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

[Paolo Ruffino]

Hi everyone,
sorry for the late reply -Xmas is a really slow time :)
there are quite a lot of things to say and comment, and is very
difficult to decide where to start from...

On 22 December 2010 11:14, Domenico Quaranta <qrndnc at yahoo.it> wrote:
> Maybe Paolo can add some interesting thoughts here.


I'll start from this point where I was personally mentioned and then
try to go back 'in topic'.

The NoTube Contest is a contest for the most valueless video on
YouTube. The participants are asked to find and submit a video that
has no value. With 'no value' we mean that there should be no reasons
to produce, publish or watch this video. It is a contest about
searching, not producing. The point is to look at the YouTube database
and find out a video with no narrative, no keywords, no views, no
links. What is not supposed to be found, or be viewed, but is still
there. We, the artist group IOCOSE, select a shortlist of applicants,
and then ask to a jury of 'experts' to choose the final winner. In
2010 we had Bifo, Patrick Lichty and Konrad Becker.
http://www.iocose.org/projects/notube_contest_2010

I'm not going any further as it gets very close to self promotion and
seriously off topic! But there is a point of connection, I believe,
between this discussion about art projects based on YouTube and the
general discussion we are having on this list about video game
(sub)cultures.

The NoTube Contest and the YouTube Play at Guggenheim, and also
'Famous on the Internet' (great project, by the way!), are all
representing and looking at YouTube from a particular perspective.
They contribute to generate narratives for describing a website
(YouTube) and its users. In a similar way, the artistic projects we
discussed earlier are all generating and based on narratives
surrounding video games and video game culture. 'My Generation' by Eva
and Franco Mattes or the very similar 'Angry Gamers' by Nia Burks
(http://www.niaburks.com/video/11.html?iframe=true&width=730&height=500)
are based on the celebration and glorification of 'internet
celebrities'. In these cases we see an artistic presentation of a
series of videos which became famous for showing a private, intimate
fit of anger from video game players. We know that game players can
get very passionate about their games and their own performances, and
video games can be very frustrating. The videos, their popularity and
the art works in fact reinforce this belief about video games and
their players.

Also, many game hacks are based on the pleasure of showing the
breaking of a supposedly closed system. Paul B. Davis, for example,
has been working on hacking Nintendo cartridges. The image of a broken
Super Mario cartridge represents his work pretty well (the story is
that he couldn't fix the plastic box after his modification and part
of it had to be broken).
http://www.vbs.tv/en-it/watch/the-creators-project--2/meet-paul-b-davis/comments

In this picture there is a perfect synthesis of a dominant narrative
in the relation between players and video game software. A supposedly
closed system is physically opened and modified. The release of open
source engines has often been presented as a concession from a
hierarchically superior developer to the players, and also as a sort
of revolution in the relation between consumers and producers in the
video game industry. But it is also true that video games became a
commodity only after some time in their history, as the case of
Spacewar shows quite well. Spacewar, conceived at MIT in the '60s, was
never 'closed' and finished. It was an always open project, constantly
under development. It is only when the video game market officially
starts, with Magnavox's Odyssey, that the narrative of a closed system
is introduced (Odyssey was codenamed 'the brown box' by his inventor
Ralph Baer, and his personal documents highlight his very project: to
"close video game software in a box" in order to make it possible to
monetize it).

This historical reconstruction shows that video game culture is
organized around a series of narratives that describe the relation
between games and their players. Game Art, as well, comments on these
narratives and contributes to generate new ones. I kind of disagree
with Alex Galloway, in this regard, when he critiques 'countergaming'
(in 'Gaming. Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2006'). He critiques the lack of interactivity in game art,
and argues that interactivity is the essential quality that makes
video games different from any other experience. A part from the
assumption that there is 'an essential quality' in video games (which
I don't like, for reasons I will maybe argue in a different email) but
he also kind of miss the point that game art is mostly a comment on
the video game culture as a whole, and not essentially on games. As
such the projects he describes, as well as the examples mentioned in
this debate, all provide an insight, they 'say something' about video
games, despite not being video games (a part from this, I believe
Galloway's text is brilliant!).

This, I believe, is one more point in favour of considering video game
culture mostly as a set of narratives. Narratives can be modified,
commented, critiqued. They can generate further objects but they are
not essentially based on technological innovations, as the non-linear
story of open source game engines shows. Game art adds its own pieces
and takes something from what has been produced before, in a constant
movement of inspiration and generation of new elements.

I'll stop here for now! take care,


-- 
paolo ruffino
http://paoloruffino.com
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