Interview: Jay Zehngebot is printing videogames
GameScenes is conducting a series of interviews with artists, critics, curators, and gallery owners operating in the field of Game Art, as part of an ongoing investigation of the social history of this artworld. Our goal is to illustrate the genesis and evolution of a phenomenon that changed the way game-based art is being created, experienced, and discussed today.
The conversation between Jay Zehngebot and Matteo Bittanti took place via email between the months of October and November of 2013.
Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Jay Zehngebot studied printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In his practice, Zehngebot explores the blurring of boundaries between reality and simulation, fantasy and history, warfare and entertainment. Specifically, his work is:
"[M]otivated by the accelerating pace of technological development, our relationship to traditional print, shifting modes of communication, information distribution, and a 24/7 news cycle. I think often about data generation and storage on a massive scale – in tandem with issues involving energy/resource consumption and real vs. perceived personal/collective security. I’m fascinated with and concerned over the rise of remote systems, advanced simulation, mobile computing, the popularity of networked gaming, and the state of our schools. I’m into innovations in user interface, astronomy, and exploring augmented reality. Lastly, I feel formed, in part, by the fact that my secondary and post-secondary education has taken place against the backdrop of two ever-present, yet distant, wars – conflicts which concurrently span our last decade – the longest uninterrupted stretch of official military engagement in US history." (Jay Zehngebot)
GameScenes: Although you work with a variety of media and explore a flotilla of themes, video games feature prominently in your work. When and why did you decide to appropriate and reconfigure digital games within your practice? Were/are you developing these works in conversation with other artists at RISD?
Jay Zehngebot: Our parents forbade Nintendo so I subscribed to Nintendo Power. The computer was considered a tool worth owning, though, and a not-insignificant portion of my early experiences with computers were game-related. For example, using resource editors to modify sprites in shareware games, or reformatting a hd for the first time to free up room for Doom. As I grew up and computers gravitated to the center of my creative process, games just came with.
Most of my drawings and prints in school stemmed from game-related concepts, but removing my hand-drawn lines - my emotional my emotional attitude - from the process and focusing exclusively on appropriation, composition, resolution and color was a step that took some time.
I wasn't plugged into game-art conversations at RISD, but the energy of my contemporaries J
and Agata Michalowska was really instrumental. I was primarily interested in issues relating to printmaking's foundations - technique, multiplicity, and the static quasi-permanence of ink on paper.
Jay Zehngebot: A concise answer to the last question involves my interest in the inherited demeanor of traditional (specifically journalistic) print media functioning as a tonally-appropriate method to explore the venn diagram overlap of industry, technology, entertainment, distance, violence, and warfare. To this end, the halftone dot is more instrumental than screenprinting - serigraphy just allows me to work big. The processes' visual outcomes are subtle, but powerful - they feel true, in the way I think a newspaper feels true. The process begins to function as a strange sort of inverse parallel to the images they present - a slight of hand involving manual digits as a mechanism for delivering pixels of ink onto paper through a (silk)screen, imitating digits in a machine rendered as pixels to a screen.
Harun Farocki's work is super inspiring for its critical forward looking gaze. I discovered his work after I had settled into a similar dual(ing?) display format, which I found very affirming. Also, as a printmaker, discovering Christiane Baumgartner's work was similarly encouraging. Strategically, procedurally, and conceptually, these artists motivate me to embrace a slow burn.
American ProGamers was a result of Major League Gaming holding their championships in Providence, Rhode Island. I spent the weekend recording video without a concrete project in mind. My principal interest was to document kids playing Black Ops. This massive video backdrop was a perfect vehicle for the same spacial flattening that I'd been exploring through print. The final book helps to articulate my interest in gaming & training is as much or more about these kids than it is about war.
The BF3-D prints were a logical next step for my game-documentation based work, and were totally driven by newly-available software. The prints end up as a pseudo-recursive look into these hyper-realistic game spaces, with the computer performing sort of visual self-analysis. The process involved playing through Battlefield 3 as a documentarian and capturing unfolding scenarios in the round. These screen captures were then algorithmically scrubbed of all HUD graphics and imported into AutoCAD's 123DCatch for automated 3D Modeling. Within this digital 3-D model I have compositional free-reign. A select few perspectives, as stills, are exported into CMYK halftone separations for printing. For me, the final images get at this act of mapping memory to a disembodied experience in an eerily accurate way, and so I set out to document the other two "3's" - MW3, and ARMA3 - in the same fashion.
Jay Zehngebot: In the run-up to Our Sentry, I was mining personal libraries with upwards of 50,000 images. Amidst this, a handful of pairings, or collisions, really distinguished themselves. Beyond the aesthetic match and collaged coherent narrative, I think about presenting the obliteration of distinction, as a parallel to the "drone pilot heads home at night" conversation.
Jay Zehngebot: Of all the game-based warsim stuff I look at and dig into, I feel that the gunfire-drumbeat youtube video genre is amongst the most violent. Juxtaposing this with scripted re-enactments of soldier dance-videos gets at the surreal relationship between a simultaneously connected/disconnected military/civilian culture. My involvement in the video was simply smashing the two things together and modifying the tempo to match the length of the two clips.
GameScenes:
I.V.A./N. (2009) deals with virtual bunkers of first-person shooters. What role does the topology of videogames play in your work? Were you reading Paul Virilio when you were working on this project, by any chance? As you probably know, his early work focuses on the archaeology and architecture of bunkers...Jay Zehngebot: The photography and writing of Virilio's
Bunker Archeologywas definitely on my radar. Replaying Quake, it was clear that my affinity for and connection to Virilio's work had everything to do with the brutalist virtual spaces I grew up running around in. This led, in turn, to his writings on Desert Storm, virtual war, the flattening/elimination of space, and technology's inherent accidents, and all of these things are prime drivers in my work. James Der Derian's
Virtuous Waris another key text, along with a deep newspaper stream.
Jay Zehngebot I've recently finished printing images from ARMA3, and am now working on
WWW.BTCSC.NET- which is realtime Bitcoin Market Information Rendered as Dynamic Architecture inside Minecraft. The visual residues I imagine casting off look something like a proxy manifestation of Burtynsky meets Caleb Larsen.
LINK:INTERVIEW ARCHIVEAll images courtesy of the artist
Text by Matteo Bittanti