Game Art: Ashley Blackman's "Walking through my back garden" (2016)

One of the most interesting trends in machinima these days is contemplative, land-art inspired video work. Consider Ashley Blackman. To create Walking through my back garden, the artist explicitly mentions

s practice of recording his walks...

... but also laments the intense radiation that put an (abrupt) end to his exploration. Blackman is referring, obviously, to Fallout 4. If Long's works developed through a physical involvement with landscape, Blackman is virtually engaged with his surroundings. Both artists are "present" in their respective environments and their performance is equally "real".

At the same time, Walking through my back garden reminds me of something that I've read last February on Will Self's blog, a description of his

Some of the students undertook virtual rather than actual dérives. A young man who is studying games design took us for a wander around the world of Fallout 4. He had created his own rules for this exercise: his avatar had to keep moving, couldn’t re-up any supplies, had to avoid being killed and was forbidden to attack any other avatars. In essence, he had created an anti-gaming game.

...And what is machinima if not "an anti-gaming game"?

Consider another of Blackman's work, Clouds.

This work reminds me of Sol Lewitt's sky photographs - a static cloudscape - produced in the late 1970s: