Interview: Jonathan Monaghan is unmasking ideology with 3D animation
GameScenes is conducting a series of interviews with artists, critics, curators and gallery owners working in the field of game art, as part of an ongoing investigation into its social history. The series traces the emergence and evolution of game-based artistic practices, examining how these works are created, experienced and discussed. Matteo Bittanti interviewed Jonathan Monaghan via email in May 2013.
His latest work, Robot Ninja, is on display at Market Gallery (Glasgow, Scotland) until June 7, 2013.
As Monaghan described the work:
“The Robot Ninja is my version of a final boss in a video game; the ultimate last bad guy a hero must defeat in order to complete his or her journey. Employing male-centric stereotypes found in video games combined with symbols of institutional power and wealth, Robot Ninja is a cultural conflation of war, authority and the super-human. But like final bosses, Robot Ninja reminds us that all great powers can fall.”
— Jonathan Monaghan
GameScenes: Your dual interest in art and technology is reflected in your formal education. You studied at the New York Institute of Technology before earning an MFA at the University of Maryland. Art and technology are not necessarily opposing disciplines. The Greek term technē, from which “technology” derives, encompasses art and craft. Could you describe your trajectory as an artist and scholar? When did you decide to commit the time and resources necessary to study and practise art, and what role did formal education play in your artistic development? I was also struck by the way your website presents research projects alongside your artistic work, a pairing that seems entirely logical in your case, yet remains relatively unusual in the art world.
Jonathan Monaghan: I think the path for myself is different than an older generations of artists who studied art initially then found technology as a medium. For me and many other young artists the technology came first and I think that is very important. I think young artists who became proficient with digital technology before any kind of art education take a distinct approach. It is hard to pinpoint what that exactly is, but I know certainly embrace digital commercial media; I love Pixar, car commercials and video games, and during most of my undergraduate studies I wanted to make those for a living. After being exposed to the world of contemporary art, such as watching the films of Matthew Barney, it all made sense to me and I felt as if I could do that, but use my skills with 3D animation to do it.
GameScenes: Ideological critique seems to be an organising principle of your work. In several videos, you subvert the meaning and function of animals whose imagery has already been appropriated by consumer and popular culture, particularly mainstream cinema, video games and CGI animation. Characters from Street Fighter ride domesticated animals around a Super Mario racing circuit, while brand logos are imprinted on computer-generated creatures. What makes 3D animation particularly effective as a form of counter-discourse, capable of exposing ideological assumptions that video game culture itself rarely examines?
Jonathan Monaghan: There is a chapter in Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media sub-titled “Narcissus as Narcosis.” In it he talks about modern society as a kind of Narcissus, entranced by their own reflection, although oblivious to the fact that they are looking at themselves. Likewise Sigfried Kracauer showed that the key to understanding modern society is to examine its ornamented surface. I am not sure we really look at ourselves and our culture, and I think it is because we are mesmerized by it; we are in a kind of medicated state. However here is where art comes in. Artists since the 1990s have really embraced these avenues of mass culture, but unlike the constructors of mass society, advertising etc... many artists don't really have a specific agenda, we are simply using these aesthetic effects and mediums of mass culture as an end in and of themselves, and that is how we can examine the ornamented surface and gain some critical insights into our seemingly seamless condition.
But we may start to awake from this narcosis, because I wouldn’t say video games are as “medicating” as one may assume. Going back to McLuhan, video games would be a cool medium as they require active participation on part of the audience, like a book. The web is the same way, and I think there is something to be said for a form of entrainment which is not possible unless you are actively participating by solving problems or communicating. I played a lot of video games as a kid, and I think there might actually be a kind of inherit creative capacity with these new technologies. Take a look at Counter-Strike. It was initially made by an online community of individuals who actually developed it on their spare time. It was a modification of a financed studio-made video game, so they didn’t have to build the entire thing from the group up, but nevertheless this small group of individuals started a multi-million dollar franchise by working on this game during their spare time. This is how I got into computer graphics and consequently contemporary art. When I was 13 I became a part of these online communities developing custom content, custom maps, models, and textures. I just found that creating games was more fun than playing them and I wasn't alone.
GameScenes: Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings (2012) is an eight-minute CGI-animated HD film that appropriates and subverts familiar video game icons, including several Street Fighter characters and Nintendo heroes. The work can be read as an homage to video game aesthetics and, simultaneously, as a pointed critique of the industry's reliance on macho stereotypes, Michael Bay-style violence and banal narratives. I find your use of 3ds Max as a critical instrument particularly interesting: commercial software becomes a means of artistic inquiry and ideological critique. What prompted you to undertake such an elaborate project, and why did you choose these particular games and characters?
