Game Art: Mark Tribe’s “Rare Earth” (2012)
A new exhibition at Momenta Art, "Rare Earth", celebrates the videogame-based photographic project of San Francisco born artist Mark Tribe (1966-). In addition to his phenomenal video and photographic work, in 2001 Tribe co-curated with Alex Galloway a seminal Game Art exhibition featuring a selection of net-based games for MASS MoCA's Game Show . "Rare Earth" is one of the most compelling shows of the Summer.
From the press release:
"For this exhibition, Tribe has produced photographs of lush landscapes found in contemporary video games and a video of a militia training ground in Upstate New York. The photographic landscapes appear at first to be real, but careful examination reveals that they are actually computer generated simulations. Like the photographs, the video depicts a picturesque landscape. It is comprised of a single, static shot: the camera remains motionless, and only the subtlest of movements, such as a blade of grass swaying in the breeze, reveal that it is, in fact, a motion picture. The photographs and the video are at once seductive and destabilizing. As we begin to question the authenticity of these landscape representations and the reliability of our perceptions, the relationship between militia training and video game play—one real, the other a simulation–is also called into question. Many younger militia members are avid gamers. Are these militiamen, training to protect themselves from an imagined threat, merely reenacting the battles that they fight on screen? In an age of predator drones flown by pilots weaned on video games, the blurring of boundaries between the real and the virtual has far-reaching implications.
Just as the behaviors of the figures in first-person shooter games conform to established vocabularies of action (running, ducking, crawling, shooting), so, too, Tribe implies, do the actions of actual militia men in their training exercises. A similar set of conventions governs the representation of landscape; even in video games, a popular commercial medium, depictions of the natural world recall the traditions of Western landscape art (such as the compositions of Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and other Hudson River School painters). In Rare Earth, Tribe draws our attention to a new form of landscape representation that bridges digital culture and art history. " (Momenta Art)
Mark Tribe, "Rare Earth" @ Momenta Art, New Tork - May 5th through June 18th, 2012
LINKLINK:Submitted by Matteo Bittanti