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

Wed Dec 29 09:14:09 EST 2010

I hope that other people didn't reply to this either because you found it as
oversimplified, shallow and ridiculous as I did.

Art doesn't come with "baggage". The history of art, as I understand it, is
a very long theoretical exchange. Saying a painting comes with baggage is
like saying philosophy comes with baggage. Art has to be in dialog with
pervious art that has come before it, just as contemporary theory has to
respond to earlier thinkers. What you're saying is like saying that
Deleuze's writing about Spinoza is "baggage".

Also, the comparison of a painting and a game is just silly. You should talk
about comparing the life changing-ness of a painting and an image from a
game for a more reasonable comparison, or compare a game with an interactive
art piece.

You want to determine the "inherent value" in something by choosing 1,000
websites and a US audience. Well, that's an extremely limited set of
"humanity", what does that have to do at all with "inherent value"? What
about the rest of the world? What about the majority of the world, who don't
have access to the internet?

I'm surprised that I took the time to respond to this, but with the
discussion ending I just couldn't let it go...

2010/12/23 Daniel Cook <danc at spryfox.com>

>
>> The following step is social agreement: other people  talking the language
>> of art have to accept it as an art work. And the last step is certification
>> and attribution of economic value. Daniel wrote:
>>
>> > And this strikes me as a major difference between games and much of what
>> goes as art.  Games work.  They are utilitarian tools.  You can have a
>> functioning game or a broken game and it is not merely a matter of taste or
>> education or external validation.  Games either create the internal value
>> structure in the player or they do not.  They are exactingly engineered to
>> drive a particular emotion and we can sample a large enough population to
>> determine if they are success or not in their stated functional purpose.  A
>> functioning game has inherent value.  It does not need to be certified or
>> discovered or framed.
>>
>> I don't agree with this. Art works as well, and has an inherent value as
>> well. It does not need to be certified or discovered or framed. But it does
>> need it in order to survive in time, because this process, like it or not,
>> is a premise to the process of preservation of a work of art. It is the way
>> the contemporary art world keeps the meme alive in time. To buy an art piece
>> is like to buy a videogame: the difference is that a videogame can rely on a
>> stable industry and be distributed in thousands of copies, while a work of
>> art relies on a little niche and is sold at an high price to one or a
>> limited number of persons.
>>
>
> To continue a thought from the previous email and show a bit more of the
> perspective I'm coming from here, let's imagine an experiment:
>
>    - We place a painting on a thousand websites that target various
>    communities.  Let's assume our population is a statistically balanced spread
>    of humanity in the US.
>    - Pick a work that isn't broadly known.  In general we want people to
>    be ignorant of the baggage behind the image.   After all, we are testing
>    inherent value, not the value of the organization and context placed around
>    that image.  We want it to be naked.
>    - People can look at the picture for as long as they desire.
>    - Then they are asked to rate it.  Pick your own scale of meaning:
>     Joy, Delight, Life Changingness, etc.
>    - After you get about 10,000 or so ratings, see how you did.
>
> Now we'll do the same experiment with a game with the same scale and
> compare the ratings.
>
> The game, if it is made well, can cheat. It can be built for this very
> scenario.  It prods the viewer to interact in a basic manner.  Just click
> the button, it states.  And then that click evolves step by step into a
> game.   You won't get everyone.  40% won't make it past the first action.
> But the rest will. Games explain themselves.  They have inherent value
> because every game is a tutorial about value structures within a system.  A
> video game has the potential to be a meme that spreads itself.  If a
> painting is a virus that requires the cellular structures to reproduce, a
> video game is at the very least a bacteria that has all the pieces it needs
> to go forth and prosper.
>
> The painting, in order to cheat, devolves quite rapidly into the base world
> of advertising and pornography.  Context is everything for the
> painting...the best it can ever be on its own is a shallow trigger for
> evoking existing value structures in the viewer.  A painting that awards the
> user +10 points for viewing it is an ironic reference, not a system building
> an internal value structure.  As you state, it requires the contemporary art
> world to keep it alive.  More often than not, it requires the contemporary
> art world to give it meaning.  If there is a game present at all, it is the
> artifice of the museum with its tutorials, PvE events, Exhibit/Level flow
> and memberships. :-)
>
> I of course realize that not all works in modern art are paintings. :-)
>  There are some delightful examples out there of art that prompts the viewer
> on how they should interact with it, Yoko Ono's instruction paintings come
> to mind.  In the best of these, you have the start of a game.  There is a
> hint of a coherent system of working rules that resulted in a predicted
> action occurring.  In short, it a functional system...which once again leads
> us back to games, not art as it is typically imagined.
>
> As a side note, I see game designers fundamentally as engineers.  Except
> the technology we work with is that of human psychology.  Instead of
> sporadically evoking 'universal truths' in a haphazard process of inspired
> creation, we engineer emotional reactions into a reproducible system of
> rules that operate on the underlying psychology of the human brain.  This is
> a vast undertaking that will likely have a meaningful impact on how humanity
> lives.  I often wonder if perhaps a more productive partnership would be not
> the arts community but instead those who study economics, religion or
> government.  Media is a tool of games, but I don't think you can call what
> games are evolving into media any more than you can call Boy Scouts media.
>
> http://www.iniva.org/dare/themes/play/ono.html
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>

-- 
micha cárdenas
Associate Director of Art and Technology
Culture, Art and Technology Program, Sixth College, UCSD

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press,
http://is.gd/daO00
Artist/Researcher, UCSD School of Medicine
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

gpg: http://is.gd/ebWx9
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20101228/6f8e5f65/attachment.html>