[-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 40, Issue 12

[Christian McCrea]

Micheal,

Precisely interesting more and more when things like Hot Coffee occur.
Its on the disc; so by law the cultural artifact is whats encoded, not
whats experienced. Even if its out of sight, its to be controlled.
Maybe an equivalent is to say that that a drug deal was happening
behind a truck in one scene of a film, and thus the film promotes drug
use.

Oh and I agree Street Fighter 2 should be there in many forms, in an
ideal game exhibit, but the SNES version has some super excellent
material quirks. After all, there were not many reasons for Ninendo to
go from 2 to 6 buttons except in anticipation of complex RPGs... and
then suddenly the bizzare appearance of six buttons at the arcade with
six at home created a kind of inevitability and anticipation (that
home consoles would emulate the arcade) that coloured much of the
early 90s game culture.

I remember working through every possible combination of button
configuration with the SNES pad, methodically, to find the most
agreeable with my technique, and devising ways to play on despite a
calloused thumb...

Game On, of course, suffers from the tremendous amount it attempts to
do, and the number of institutions its had to go through. But as the
first big international touring show, it bodes well for the second and
third. (Maybe thats my gamer brain speaking to a sense of
sequelism....) It is a very very different beast each time it is
shown, but as said, I'm keen to keep an eye on the border politics
with new media art. To watch what wheels are being reinvented without
respect to art practice history (as Sean Cubitt and others mentioned a
couple of days ago) but also because some of those wheels were pretty
square the first time around....



-Christian


> >
> >
>
>  On reflection, the curatorial approach of the Game On exhibition seemed
> fairly simplistic in terms of exploring this sense of multiplicity around
> gamic objects - not that I didn't thoughly enjoy playing Street Fighter 2
> again (but on SNES, were they for real?!, etc.)
>
>  Of course, in this respect, there's something to say for the fan-scene
> around retro-gaming for filling in gaps and exploring lost futures, those
> moments of pure potential, a venacular approach that effectively
> re-activates the past in a manner institutions could never hope to. Chris
> Covell's work comes to mind (a supposed technical hardcore guide for Cory
> Arcangel's NES hacks), especially things like his pages on retro Japanese
> videogame mags, including an analysis of pre-release images and promotions
> for console games that were never completed and so on:
>
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets1.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets2.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets3.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets4.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets5.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets6.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets7.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets8.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets9.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets10.html
>  http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/secrets11.html
>
>  In terms of Christian's materially-orientated analysis, I love the idea of
> these artifacts left out of level design in consoles, but with the tiles
> still encoded and cycling in the commercial cartridge, would be cool to
> literally re-animate them, give them life:
>
>  "Ooh... look at those planets! Of course, this is Gemini Man's stage. The
> planets were taken out of the level design, but their character tiles are
> still in the CHR ROM of the final release of the game, and the palette still
> cycles as though they were there, glowing."
>
>
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