamers and non-gamers from many parts of the world. It became obvious that loads of women were really pissed off with being actively excluded from game culture and were doing something about it.
GameScenes: In “Bio Tek Kitchen”', the player is attacked in a kitchen by mutant vegetables engineered by a ruthless corporation whose only purpose is to take over the entire food chain. The player has to defend himself with the aid of weapons such as dish cloths and egg flippers... Do you think the videogames could be an effective means to tackle serious issues, for example the genetic modification of crops?
Josephine Starrs: Yes, why not? Humour and play have always been strategies that artists have employed in their work to create meaning; the Surrealists for example. Digital gaming has become as much of a cultural force in our world as cinema. In the same way that experimental film and video has grown alongside the mainstream film industry, game art has emerged in the past two decades, often drawing on digital game concepts, formats and narrative structure. Themes such as war, biotechnology, the cyborg, and dystopian futures are common themes in mainstream games. I don’t think any subject should be off-limits to media artists.
Leon Cmielewski and I created Seeker an interactive video installation that was playful in that it encouraged participants to map their own family migration history. It also explored relationships between conflict commodities like tantalum, which power our mobile culture, and the tragic deaths of people seeking asylum in new countries. This is an important artwork that won an Award of Distinction at Ars Electronica in 2007.
Josephine Starrs, "Seeker", 2006
GameScenes: “Bio Tek Kitchen” has been showed around the world since 1999. Was the programming challenging?
Josephine Starrs: We have made many interactive works over the years, documented on our website. We maintain former hardware and software systems to support our artworks. Unfortunately museums in Australia are not interested in collecting and archiving this kind of work yet. "Bio Tek Kitchen" is a Marathon Infinity mod and runs on Macintosh OS9, so it can only easily be seen as a short machinima we made called "Kitchen Carnage".
GameScenes: Australia was among the earliest catalysts for Game Art. Aside from your work, one cannot forget Rebecca Cannon's seminal Select Parks or ground-breaking modifications and "indie" projects, like “Escape from Woomera”. Why?
Josephine Starrs: Australia has always been very hip when is comes to new media art. We are often early adopters of new technologies, but we are also innovators and are not afraid to critique the establishment. Who knows, that irreverence could be the influence of our Indigenous culture, and perhaps the Irish convict culture.
GameScenes: One thing that struck me is that several Game Art pioneers are women. It surprises me for at least two reasons. One, because Game Art is a niche genre in contemporary art. Second, in the mid-Nineties there were relatively few women playing or developing videogames, unlike today...
Josephine Starrs: One reason for this is that the games industry ignored women and girls for more than a decade, perhaps fearing that if they market games to girls the boys would be unhappy about losing their no-girl zone. So even though women were often excluded from the mainstream game industry, female artists could have fun making their own games, hacking the game engines, slashing the dominant game narratives and critiquing the content and structure of mainstream game culture.
GameScenes: Do you believe that Game Artists specifically, and, in general, artists working with videogames have somehow contributed to a broader socio-cultural acceptance of videogames as an artistic medium?
Josephine Starrs: Yes, to a certain extent. There are many games that are great works of art, but it might take a new generation of art curators to convince our cultural institutions of that. Also, mainstream culture has always had a history of taking ideas from artists for commercial gain no matter what the medium. And artists love mashing up mainstream culture to create fantastic art.
All images courtesy of the artist.
Link: Josephine Starrs
Text by Mathias Jansson
Related:
GameArtworld: The Early Years: Interviews
Margarete Jahrmann and the "Synreal exhibition" (1999)
Tobias Bernstrup & Palle Torsson's "Museum Meltdown"
Anne-Marie Schleiner's “Cracking the Maze”
Orhan Kipcak (ArsDoom, ArsDoom II)
Konrad Becker on “Synreal: The Unreal Modification"
Nia Burks, "Angry Gamers" (2010)
"The work comes as the result of the artist’s process of content
curation--- the organization and arrangement of User Generated Content
on Social Networking Sites. By recontextualizing and rearranging already
existing data, it is transformed and, gains new meaning.
Our culture’s desire for the archive, combined with ideas of
self-celebrity, originality, proof of existence, and boredom result in a
gluttonous and rich world of self generated imagery. With the willful
rejection of the roles that privacy, exclusivity, and forgetting play in
our culture, the content of the social web is, ostensibly, available
for all to consume. What is real or fake? Why do we participate? Why do
we record images with the intent to mass distribute? What does it mean?
