[-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?

[Domenico Quaranta]

Dear Empyrers,

I've been a lurker on this list for a long time, always reading  
interesting discussions. And I'm really happy to have been invited to  
contribute to one of them.
As an art critic, I've always been interested in the impact of new  
technologies on artistic production and dissemination. My interest in  
games comes from this broader approach. I've never been an hardcore  
gamer myself, and my interest in media studies and game studies is  
instrumental to my work as an art critic.

That said, I found the conversation up to now really useful, and I'd  
like to push it further submitting you some thoughts on so called  
"Game Art". Let's start from an example.

My Generation (2010, available here: http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/mygeneration/index.html) 
  is one of the last works of the artists' duo Eva and Franco Mattes.  
The work is a crashed yet still working computer displayed on the  
floor, and featuring a video. The video is made of found footage of  
young people playing video-games – at least until they get so angry  
with the machine that they start crashing it. They do it in the same  
way in which we sometimes start hitting ourselves, or any part of our  
body (our head, our hand, our legs), when they don't seem to work  
properly. Looking at this video, a statement made by artist Miltos  
Manetas in 2004 comes to my mind. In the attempt to show that “copying  
from video-games is the art of our times”, Manetas starts claiming  
that a video-game character is a truly animated character, because it  
“is a combined creature: the cartoon plus the player. It’s the  
player’s energy what “powers” the puppet: if you don’t play with him,  
he falls asleep:” Mario”, is nobody else but you.” [Miltos Manetas,  
“Copying from Videogames is the art of our time”, 2004, online at http://www.manetas.com/txt/videogamesis.html 
.] Thus, the rage against the machine displayed in My Generation is,  
more properly, a rage against ourselves, and against our way to live  
into the game.

Both the Mattes and Manetas belong to a generation of artists who grew  
up playing videogames. They may or may not be hardcore gamers, but the  
fact is that their first encounter with a computer was probably due to  
a game. For the current generation of digital natives, the situation  
is different: their media experience is much more complex from the  
beginning, including mobile phones, tablets, home computers along with  
consoles; furthermore, for them gaming is embedded in almost any media  
experience. On the contrary, for the generation that grew up along the  
seventies, the computer was, first of all, a gaming platform: the  
arcade they played in public spaces, the C64 they played at their  
friend's home, the Gameboy they played on the bus. For most of them,  
the computer as a working environment or as a source of information  
came later.

The impact of this common background on the art field has never been  
studied in deep. If we look back at the first generation that grew up  
with television – first introduced in the US along Thirties and  
Forties – we may see this impact working on a double level. At a first  
level, artists rewrote the relationship between avantgarde and kitsch,  
and between art and mass culture, putting into question the way this  
relationship was previously discussed by critics such as Clement  
Greenberg [Clement Greenberg, “Avantgarde and Kitsch”, Partisan  
Review, 1939. Available online at http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html 
.]. Pop Art was born. At a second level, the experience of television  
had an even deeper and broader impact, ferrying art, as Rosalind  
Krauss noticed, to the post-medium condition: “In the age of  
television, we live in a post-medium condition”. [Rosalind Krauss, A  
Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition,  
London, Tames & Hudson 2000, p. 31.]

My question is: can we claim a similar, double-layered impact when we  
speak of the relationship between video-games and art?

