GameScenes is conducting a new series of interviews with the artists, critics, curators, gallery owners operating in the field of Game Art, as part of our ongoing investigation of the social history of this fascinating artworld. Our goal is to illustrate the genesis and evolution of a phenomenon that altered the way game-based art is being created, consumed, and criticized today.
In August of 2010, Mathias Jansson talked to Arsgames founder Flavio Escribano. The interview took place via email.
Flavio Escribano: Yes, indeed, I'm the president and one of the founders of ARSGAMES. In a way it all started by chance. The project started as a conference within the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. At the time, as part of my PhD programme, I was engaged in situationist interventions in public space, generating artworks against the Intervention of Spain in the Second Gulf War in Irak. They were called SocialCraft and were based on modified levels of the popular videogame Starcraft. My supervisor proposed that we took the idea forward by promoting it through a series of yearly conferences. The first was held in 2006 and during the third one -in 2008- the idea of to found a collective rose supported by the interest of many of the participants. It must be said that in 2006 Spain, the mainstream debate around videogames was pretty much limited to the discussion of the violent connotation of some popular titles. In this context ARSGAMES was born with a broad spectrum of objectives. On the one hand we aimed at promoting innovation in the videogame industry by putting emphasis on experimental essays that blend Science, Art and Technology, which are the object of our own research. On the other hand, by focusing on our past, present and hypothetical future, we wanted to foster the production of videogames that were closer to the Ibero-American culture and further from the Anglo-Saxon and Japanese stereotypes (something similar to Accion Mutante by Alex de la Iglesia or Cronos or Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro).
GameScenes: In 2010 you have been involved with PlayLab, a series of workshop about experimental videogames. What kind of artistic videogames can we expect in the future?
Flavio Escribano: Indeed, after two years of discussion with Medialab-Prado and SONY Playstation we were finally able to align our positions and to launched the call you can access here. Although the official announcement was limited to Madrid area we received over 65 proposals from around the world (Austria, France, South America ...) , out of which we had to choose eight only . It was amazing to see eight teams and a total of more than 50 people working in coordination with each other and with the tech staff. Luckily the Medialab-Prado's team ensured an excellent best media coverage of the event and supported the documentation of the achieved results through videos and a Wiki. Between November and January another collective called ZEMOS98 and us held a "Game Art" exhibition in Seville called "Over the Game". We tried to be as eclectic as possible. The taxonomy of the Game Art is broad and complex and we wanted to capture at least one representative piece of each of its forms. From Totto Renna to Neil Blomkamp through a variety of local and national artists the public could see how the videogame culture emerges form every artistic disciplines and it is beginning to shape its own language, a language which is rich both in terms of form and content. In my perspective, the future lies in the convergence, that is, in an age where every human experience becomes "playable". To talk about the end of the videogame era would not be appropriate, rather we might say that we are entering into a kind of new post-video game era where borders are being transcended. I think our society will gradually evolve (with crisis or not) towards a leisure society where neo-capitalism will break the difference between play and work (and will force a merger between the first, second and third place as Oldenburg would say). I see two branches in the context of Game Art: The argumentative and critical branch and another branch from the side of the industry to achieve a high level of technical and conceptual innovations. Undoubtedly the game-videogame concept and the historical context will have greatly influence what is to become the 'Game Art "in the future.
6º Open ARSGAMES-MONDOPIXEL e Inauguración de ESTACIÓN FUTURO 2: Tiempo, espacio y emoción. Concierto de ADDSENSOR incluido. 6/11/2009 - Intermediae (Madrid) (source)
GameScenes: What's your assessment of the Spanish Game Art scene? It seems that Spain is the most exciting place to do game-related art. LABoral Art, Gijon, for instance, has dedicated three major exhibitions to Game Art. Are there many artists experimenting with games? What about museums and galleries? Critics and journalists? What's the general level of interest in Spain?
