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

[atrowbri]

Domenico,

Eva and Franco Mattes's "My Generation" reveals what fantastic and
literate producers of media, especially comedy, the current generation
has become. The longest and most prominent video in the "My
Generation" collection is commonly known as "Angry German Kid"
[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/angry-german-kid-keyboard-crasher] (it
begins at 7:52 in the video) and it is well known as a fake. This
article does a good job as uncovering it as a fake:

http://www.cracked.com/article_15849_7-viral-videos-you-didnt-know-were-staged-and-how-they-did-it_p3.html

It is highly likely that most, if not all, of the other videos are
fakes as well, many of them "Angry German Kid" inspired. This makes
"My Generation" a document revealing an Internet meme in which kids
turn the media stereotype of video games causing rage and violence
back at the media, laughing the entire time. As the article above
reveals, "Germany's Focus TV saw the clip, and got permission from the
kid to use it on the air. Leopold and his father then watched as the
TV show manufactured a backstory--the one about the father secretly
recording his bloodthirsty, ADHD son--which then followed the clip as
it swept across the web." Thus the rage against the machine displayed
in "Angry German Kid" is a détournement of the very image of rage
society at large would project onto video game playing children.

I do not know whether the Mattes were aware that they created a
collection of fictitious enactments of the media-created dangerous
video games fiction. Considering their other playful work, I find it
likely. I have no doubt that video games can cause rage and I would
also offer "Angry German Kid" as self-aware parody by the specific
Internet/video game community. However, that this collection is taken
as "true" highlights the need for caution when Internet culture is
turned into an academic subject. Multiple stereotypes have already
been projected onto those who populate Internet subcultures and those
stereotypes must be critically questioned, just as stereotypes about
any other population would be.

>From Youtube memes that build into incredibly complex social and
community art projects, to Encyclopedia Dramatica pages that are
written in multiple layers of parody, to 4chan raids that are as
willing to defend Wikileaks by attacking Mastercard as they are
willing to attack the "Interior Semiotics" performance artist known as
"Spaghettio Girl" [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/interior-semiotics],
the Internet cultures and subcultures represent increasingly layered
and subtle politics beyond what popular journalism, and often academic
study, can keep up with. Journalists are still writing about
"Anonymous" as if it is a group of people when the central joke of
Anonymous is that there is no such group as Anonymous. It is instead
an anti-group, a crowd in the sense of Elias Canetti's Crowds and
Power, swept up towards a common goal in which comedy and political
action are inseparable.

Increasingly, we see the art world attempt to colonize the Internet
and gaming, imposing aesthetics and structure from the outside,
looking for potential stars. I would compare my own (with Jessica
Westbrook) curation of Youtube videos in 2007 for "Famous on the
Internet" at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center
[http://www.atrowbri.com/swf/FamousInternet.swf] to the Guggenheim
Museum's recent "YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video"
[http://www.youtube.com/play]. While we were attempting to take
samples from an emerging culture to share in another context,
highlighting the new phenomena of becoming famous on the Internet, the
Guggenheim offered Youtube video producers the opportunity to submit
to art world judges (Laurie Anderson, the band Animal Collective,
filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, and
artists Douglas Gordon and Takashi Murakami) so that they could pick
the winners. Predictably, the jury's selection became a set of
animations and "experimental" films that would be acceptable in any
city cinema festival. The genius of Youtube -- strange amateur
creations, joyful meme one-upmanship and bizarre real life documents
-- failed to make the art world's art list.

In a similar way, I question the concept of an art game culture that
does not begin by recognizing that video games were art before the
traditional art world began to sample various elements of video games.
I question why the modifier "art" is necessary in the phrase "art
games, art mods, art machinima. The most popular and well known
machinama, "Red vs. Blue" [http://redvsblue.com/] does not require any
"art" modifier, it exists as biting parody as well as a
gaming-focused, populist "Waiting for Godot."

The multiple coding of communication and action that take place in
"Angry German Kid" and the meme-related videos that followed, as well
as in Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4Chan and Anonymous, are intended to
confuse or ward off outsiders and act as booby traps for those who
would attempt to make them the subject of journalist or academic
study. There are many online communities making art who have no need
to be defined as artists, who in fact may reject the idea that their
serial productions like Advice Dog
[http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Advice_Dog] are art in any way.
Whether we consider ourselves artists or not, those of my generation,
most of all the brilliant children, are moving towards irrational
interaction based on anonymous collaboration and action in order to
escape from the overproduction of media, marketing, messages,
branding, surveillance, study, investigation, knowledge and, most of
all, information.

> Are games - and nee media in general - really turning visual arts into something radically different from what it has been in the twentieth
> century?

The really new media, as featured in games and on Youtube and endless
dark corners of the Internet, highlights how self-involved and
tiresome the visual art world can be when it chooses to remain stuck
in (or worse, attempts to colonize really new media for) Twentieth
century theory and practice. Radical, exciting culture is happening
far outside the existing art world, as it always has. Hopefully we can
find inspiration in these new emergences as examples of really new
media art and interesting art cultures (or cultures engaging in
activity we can recognize as similar to art) rather than attempting to
select the most art-like elements to drag back into or onto white
boxes.

Best,
Adam Trowbridge


Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_15849_7-viral-videos-you-didnt-know-were-staged-and-how-they-did-it_p3.html#ixzz18m9AHNA2

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 4:13 AM, Domenico Quaranta <qrndnc at yahoo.it> wrote:
> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Adam Trowbridge
www.atrowbri.com
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