gamescenes

Game Art: Matteo Bittanti's "Slow Fighter I-III" (2009)

 

"Why has pleasure in slowness disappeared?" (Milan Kundera)

 

Game Art: Tim Devine & "Onur Sonmez' "The Mexican Standoff" (2010)

 
 

"The Mexican Standoff removes the link between the persons thoughts and actions; people are directly thinking about what they are doing – creating a hyperreality. Two people use their minds via EEG headsets to fire their guns in a Mexican Standoff realised in an ultra-violent first person shooter (FPS). The characters take a long time to die so the game can last for quite some time. To trigger the EEG interface the person needs to think about pulling a trigger in their right hand. When this is detected the avatar will begin to shoot the other. In popular culture, a Mexican Standoff is usually portrayed as two or more opponents with guns at the ready, creating a very tense situation. A Mexican standoff is a slang term defined as a stalemate or impasse, a confrontation that neither side can win."(Tim Levine & Onur Sonmez)

Link: "The Mexican Standoff" 

Link: Additional information

Update: March 09 2010 - Thanks to Onur Sonmez for the updated information.

Event: PLAYLAB (Madrid, January 21-24 and February 4-7, 2010)

"PlayLab aims to explore the context of games and video games as a space for creativity, experimentation, learning and reflection. Call for the presentation of proposals to be carried out within the collaborative production workshop that will take place in Madrid on January (21 to 24) and February (4 to 7), 2010. With the collaboration of Arsgames.

PlayLab aims to explore the context of games and video games as a space for creativity, experimentation, learning and reflection. It also aims to create an environment that leads to collaborative work in which different disciplines come together.

PlayLab's activities are proposed as an open and participatory research process from which one can approach video games, a phenomenon that is becoming more extensive and influent in Contemporary Society, and explore its critical potential, its learning possibilities and its capacity to create social spaces that go beyond the purely commercial and standardized.

PlayLab is also interested in the history of Games and video games as it examines its possible genealogies and studies its social, cognitive and psychological effects characteristic of video games today.

Core themes

• The Game beyond the screen: the city as a game arena, geolocated games, board games, applied to scenic arts, robotics, augmented reality games, etc.
• The Game as a generator of social spaces whether in the collaborative processes of production or in the collective forms of playing (social gaming).
• Game and video game Application in other areas: education, science, engineering, economy, systems for social organization, etc.
• The users take things in hand: remixing, reusing, intervening and using existent video games in an unexpected way (machinima, game hacktivismo); or actively participating in the production  (experimentation with hardware and software with Game, video game and Free Software platforms) and in the creation and redefinition of the rules of the game without altering the code.
• Artistic and/ or critical video games, new interactive and/or fictional narratives, activism, gender, new forms of representation.
• Intervention in Multiuser Persistent Worlds, projects for intervention and performative situationism in video games, Role-playing video games.
• Video games for New Players: Video games 2.0, casual games and minis games, as well as proposals that bring and promote a greater presence of women in the video game production and use." (PlayLab)

Link: PLAYLAB (list of selected games)

Event: Sight 09/10 (Museo Laboratorio, Pescara, Italy, 12/18 - 01/23 2010)

 

featuring: Damiano Colacito & Aram Bartholl among the others

 

Game Art: Studio Kinglux' "GAMEFACE"

     
  

"GAMEFACE" is a collection of gamers' portraits collected by eclectic/electric cool hunters Studio Kinglux, located in Birmingham, UK. As Lili Weiss & Tony Hill write, "We had been inspecting the vague, blank, expressions of gamers in a kind of narcissistic feedback loop. We had been staring at a computer screen, looking at people, staring at computer screens....[...]  These then, are the portraits of electronic decision making and digital vacancy. Binary boredom meets crucial concentration. The look is always Gameface. A description found on an internet chat forum that describes the look of intense concentration on a person playing a video game." (Studio KingLux)

Link:  Studio Kinglux

Complete Gallery: Download KINGLUX 2009 PHOTOBOOK GEMEFACE

Related: Philip Toledano's "Gamers"

Related: Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann's "Shooter"

Related: Todd Deutsch's "Gamers"

Related: Sybille Fendt's "No Sleep Before I Die" 

Related: Shauna Frischkorn's "Game Boys"

(Thanks to Mathias Jansson for the additional links!)

