[-empyre-] the self and the (machinic) other / a post-systemic condition or a post-art condition?

[Gabriel Menotti]

Hey!

“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.” [Domenico Quaranta]

I don’t see these outbursts (whenever they actually happen) as a form
of rage against the self. On the contrary, they are normally provoked
by the frustration over “unresponsive controls.” I remember feeling
the same as I was learning to ride a bike when I was 13, or playing
VVVVVV earlier this year. Two perceptions confront each other: even
though you feel that you are doing everything right, you don’t see the
machine responding accordingly. So, you try and make the machine
respond by force. In other words, it is also a form of cheating – of
confronting the game outside its own parameters.

In that sense, the outbursts are a strong affirmation of the
egoistical self against the machinic otherness. Of course, they hide
the fact that the part in this relation that is flawed is the user
himself – but anyway, the user is only flawed according to the
parameters of the machine, etc.

This can be seen as a form of self-aggression if we believe that there
never is any real antagonism between man and videogame, only a ritual
one (which I do believe). The end game screen is (generally)
pre-programmed, and therefore the game intends (and, since we’re into
guattarisms, let’s say it *wants*) to be mastered – even by a deaf,
dumb and blind kid; even at the cost of a hundred coins.


“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.” [DC]

Maybe the naturalization of technique that society is through going
creates a sort of “post-systemic condition,” and videogames are the
object that best express this – not only in our (“ludic” or
self-aware) ways of understanding them, but also in the ways that this
understanding fosters different forms of machinic engagement, both
affective and operational.

Overall, I fell that, nowadays, there are different disbelieves to be
suspended.  I wonder if this can lead to the perception that the
frameworks that separate Cartier-Bresson from Thomas Demand are no
more fundamental than the ones that separate playing from cheating.
But how can we push this critical perception into critical agency,
allowing movement across frameworks without needing to crystallize
another one (as the post-structuralisms did, in a way)?


“Internet cultures and subcultures represent increasingly layered and
subtle politics beyond what popular journalism, and often academic
study, can keep up with.” [Adam Trowbridge]

I wonder if the art system isn’t losing the pace either – not only in
terms of structures of distribution and authorization, but also
regarding its choice of topics and strategies of production. Even
though there has been no point in talking about avant-gardes for a
while, early digital art had this “antenna of the race” quality.
Nowadays, the interesting reverberations seem to come from somewhere
else.

About this, another work by the Mattes comes to mind: the
“performance” No Fun. [1] Does it have ethical or aesthetical
implications any stronger than other performances done within
chatroulette subculture (e.g. the batman guy [2], piano improv [3],
tits or chicken die [3])? Or its particular meaning and value arises
from the fact that it is framed as art – and therefore deserves a
critical consideration that these other performances don’t (it is
reviewed in certain websites, etc)?

It is telling that, for the performance to be framed (i.e. circulate)
as art, it has to become a video piece. In what is this different from
a speedrun or machinima, who become actual works only after they are
recorded? How does the Mattes’ piece incorporate this mediatic
translation into its strategies? Is the performance any different from
a candid camera prank because it depicts death? Is it any different
from a “faces of death” episode because it includes the reactions to
it? And what can we say about the reactions to the performance's
recording?

Best!
Menotti

[1] http://vimeo.com/11467722
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoa-KqIwW8s
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTwJetox_tU
[4] http://www.geekologie.com/2010/03/pederast_feeds_baby_chick_to_s.php
(the chicken video is a fake – but what difference does it make?)