Flavio Escribano: Honestly, I do not see any interest in Game Art on the main Public Institutions side. Basically, there is ignorance in terms of contemporary cultural movements because our cultural policies are slow and stuck in the past (in Spain would be unthinkable that a fanzine like "Bondage" was ranked as "special edition" obtaining special privileges at the National Art Library as in London). Institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art of Reina Sofía have never devoted any exhibition or conference to this phenomenon. The effort made in LABoral Art, Gijon to compile artworks, artists, lectures about GameArt and to document the phenomenon has been one of the best initiatives in Europe (if not the best) in support of artists and groups who are working in this area. Such an initiative has been able to stimulate many new artists to start working on this line in Spain. In my case the inspiration came after visiting the Des-GAMES exhibition at MEIAC Museum in 2001, one of the first pioneering exhibitions of GameArt.However there is large interest in the Game Studies concerning games as art and art works in private or semi-public institutions such as the LABoral, the Fundación Caja Madrid and in minority public institutions Medialab-Prado, the vanished art space Iniciarte (Junta de Andalucía) and Intermediae, where they are involved into theoretical discussion or experiment with new forms of exhibition (Estación Futuro in Intermediae). Moreover, in Spain we have what is perhaps the only regular publication (and printed) on Game Studies in Europe: Mondopixel. Still, in Spain we need: more interest from public institutions, more "game-artists" considering themselves as artists and not merely as hackers or engineers as well as critics able to talk about games in a different way than videogame journalistic tradition from the 90s. In any case the situation in Spain is very difficult considering the reductions of between 20% to 50% in budgets of public cultural institutions.
GameScenes: Do you have any favourite artist(s) working with Game Art, and why?
Flavio Escribano: There are works that I find amazing, projects with a transcendent power within a semantic framework that only one generation of players can feel and grasp with all their poetic and discursive essence. I am especially fond of Joan Leandre's modified games and videos. I think Leandre is an ahead of his time artists - even more so in the Spanish context. He has a very sound theoretical background. At present, and in relation to the paradigm shift Society-Technology-Videogames, I'm closely following Mar Canet's works across the different collectives he takes part to: Derivart (Art, Finance and Technology) and Lummo. Mar is a multifaceted and untiring artist whose roots spread across different disciplines (art, software development, marketing, graphic design, activism...). He's not only capable of mixing his origins to produce interesting and original artworks, he also has great capacity of leveraging the rules of the Market to give great visibility to his work. Both Leandre and Canet were exhibited in "Over The Game".
6º Open ARSGAMES-MONDOPIXEL e Inauguración de ESTACIÓN FUTURO 2: Tiempo, espacio y emoción. Concierto de ADDSENSOR incluido. 6/11/2009 - Intermediae (Madrid) (source)
GameScenes: When did you interest for videogames begin?
Flavio Escribano: I did not go to videogames, they came to me and I could not do anything about it. My first game was Starglider when I was 8 year. During the 80s I enjoyed the Spanish Golden Age of Software with internationally successful titles as "La Abadía del Crimen", "Navy Moves", "Narco Police", "Mad Mix Games ..." most of them beautifully illustrated by Alfonso Azpiri . Azpiri succeeded in creating an artistic imaginary based on videogames that reminds me what occurs with the main character from "Dream On" TV Serie and films. When I lived in Badajoz I used to visit the MEIAC (contemporary art museum in the city) and found Antonio Cerveira Pinto’s exhibition DES-GAMES. He is partly responsible that ARSGAMES is a reality today.
GameScenes: In your thesis, “Videogame like artistic tool”, you investigated the relationship between art and digital games. You are also conducting an extensive research about Video Game Platforms as possible artworks. What are you currently working on?
Flavio Escribano: I'm a currently writing from a modest public Library down-town in Seville, surrounded by books and video games working on the finalisation of my PhD thesis. I have already concluded what you could consider a Master’s thesis. My doctoral research is focused on exploring language-specific aspects of videogames in terms of their symbols, their relationship with other artistic disciplines and cultural practices and/or new kind of artistic practices that the game has caused in our society and which did not exist before. I am also very impressed with the work of the philosopher Beatriz Preciado "Testo yonki" and her conception of the human body (especially female) and gender in this era of genetic engineering, chemicals and cybernetics.
*Thanks to Margherita Bacigalupo for the translation from Spanish to English.
Text by Mathias Jansson
link: ArsGames/ArsGames on Twitter
link: flickr gallery
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