Jonathan Monaghan: One of the things that interests me about 3D is the ever growing amount of 3D content available. There is so much on the web, much of it pirate-able, and then there is also the incredible amount of high quality 3D content developed for video games, much of which can be extracted or ripped from the proprietary formats. Anything virtual is there for the taking. Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings started by looking at this wealth of content as a starting point from which to build in. In this collection process you really see the ridiculously proportioned characters, which really embody male-centric ideals. There is also cultural and historical stereotypes, with M-Bison as a Nazi-esque evil power-seeking bad guy and Guile as American solider good-guy. These were important characters to me as a child, so the animation is both a critique as a homage in a way.
GameScenes: The nonlinear narrative of Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings draws on a wide range of sources, including science fiction, mythology, religion and popular culture. Power seems to connect these disparate influences, particularly its creation, re-creation and eventual destruction. Is this the ultimate fiction of history? Is the recurring cycle of creation, exploitation and implosion the driving force of human evolution, or perhaps its devolution?
Jonathan Monaghan: No you are very much on track. I really like this idea of hidden power. Pitting these ridiculous looking video game characters and environments with recreations of real, “evil” power is very much what I was doing. By trying to create a coherent reality or a narrative where these absurd manifestations of power interact with actual power structures, my viewers can approach how power works through a different lens.
GameScenes: The nonlinear narrative of Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings draws on a wide range of sources, including science fiction, mythology, religion and popular culture. Power seems to connect these disparate influences, particularly its creation, re-creation and eventual destruction. Is this the ultimate fiction of history? Is the recurring cycle of creation, exploitation and implosion the driving force of human evolution, or perhaps its devolution?
Jonathan Monaghan: There is something military in nature about our media; it is constantly on the offensive, incredibly efficient, strong and controlling. However the “weapons” (the tools of media) have become much more democratized and that diffuses the battlefield. This new struggle for power in the digital era I think is why I am so obsessed with the topic. So I like to think of Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings as a kind of history painting, rendering ancient myths as contemporary metaphors where current fears and hopes are embodied in familiar narratives and characters.
GameScenes: Phallic imagery pervades your work, reflecting the male-dominated ideology of video game culture. Even female characters such as Chun-Li can be understood as projections of male fantasy rather than fully developed figures. Her design, for instance, appears to graft exaggerated female sexual characteristics onto a conventionally masculine fighting archetype. Can art function as a critical mirror, revealing and magnifying the ideological assumptions behind activities such as gaming, which are often dismissed as mere escapism or treated as culturally and ideologically neutral?
Jonathan Monaghan: There is more to mass-cultural products than escapism; they represent our ideals, dreams, uncertainties and fears. By analyzing and re-interpreting these products we are gaining more insight into who we are, and that is what I am doing with my work.
GameScenes: In Rainbow Narcosis (2012), a nine-minute CGI-animated film, we follow the journey of a beheaded lamb through a succession of environments. Although video games are not explicitly referenced, the visual language evokes their aesthetics. Are you suggesting that there is no fundamental ontological distinction between the so-called “real”, represented here through photorealism, and the fictional, expressed through game-like imagery? Narratives construct our understanding of physical and virtual realities alike. Could all realities, in this sense, ultimately be virtual?
Jonathan Monaghan: I think the line between what is real and what is mediated has been blurry for a while, and perhaps it is not even a necessary question anymore. What is presented to us from all media is an absurdly twisted and distorted version of reality. I just love playing with the photo-real, there is a seductive sexiness to it. The software I used to create photo-realism was developed for that very purpose, to create seductive images to draw you in and make you feel good so you want to buy something. I am drawing you in to unsettle you and to examine these aesthetic effects.
GameScenes: 3D animation and CGI frequently draw on a limited repertoire of visual and narrative archetypes: the mech warrior, the ninja, the hypermuscular Amazon, the macho hero and the appealing anthropomorphic character. In your work, however, the ideological assumptions embedded in these archetypes become visible and provide the material for critique. This is particularly evident in Robot Ninja (2013), your latest project. Could you describe your creative process? Did you create all the models from scratch, or did you appropriate elements from existing games? How long did it take to produce the video?
Jonathan Monaghan: The elements used to create the Robot Ninja were partially appropriated directly from various video games, others were created from scratch. What is great about the stereotypes in video games, like the ninja warrior or the mech-warrior is that you the video game player usually take on and embody these super-human ideal warrior personas. In Robot Ninja however you have this absurd mash up of all these things, but it is its own thing coming at you, it doesn’t transform you, it just confronts you and you are not sure yet if it is good or bad.
Text and editing: Matteo Bittanti.
Originally published on GameScenes, 26 May 2013. The questions have been slightly edited in 2026 for clarity.
All images and videos courtesy of the artist