Re: [-empyre-] Re: games and apathy

[fizzion <fizzion@optusnet.com.au>]

on 12/6/03 6:48 PM, Tamiko Thiel at tamiko@alum.mit.edu wrote:

> Hi Melinda,
> 
> I'm also not a gamer, although put my in front of a console and I'll
> fire away like crazy - it's just that I'm not very good, die quickly and
> have no interest in investing the improving my game.
> 
> But my experience showing VR are exactly the opposite of yours. The
> feedback I've gotten is that there is a huge group of people out there
> who are really excited to find 3D games technology being used for other
> purposes - including a lot of girls who are not interested in the
> first-person shooter games but are really attracted to slower, more
> poetic pieces and have to be torn away from the joystick by their
> parents. And these are exactly the people who DON'T like the competitive
> aspect and the porn movie rhythm.
> 
> Perhaps the difference is that my work is more "reality-based" and less
> abstract than yours, so it's easier for people who are not used to
> interactive 3D to figure out what they are supposed to do. But it's also
> clear that the computer games industry is training the upcoming
> generations for us, so that we don't have to stand there and tell people
> how to use our work.
> 
> I do believe that there is simply a lag time and 3D will enter the
> gallery system at some point, just like video did after being ignored
> for so long. But I think it is also important for us as artists to
> examine the time-based interactive experience and understand what makes
> it compelling for the user.
> 
> - tamiko
> 
And Melinda wrote:


> i was interrested it the sloth club (an eco cultural movement) which i came
> across in japan last year. their motto is "slow is good"..
> http://www.sloth.gr.jp/E-index.htm and i started looking at slow works of
> art as a different way to engage the viewer..
> 
> melinda

I love first person shoot em ups, but I also like the puzzle things, I play
scrabble at the highest level, which is hard, and constantly lose, but it
brings my attention to a high level, makes me work harder mentally to find a
solution, I like that, particularly when I win.

Slow art; painting and drawing - I have a number of works on my walls at
home, I find that over the years my perceptions of what these works - mine
and others - are saying, communicating to me changes. My accumulating and
evolving state of knowledge enhances or alters my perception/experience of
these works. Mental context changes.

What I'm trying to say is that what you bring to the viewing of a work,
whether digital/interactive or traditional media, influences how you see it,
experience it. In this respect also if you bring to your experience of a
work a meditative, informed state of mind you are likely to get more out of
it; so with sound being able to listen in a fully focussed way elevates, if
you like, your experience of it.
Rollo May puts it this way - 'The ancient Greeks knew, as every society and
almost every individual learns, that responding as a total person in one's
encounters with life requires an intensity and disciplined openness of
conciousness which is not easy to sustain' ...

So with games, its nice to lose yourself in the adrenaline rush but it can
be a different thing when encountering a work of art, whatever the media.
I remember seeing a retrospective of the Australian aborigine Emily Kame
Kngwarreye's work in Sydney at the AGNSW. It was overwhelming, not just
because of the shear range of her work, styles etc, but because it was
evidence of a person, an artist who worked in a state of liberation and
exhilaration, no flies on this lady. The whole thing washed over me, her way
of being, her understanding of her relationship to the land.I walked away
with a smile on my face and about ten feet off the ground. I felt about my
own work that it was ok to be crazy and to make strange things, drawings,
whatever, just do it, you're not mad after all, it was liberating.

Space Odysseys, sensation and immersion was Aug-Oct 2001 AGNSW featuring
work by Luc Courchesne, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Gary Hill,
Moholy-Nagy, Kariko Mori, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and Lynette Wallworth
was characterised by art that engaged in a slow, meditative manner. Turrell
was extroadinary, I wanted to just stay there all day and experience his
spaces, just space ... Turrell says 'I want to address the light that we see
in dreams and make spaces that seem to come from those dreams.'
Its interesting that before white explorers came, many South Sea islanders
had no sense of time, the idea of time that westerners have, or as Janice
Joplin once said 'Its all one big day baby'.

With digital art, 3D, whatever - what are your expectations of it?
Or, what kind of person are you?
I'm all for slow art, and slow food, but I like a quick fix occasionally.

Barrie

fizzion@optusnet.com.au