Game Art: Ida Rödén's “Composition Grid” (2009)

 In 2007, seven students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå, Sweden - Olof Broström, Carl-Erik Engqvist, John Huntington, Anders Johansson, Eskil Liepa, Ida Rödén and Per-Arne Sträng - created a collective known as "Dataspelsgruppen” (literally, the “Videogame group”). Their ambition was to investigate and use videogames as artistic tools to collective explore the artistic process in the liminal spaces between art and game design. In the same year, they designed their first game project, “Yod Burrow and the mix-up of Chaste City”, which was presented at Bildmuseet, Umeå. The videogame was never completed, so they exhibited screenshots and sketches of the game.

 After graduating, some of them have continued to work with videogames and art. Among them is Ida Rödén. Collaborating with Jens Andersson (former lead designer at the Swedish company Starbreeze Studios, the team behind such games as The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness), Ida developed the experimental videogame “Rorschach,” a detective story taking place in a madhouse where a murder has been committed. The graphics - created by Röden - evoke the ink-stain look of the famous Rorschach-test. The game has been exhibited at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden an d at the festival FILE 2008, in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

 
In the past few years, Ida Rödén’s interest has turned to  drawing. In an exhibition held in Östersund, Sweden and organized by the Swedish collective Upgrade! node, she showed a new project called “Composition Grid”, build on the concept of Tetris. The concept behind this piece of interactive art is that the player should be able to design, in a Tetris-like way, a unique drawing on the screen that later could be printed with the artist signature on it. The picture on the screen are created with help of 216 different creatures (built with six squares) falling from the sky. The next development step consists in transfering the program to a flash application available on the net.

On her homepage, Ida describes her view on video games and art, a description I think many artist working with Game Art recognize: 

“Video games have the potential of becoming one of the most advanced art forms. I don’t have interest in defining whether a video game is art or not. An art piece that intrigues me has an interesting idea expressed through a well-done and personal handcraft. If a video game has that, then it has every potential of being an art piece.” (Ida Rödén)

Text by Mathias Jansson.

Link: Ida Rödén

Video: Julian Oliver, art & games (CrossLab, New Zealand, Dec 10 2009)

Archived video of the presentation by Julian Oliver during the CrossLab LunchEvent of 10 december 2009. (Thanks to Evolutie!)

Link: CrossLab's BlipTv Channel

Link: Creative Machinery

Interview: Nicola Verlato (Domenico Quaranta, ArtPulse)

 
 Nicola Verlato, "Gator", 2008 (oil on wood panel) I[mage courtesy of the artist]

excerpt:

"Domenico Quaranta: To tell the truth, there is a lot of Toryism in video games. Some weeks ago I was on a panel with some conceptual artists, those who design landscapes and characters for video games, and I was astonished when they told me that they drew inspiration from… John Singer Sargent. Anyway, I see your point: a video game is like a bomb hidden in a Vuitton bag. What’s really disruptive is its inner machinery. Moreover, if low and popular culture – from cinema to video games, from comics to fantasy card games – inherited the traditional approach to storytelling, they turned it into something completely different. What’s your relationship with this low-brow approach to storytelling and image making?

Nicola Verlato.- If liberal democracies and industrialism were what made modernity different from the previous models of society, the low and popular narrative forms have probably been the real cultural product of modernity: they were produced employing industrial processes and they were intended to reach as many people as possible with a clear and intelligible language in the spirit of democracy.