The world of Social Media holds the greatest potential for diversity
that humans have ever known. The art practice and investigation
illustrates the power of sameness and homogeny (with the ability to get
lost in details) in our online behavior within this social environment" (Nia Burks)
Link: "Angry Gamers" (via John Michael Boling, Rhizome)
"Per leggere questo libro - si precisa nell'introduzione - occorre un iPod ben imbottito. La playlist da spararsi in cuffia chiama all'appello qualsiasi cosa di DJ Krush, del primo DJ Shadow, di Coldcut o Underworld. La raccomandazione non è un vezzo, ma stretta necessità: serve per comprendere più a fondo il concetto di dispositivo sinestetico in riferimento a Rez e la poetica tutta di Tezuya Mizuguchi. Per leggere questo libro, inoltre, non bisogna neppure possedere il gioco di UGA (United Game Artists) o dichiarare di averci giocato almeno una volta nella vita. "Posto di fronte a un videogame particolarmente avvincente, un giocatore viene colto da una voglia irrefrenabile, da un'urgenza insopprimibile, da una desiderio animale: strappare il controller dalle mani del malcapitato utente pehttp://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00d83451ba1e69e2011570ffbafd970b/post/composer interagire in prima persona. […] Per un gamer, giocare in prima persona è una esigenza, non un'opzione. Giocare vuol dire porsi delle domande, pretendere delle risposte, leggere il testo che si sta dipanando sullo schermo. […] Rez è uno dei rari casi in cui ci può ritrovare a fissare uno schermo senza un controller tra le dita e senza porsi domande. A me è capitato". Il gameplay, in un videogioco come Rez, non conta proprio un beneamato: è sufficiente anche solo vederlo giocare da altri. È puramente una questione di spazio e cyberspazio, di tempo e di groove, di trance e neuroni, di arte visiva, di Kandisky (secondo i comunicati ufficiali di Sega – Il progetto originario portava il nome di Project K) e di spiritualità digitale applicata al viaggio più onirico possa esserci al mondo. Rez, in buona sostanza, come potentissima droga sintetica, mirabolante e innocua." (Lorenzo Antonelli, NetxGame.it)
Leggi: "Art is Rez-sistance" di Lorenzo Antonelli
Acquista: Rez di Cristiano Poian
Image: 2002 Jan Sprij
GameScenes: When did you start playing videogames? And why did you decide to use them for your artistic interventions?
Installation: Nybble-Engine-ToolZ
Ars Electronica 2003
GameScenes: Your artworks have been displayed in several European museums and galleries for the past ten years. Did you notice a change in attitude toward Game Arts? Are critics and visitors reacting differently to your ludic artworks today compared to the early days of Game Art?
Margarete Jahrmann: Museums need certain logics of arts and public display to be fulfilled. But for me this was always a positive challenge - to quit the boring pure virtuality and to make it more dirt by integrating the physical body, the art coded installation. Ars Electronia at OK Center Linz in 2003 was a very great opportunity- we built a player generated architecture of a shooter game- only the carved out shapes in human size- a complete room of about 60 square meters was filled with that- that was wonderful!
Also the experience at V2 lab Rotterdam at the Las Palmas exhibition space and at Gallery Mama in 2003/04 was perfect. We also had the opportunity to build a circular screen of about 12 meters for a real immersive experience - combined with a living room situation...to seduce players to send out anti-war mails by shooting. ... and showed an art coded print out of the game architecture- the generative architecture of course - in a vitrina like a modern
Installation: Taunting Bots Dance on a red square machinima towards
heavenly peace!
Red Gate Gallery Beijing, China 2004
GameScenes: Tell me about the Nybble-Engine project. It reminds me of The Matrix, an engine whose goal is to showcase the hidden information of the net and construct an architecture made of bits...
Yes - you got it pretty well. But in our case it was not ONLY textures- it was really a total conversion of the engine, which fully integrated commandos of a Linux server as working function into an game engine. So your REALLY could start commandos from inside the game - as NS look up traceroute, send mail, receive mail- only by shooting or bumping into objects.
We introduced a second text layer, which displayed all that feature live in real-time inside the engine. This was developed during a three month residency at the V2lab in Rotterdam and supported by them.
Installation: Nybble-Engine-ToolZ
Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, DEAF 2003
All images courtesy of the artist.
Link: Margarete Jahrmann
Text by Mathias Jansson
Related:
GameArtworld: The Early Years: Interviews
Interview: Sylvia Eckermann on “Hotel Synthifornia” (1998)
Martin Berghammer's RELOAD exhibition (Shift e.V Gallery in Berlin, 1999)
Tobias Bernstrup & Palle Torsson's "Museum Meltdown"
Anne-Marie Schleiner's “Cracking the Maze”
Orhan Kipcak (ArsDoom, ArsDoom II)
Konrad Becker on “Synreal: The Unreal Modification"
Recent Comments