Re: [-empyre-] playthings response

[eugenie <eugenies@onetel.net.uk>]

hi all,

right, i've got loads of things going around in my head and i'm going to try
and sort some of them out. let's start with this question from melinda ...

> what i am left thinking about after the rush of information are mods and
> machinima. given that artists have always subverted technology from its
> original intent, exploiting the gaps, and bugs and crevices of the analog
> and digital landscape,   im wondering if this just a continuation of that
> tradition, or does it represent something different ... some other sort of
> morphism..?

off the top of my head i would say no, it's not morphism as troy and i have
been discussing it.... but it actually raises some really interesting
questions concerning some of the issues that troy and i touch on in our
research.

on one level, both of us are concerned with exactly the same thing - the
fact that videogames actualize (quite explicitly) particular theoretical or
philosophical concepts. in the case of troy's work, this is the concept of
'semiotic morphism', which has been detailed clearly in earlier posts.

i had the chance to play semiomorph for a couple of hours whilst i was in
sydney. apart from being a lovely, eerie little world, the game itself
demonstrates something really interesting about semiotic morphism (and
'morphing' in general), and how it differs from my understanding of
anamorphosis. 

semiomorph foregrounds the fissures - or 'interstices' (this was a popular
word at plaything!) - between the underlying system and its representation,
by drawing attention to shifts in 'external' representation: the form of the
environment and the player is constantly shifting. the internal logic of the
game, however - its 'internal' system - remains intact. in other words, even
though one's immediate perception of the environment is quite unstable - and
the constant shifts in perception are unsettling in themselves - the
environment is consistently meaningful and legible to the player on a
structural level - we don't have to 'relearn' a new system in order to find
our way around. i think this is what mostly goes on in mods and machinimas
though it's easy and pretty interesting to conceive of a mod that would
totally destroy the internal logic of a game and make a familiar, legible
environment completely disconcerting. can anybody think of examples of this
sort of mod? 

my take on anamorphosis is slightly different: i'm interested in the point
at which representations stop being meaningful. total systemic failure, if
you like. let's go back to holbein's ambassadors again. when you stand in
front of the painting, the anamorphic skull is 'meaningless' if you try to
fit it into the terms of the perspectival system that the rest of the
picture invites the viewer to adopt. when you move to a point where the
skull becomes legible, the rest of the image is meaningless. instead of
shifting from one form of representation to another whilst maintaining the
same underlying logic, the viewer moves between one (more or less) logical
system and another.

dalia judovitz puts it a bit more elegantly than i do:
"Whereas perspective represents an effort to rationalize and thereby
normalize the visible, anamorphosis, on the contrary, represents a rejection
of visual semblance, in favor of a schematism that deliberately distorts the
visible. Unlike perspective, anamorphosis does not reduce forms to their
visible outline. Rather, it distorts them through a process that projects
them outside of themselves. ... Anamorphosis supplants the frontality of the
visible, since the position of the viewing subject is now constituted
outside the parameters that define visual semblance." jud66-7

anamorphosis, in other words, points up the simultaneous existence of
multiple systems of subjectivity, not all of which are 'logical' and many of
which aren't even socioculturally legible or quantifiable as such. in
cultural studies terms - and particularly in 'postmodern' accounts of
cyberspace and VR - subjectivity tends to be cast as an effect of 'a system'
or 'THE system' of representation. Lacan's account of subjectivity (i.e. as
constituted in/by language) is a case in point. Rez - the game i was talking
about in my plaything paper - shows us something entirely different. as i
argued, it actualizes exactly the same thing that holbein's picture does
i.e. that subjectivity is multisensory and multistable.

eugenie