I’m not sure if the avant-garde was incarnating the progressive spirit of the twentieth century. Instead, I think about it as a cultural and social resistance of an old aristocratic order that needed, and still needs, the language of art in order to create social differences through the use of complex linguistic codes of difficult, and sometimes cryptic, interpretation. If the video game artists you met told you that they were inspired by Sargent (an artist considered conservative in a modernist perspective), it is probably because the language of the artistic avant-garde is completely useless in the process of making a video game. Furthermore, if video games are the artistic-technological avant-garde of our times, we should probably start looking at the relationship between Sargent and the avant-garde in a different way: while Sargent is still extremely influential, Malevich has already exhausted his role in shaping our times.

This situation reminds me of what happened in the music field. In the last forty years we have faced the complete failure of avant-garde music in shaping our cultural landscape. For the old high musical forms, the only way to survive has been by reconsidering what was thrown away by the avant-garde: tonality, rhythm and harmony. “One day the postman will whistle my melodies,” said Arnold Schoenberg. It never happened. What happened instead was the invasion of rock and pop music in every recess of our lives thanks to the industrial processes of production and distribution and the use of a kind of “conservative” language that Boulez, not so long ago, called “a fascist product.”

Young composers today, especially in America, are trying to combine the language of pop music in the complex structures of high music. This is what I’m trying to do in my paintings, as well as what other painters are doing in this country." (Artpulse)

Link: Domenico Quaranta talks to Nicola Verlato (Artpulse)

Link: Nicola Verlato

Interview: Anne-Marie Schleiner's “Cracking the Maze” (1999) - A decade later

In July 1999, artist and scholar Anne-Marie Schleiner curated the exhibition “Cracking the Maze: Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art" at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. The exhibition featured both artists and game hackers  and presented artistic modifications of commercial videogames. Ten years later, GameScenes talks to Anne-Marie Schleiner about that seminal event. What's the legacy of "Cracking the Maze"?

GameScenes: How did "Cracking the Maze" come to be?

Anne-Marie Schleiner: Back in the mid-1990's my thesis in Computers in Fine Art, at CADRE program at San Jose State University in California, was a game modification and sculptural interactive installation based on the modification called Madame Polly (Polly from Polygon--the planes that 3-D game space is built from.) In the process of making this mod I encountered the world of game hackers, skinners, patchers, wadders and whatever else people who would make alterations in games in micro and macro ways were called. They shared their mods online and also shared the software tools and techniques that they used to make them. So my first contact was technical but when I discovered the underworld of modification, which seemed much more experimental in many ways (culturally, gender-wise, thematically, and potentially ludically) than the original commercial games they modified, it occurred to me it would be interesting to invite artists to get their hands on these tools and to make modifications with them.

 
 
GameScenes: How did you select the artists for “Cracking the Maze”? There couldn't have been too many artists experimenting with videogames at that time, right?

Anne-Marie Schleiner: I circulated an online call for entries describing the curatorial concept of "Cracking the Maze" and over the course of 9 months artists responded. For instance net art duo JoDi were already working on modifiying Wolfenstein, 3-D. Jason Huddy's Los Disneys was already completed and I contacted him directly to ask for his participation, and some of the other artists who responded to my call were in the midst of creating pieces. For other interested artists like Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmeleiwski I helped procure free games and modification software and games, writing to a couple game companies like ID software to see if they would be interested in sponsoring the show in some capacity.  Bungie, makers of Mac game Marathon (later fated to be bought by Microsoft and to make Halo), offered free copies of their games and modification software to the “Cracking the Maze” artists, which luckily was the same game I had modified to create Madame Polly so I was also offering the artists some technical advice. Feeling like there was still a lack of mods intervening in more aggressively artistic and aesthetic ways, I snuck a new mod of my own into “Cracking the Maze” called Epilepsy Virus Patch under an artist persona of mine Parangari Cutiri (in those days, before social software tied down our identities, it was common for digital artists to have anonymous extra artist personas) . So I was technical support, curator and an artist for “Cracking the Maze”, a mix maybe as unholy as the relationship between the commercial PC game industry and the gift ecology of game modding. 