This question may seem quite out of topic in this debate. So, it may  
be useful if I explain shortly why I'm asking it in this context. The  
fact is that, since artists started – at the beginning of the Nineties  
– to show some kind of interest to this relationship, their work has  
always been described in terms of “subculture”. Let's take, for  
instance, the broader term “Game Art”. When artists and theorists  
started using it, in the Mid-Nineties, they did it to bring attention  
to an interesting phenomenon: that video-games where something you  
should know when talking about contemporary art. That was happening  
not only because many artists were starting introducing references to  
video-games in their work, for example painting, as Manetas did, video- 
game characters or appropriating game footage in their video works;  
but also because some artists were starting using it as an art medium,  
for example developing little games, or making art patches or art  
modifications of existing game engines. The problem is that the term,  
as many similar terms (net art, digital art) had a dangerous side  
effect, working as an “enclosure” for the art practice it defined.  
 From that moment on, so-called Game Art started being discussed only  
in dedicated books or magazined, being shown in Game Art exhibitions,  
being criticized only by “Game Art experts”, or by people coming from  
game studies, software studies or media studies. In other words, the  
phenomenon started being discussed as something involving a few  
artists who were mostly hardcore gamers and skilled programmers as  
well – as a game played by rules that were shared just by a few  
people, and that had little in common with the game played by the  
broader art community. In other words, it became an “art subculture”.

If we start considering the single practices collected under the  
umbrella term “Game Art”, this process becomes even more clear. Art  
patches and art mods started being discussed as part of the broader  
phenomenon of game patches; videos appropriating game footage as part  
of the broader phenomenon of machinima; art games as part of the  
broader phenomenon of indie games; and so on and so forth.

Let's try to be clear: This is not dangerous in itself: art can only  
be blessed if people coming from other fields – game studies, media  
studies – start watching at it. It just becomes dangerous when it is  
the only option available; when, in other worlds, an art criticism  
less interested in games than in art is the only point of view missing.

Yet, we also have to face what happened until now. Maybe, “Game Art”  
is actually an art subculture. Maybe art games, art mods, art  
machinima are just the natural, yet isolated and short-minded,  
emergence in the field of art of the correspondent gaming subcultures.

Or, maybe, there is a wider perspective from which “the art formerly  
known as Game Art” may be discussed, and other interesting  
relationships between art and video-games may be introduced. Along  
this discussion, I will try to push this second option, adopting the  
double-layered perspective used to discuss the impact of television  
and mass media on contemporary art.

 From this perspective there is, at a first level, an increasing  
number of art works that can't be fully understood without referring  
to game culture or to a specific gaming subculture. In our comparison,  
it is the parallel to what Pop Art was in the Sixties. However, these  
practices often go far beyond the level of appropriation of the pop  
imagery and of popular culture languages and mechanisms that was  
pursued by Pop Art. This is related to the way we can, today, use and  
abuse the media, that is completely different from the Sixties; and to  
the number of media related cultures and subcultures available today.  
There are, of course, artists painting characters from video-games  
(Miltos Manetas), adopting game aesthetics in their visual practice  
(Jon Haddock), and adopting other strategies inherited from Pop Art.  
But there are also artists using video-games (online or offline) as a  
performative environment; artists modding commercial video-games for  
very different porpuses; artists making video-games with an artistic  
agenda, either conceiving them for the white cube, for the internet or  
for commercial platforms; artists picturing gamers or other characters  
of the world of video-games; artists addressing role-playing, 8bit  
music and aesthetics, and so on.

At another level, we may wonder if the advent of video-games and the  
increasing familiarity of artists with them may have had other  
consequences on recent art practices. In his book Relational  
Aesthetics (1998), art critic Nicolas Bourriaud suggests [Nicolas  
Bourriaud, Esthétique relationelle, Les presses du réel, 1998.] that  
there is a strong relationship between the emergence, along the  
Nineties, of interactive technologies and the increasing interest, in  
the art field, to work on relationships, instead of objects. Are games  
- and nee media in general - really turning visual arts into something  
radically different from what it has been in the twentieth century?

