Kent Lambert, Reckoning 4, HD video, color, sound, 9' 50", 2016, still frame
Reckoning
[noun]
the action or process of calculating or estimating something.
a person's view, opinion, or judgment.
Kent Lambert's follow up to the recently released RECKONING 3 (2014) expands the asynchronous conversation between mass media (television, cinema) and new media (video games in primis). Once again, Lambert appropriates sequences, images, and sounds from popular games (including Hitman,Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid), movies, and TV shows. Developed over a period of two years, RECKONING 4 is not your average postmodern pastiche, but a virtuoso exercise in digital ethnography. Among other things, the video documents Lambert's attempt at talking to strangers during an online game session (GTA V ) and features excerpts from an online discussion with a former student, in which we learn that the young man had structured his entire existence around video games but then decided to quit cold turkey to regain control of his life. As in RECKONING 3, all verbal interactions are technologically-mediated: voice travels through radios, headsets, phones and speakers. Devices abound and face-to-face interactions are almost non-existent. Lambert himself only appears on screen(s), like Videodrome's Dr. Oblivion, a modern day Dr. Mabuse, the saint patron of omnipresent surveillance, to discuss playbor, i.e. the labor of play. Welcome to the digital age. As the artist declares, RECKONING 4 examines:1. Terror and wonder in big-budget virtual worlds2. The fluidity, fragility and loneliness of technologically mediated social identities and friendships3. The queerness and malevolence of archetypal masculinity4. The poetics of blockbuster aestheticsIn his statement, Lambert writes:By the time I started actively editing RECKONING 4, my ambivalence about video games had deepened in multiple directions. I couldn’t deny the escapist pleasure I often took from my game sessions, particularly during professional and personal crises. That pleasure was tempered by the tedium of staging, capturing, transcoding and organizing footage from these sessions, and soured by the casual misogyny that permeated so many popular games and the culture surrounding them. So I looked to podcasts hosted by prominent video game journalists for non-male voices, for critical and feminist discourse on game culture, and I engaged in dialogue with several students I worked with about the pleasures, perils, and unexplored artistic possibilities of video game forms. One of these students, Bryce, agreed to an interview with me (via headset chat) after his own ambivalence brought him to something of a crisis point. He realized that he’d essentially become addicted to video games, to the detriment of his studies and overall well-being. We spoke for several hours and played what he’d decided would be his last game session before selling his console. Our conversation figures prominently in this piece and will presumably be woven into subsequent installments. Kent Lambert, Reckoning 4, HD video, color, sound, 9' 50", 2016, still framesThe recursive loops of ersatz conversations, mixed-reality effects, and musings on reality and simulation, performance and violence, identity and politics make RECKONING 4 particularly intriguing. The unexpected juxtapositions produce uncanny, even disturbing, always illuminating insights. While RECKONING 3 focused on the intermedial dialogue between cinema and video games, RECKONING 4 is mainly interested in the communicative paradoxes of simulation, most notably the the cul-de-sac of ceaseless information. As German media scientist Friedrich Kittler famously stated in his masterpiece Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, "media define our situation" (1). Lambert's characters inhabit a media-saturated world that leaves no room for autonomy. Agency is replaced by the illusion of interaction. Creativity gives way to simulated freedom. The artist is particularly fascinated by the "media gaze", that is, the way different technologies structure the scopic regime. Characters - both human or digital - obsessively glance at each other without really seeing anything or anyone. Similarly, they talk to each other, or rather, pretend to. The middle-aged gamer actor from RECKONING 3 returns to engage in a pseudo conversation with an avatar. The "secondary orality" of game talk has completely replaced meaningful dialogue. Words are reduced to mere utterances. In Lambert's mundane dystopia, there is no ontological distinction between reality and simulation: the two form a diabolical amalgam in which violence, aggression, and harassment - both symbolic and "physical" - are normative. Unsurprisingly, a sense of dread permeates the entire video - a "stalking sequence" appropriated from Grand Theft Auto V is particularly disquieting. There is no reality outside the matrix. Simulation is seamless and totalizing.Kent Lambert, Reckoning 4, HD video, color, sound, 9' 50", 2016, still framesWith RECKONING 3, Lambert focused on the peculiar phenomenon on online communication through technological prostheses such as controllers, buttons, and microphones. The artist provided a taxonomy of gestures, protocols, and procedures. In RECKONING 4, communication becomes ecstatic, in a Baudrillardian sense. Different layers of images accumulate within each frame: game scenes appear on screens in other scenes. In this perverted matrioska game, meaning is lost. Repetition produces chaos and noise that overwhelms and thwarts any attempt at making sense. Lambert's astute editing creates the illusion of continuity between situations, spaces, and different layers of reality. The same characters perform multiple roles: for instance, Kevin Spacey appears both as an evil politician (i.e., Frank Underwood, the cunning, despicable President of the United States starring in House of Cards) and as a super villain in the blockbuster videogame Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. The unprecedented proliferation of hyper-realistic images - accompanied by the so-called "Uncanny Valley effect" - trigger cognitive dissonance spasms in the viewer. But RECKONING 4 is not a pedantic, didactic cautionary tale on the dystopia of simulation. Rather, it is an illuminating meditation on the epistemology of gaming. Kent Lambert, Reckoning 4, HD video, color, sound, 9' 50", 2016, still framesKent Lambert (b. 1976, Colorado Springs, Colorado) is a Chicago-based musician and media artist. His creative output primarily consists of 1) vocal driven art-pop music and 2) pop-inflected video art made from repurposed industrial and commercial media. His ever-mutating band Roommate has been performing stateside and abroad for over a decade. Their fourth album MAKE LIKE was released in 2015.Kent Lambert, Reckoning 4, HD video, color, sound, 9' 50", 2016, still frames