 

GameScenes: The exhibition also featured a series of game hackers. Did you see any difference between them and the artists in the exhibition?

Anne-Marie Schleiner: Of course there are differences but in “Cracking the Maze” it seemed strategic to blur those differences. I think many online creators,  whether they are posting remakes of Youtube videos or customized game avatar skins, do not consider themselves artists and they do not have artistic training. They remain innocent (maybe happily) of previous artistic tactics which foreshadow their creative processes, such as the collaborative cafe games of the Surrealists or Marcel Duchamp's found objects. These processes, which I am calling "ludic mutation" in my current Phd research, are about changing the given, metamorphosis, cultural hacking that has the potential to travel along contagious vectors, especially in the online medium of culture. Fine artists' game modifications, on the other hand, I often wish were more contagious than they have been so far. The game industry has yet to adopt a more fragmented, less mimetic experimental approach to virtual 3-D space, with few mostly Japanese exceptions like the PlayStation music game Rez or Katamari Damacy. In fact one encounters the opinion that good art cannot be a good game. This reveals assumptions about what constitutes good game play, however play is not necessarily rule bound but also chaotic (paidia), destructive and creative. Generes such as sandbox games indicate a broadened approach to play appearing even in the industry..well I can go on and on about theories of play etc from my current writing for my dissertation and from my classes teaching game design at the National University of Singapore so I will stop here.

GameScenes: In your curator’s note, you wrote:  "Many artists, art critics, new media critics and theoreticians have expressed a disdain for games and game style interactivity, in fact, to describe an interactive computer art piece as "too game-like" is a common pejorative." So how did the public, critics, and the visitor react to the exhibition?

Anne-Marie Schleiner: If imitation is flattery yes there were some exhibits that borrowed a very similar line-up of artists as "Cracking the Maze", which was originally created outside the umbrella of any art intuition or festival as a purely online art show. Terms such as "patching" which appeared in my curatorial statement and that were actually not common vernacular in the game mod community were key indicators of unrefer nced influence in the descriptions of other shows :). There was a response from the press, some mention in articles in the art section of the New York Times. American museums never did seem to keen on the idea of games as art but some European digital art festivals were interested, for example I got an invitation to curate a small online show for the Sonar digital music festival in Barcelona which I called Snow Blossom House and I managed to bring a couple of the same artists with this show, although Snow Blossom House was not exclusively focused on games.

 
GameScenes: “Cracking the Maze” was an online exhibition, why didn't you make a real exhibition in an exhibition hall with computers?

Anne-Marie Schleiner: I thought more people would have exposure through the Internet than if the mods were installed in a local gallery in one location, even if online one only could experience the small animated gifs(Internet pages have grown in resolution size since then), game mod screenshots and descriptions. At the time this was also a conscious political decision to privilege the Internet as a medium over what I saw as more limited elitist art world venues.

GameScenes: At that time, did you believe that videogames could become a new important medium for artistic expressions? Could you foresee that digital games were bound to become one of the most popular forms of entertainment and an academic discipline?

Of course I envisioned games as important medium for artmaking, thus my efforts to get game software modification tools into the hands of other artists besides myself for "Cracking the Maze". And yes even back then in the late 1990's I was interested in games as a subject of serious academic research. I submitted the short rationale I wrote for my Madame Polly game patch creation to the journal Leonardo who published it later as a revised article called "Does Lara Croft wear fake polygons" in 1999. I have always been critically fascinated with games but I could not foresee how the field of ludology would take off, and in many ways I am critical of a thread of reductionism structuralism within ludology that forecloses artistic intervention and creativity in relation to play -this is another area I have found it necessary to  entangle with in my current research.

  

GameScenes: “Cracking the Maze” is still available on the net, but for how long? Games and technology are changing so fast... Will it be possible to preserve the history of the early Game Art for the generations to come?