Bests,
domenico


---

Domenico Quaranta

web. http://domenicoquaranta.com/
email. info at domenicoquaranta.com
mob. +39 340 2392478
skype. dom_40







Il giorno 20/dic/10, alle ore 14:16, Gabriel Menotti ha scritto:

> Dear all,
>
> The discussion about videogame preservation reinforced the systemic
> quality of gaming and the fundamental cultural dimension of its
> seemingly internal mechanics. As Jerome said, a game cannot subsist
> without representation information to take place of ancillary
> structures such as file specifications, media standards, platforms,
> etc (and players, I wonder?). From the cases presented by Rafael, we
> have seen situations where a “static” document – e.g. a videogame ROM
> image – becomes a proxy for gaming, revealing forgotten potentials,
> subverting canons and fostering new game modes. Davin Heckman
> suggested an analogy with the preservation of oral lectures in their
> published notes – a documentation that effectively takes the place of
> the lectures and becomes reference to numberless philosophy thesis.
>
> All in all, last week’s discussion opened up a more general frame,
> starting with the ontological dichotomy evoked in Daniel’s post
> (signal vs system). Daniel also poked into the artistic qualities of
> videogames, in the same way that Micha Cárdenas, recovering some past
> threads, brought into question their potential political and economic
> implications. It seems to me that, more than the mater of constructing
> videogames as historical objects, we face the problem of constructing
> them as objects in the first place – not only as objects for
> research/analysis, but even as commodities. What is the right way to
> market a game and make profit out of it? Is a game a product or a
> service?
>
> But: is it fruitful to pin this down? Does it make any sense to ask
> these questions? Instead of thinking of games as objects, shouldn’t we
> be appropriating them as tools and means to explore the contexts in
> which they are inserted, just like David Griffith says Naked on Pluto
> does with Facebook privacy politics?
>
> And how can a game be critical of its own platform, if not by taping
> into even lower underpinnings and conventions – ethics, aesthetics,
> legality? Ideologies? Culture itself?
>
> This final round of debate means to contextualize gaming subcultures
> within these universal parameters and criteria. Certainly, this means
> rephrasing yet again the question of “what is a game?” Hopefully, it
> will also imply in using games to rephrase questions such as “what is
> art?” and “what is politics?”
>
> Our guests are:
>
> * Greg Costikyan
> Greg Costikyan has designed more than 30 commercially published board,
> roleplaying, computer, online, social, and mobile games, including
> five Origins Awards winners (ludography at
> www.costik.com/ludograf.html); is an inductee into the Adventure
> Gaming Hall of Fame; and the recipient of the Maverick Award for his
> tireless promotion of independent games. At present, he is a freelance
> game designer, and also runs Play This Thing!, a review site for indie
> games. He is also the author of four published science fiction novels
> (www.costik.com, playthisthing.com).
>
> * Domenico Quaranta
> Domenico Quaranta (http://domenicoquaranta.com) is an art critic and
> curator. He focused his research on the impact of the current
> techno-social developments on the arts. As an art critic, he regularly
> writes for Flash Art. He edited (with M. Bittanti) the book
> GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (October 2006). As a curator,
> he organized various shows, including Holy Fire. Art of the Digital
> Age (iMAL, Bruxelles 2008, with Y. Bernard) and Playlist (LABoral,
> Gijon 2009 and iMAL, Bruxelles 2010). For the ARCO Art Fair (Madrid)
> he curated the Expanded Box in 2009 and 2010.
>
> * Paolo Ruffino
> Paolo Ruffino was born in Rome, Italy, and currently lives in London,
> UK. He has been studying Media and Communications, digital media and
> semiotics in Rome, Copenhagen and Bologna. His interests include video
> game theory and culture, digital media, fakes and 'new media' art. He
> is a PhD student and Visiting Tutor at the Media and Communications
> department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research project
> is a cultural analysis of video game consumers. It involves a study of
> the concept of consumer/producer, the history of the video game medium
> and phenomena such as 'modding', independent gaming, open engines and
> game art. He is also a member of the artistic group IOCOSE. Among
> their works, they invented a spam campaign for the Italian Democratic
> Party, designed a religious hi-tech product based on electric shock,
> crafted an IKEA guillottine, experimented a drug made out of floppy
> discs, killed pop star Madonna and organized an international contest
> for the most valueless video on YouTube.
>
> Best!
> Menotti
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