Anne-Marie Schleiner: Yes, I am grateful to my alma matter, CADRE and their online graduate student journal Switch for continuing to host "Cracking the Maze". The ephemerality of digital art is a big problem that has not been adequately solved, and maybe this also has something to do with its charm. I leave this question to more capable people like Jon Ippolito or gallerists of digital media art to resolve these issues... I have sold a few collectable betacam SP videos and screenshot prints of my own software art to collectors but how long does video really last and  is this really an adequate representation of interactive works? It takes a lot of effort to look at my own work from older platforms even. It would be nice if people in the cultural industry could do something about the longevity of artworks in this variable medium.

Text: Mathias Jansson 

This interview took place via email in early December 2009.

All images are from Jodi's "Sod" (1999)

Link: “Cracking the Maze” (online catalogue) 

Event: PLAYLIST. Playing Games, Music, Art (Laboral, Gijón, Spain, 18.12.2009 – 17.05.2010)

PLAYLIST.  PLAYING GAMES, MUSIC, ART CURATOR: Domenico Quaranta DATES: 18.12.2009 – 17.05.2010 VENUE: Mediateca Expandida de LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón – Asturias) MORE INFO: www.laboralcentrodearte.org ARTISTS: Paul B. Davis (UK), Jeff Donaldson / NoteNdo (DE), Dragan Espenschied (DE), Gino Esposto / Micromusic.net (CH), Gijs Gieskes (NL), André Gonçalves (PT), Mike Johnston / Mike in Mono (UK), Joey Mariano / Animal Style (US), Raquel Meyers (SP), Mikro Orchestra (PL), Don Miller / No-carrier (US), Jeremiah Johnson / Nullsleep (US), Tristan Perich (US), Rabato (SP), Gebhard Sengmüller (AT), Alexei Shulgin (RU), Paul Slocum (USA), Tonylight (IT), VjVISUALOOP (IT). CATALOGUE: Texts by Matteo Bittanti, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz, Ed Halter, Domenico Quaranta. Music CD included. Along the Twentieth Century, music has often been the driving force behind crucial innovations in visual arts, and the starting point for many artists. Without forgetting the role played by music in the development of abstract art, it was mainly during the Sixties that music provided a fertile ground for new approaches, new theories, new art forms, new aesthetics. John Cage was a musician working with artists and engineers. The very first performance (the Untitled Event at Black Mountain College in 1952) was a musical event, such as many Fluxus events during the Sixties. Furthermore, Fluxus adopted music notation for its peculiar “scores”. It was thinking to music that Umberto Eco first introduced the concept of “opera aperta”. And at the very beginning of Video Art lies the manipulation of the electronic signal, first experimented by Nam June Paik in music. PLAYLIST is an exhibition that wants to explore the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation, since the mid Nineties, of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms and alikes. It’s our feeling, on the one hand, that electronic music culture has been of great importance for the development of low-tech, home-based media art; and, on the other hand, that – such as for the early Video Art – the manipulation of the digital stream is mainly grounded in musical research. The core of PLAYLIST will be the exploration of the “8bit movement”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music. The show will demonstrate that the retrogaming phenomenon in visual arts can be considered an outfit of a pretty musical phenomenon, that in a bunch of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs, occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-res sounds and aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes. For the first time, retro-gaming will be explored through the lens of musical production and distribution, displaying not only tracks, but instruments, tools, softwares and hardwares, skins and graphics, but also discographies, platforms and communities. Thus, PLAYLIST will serve as a starting point for an archive / collection of materials produced by artists and musicians, and as a relational context where visitors can practice with tools produced by artists, and take part in workshops, lectures, improvised performances. Furthermore, PLAYLIST will try to provide a context for this kind of research, not necessarily game related, selecting seminal projects and artists that helped forging the conceptual frame in which retro-gaming took place.  LINK: Laboral (via Domenico Quaranta)