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

[davin heckman]

In some ways, I think the question of games as art can be enriched by
looking back to poiesis and techne.

On the one hand, we are trying to describe formal questions of how
someone creates a representation of something (a sculpture,  a text, a
game, a painting, an utterance) which is expressed via technique.  On
the other hand, we are talking about what those representations
accomplish with regards to the being that engages with this
representation.

If we step back from the modern conception of art and consider that
there are a whole number of crafts that people engage in, and that
these crafts have to do with being....  then we can consider the level
of skill with which the craft is accomplished AND we can consider the
way that this craft engages with questions of being.

What I tend to consider art are those works which engage the user,
reader, viewer in reflection upon being.  But this is a limited
definition, and, really, it is an evaluation of quality: I think good
works allow people to see the context in which individual and
collective consciousness is thought.  The best works enable people to
direct their attention differently, productively (and I don't mean
productive from a purely economic perspective, though it does
intervene in the general ecology of human interaction.  It's funny if
you think about the relationship between economy and ecology....
oikos for dwelling with a distinction between nomos and logos, perhaps
as the distinction between the law as imposed order versus the word as
emergent order or even an immanent order, particular to the logical
relationships among those which it contains).  In this sense, I owe a
bit to Badiou's discussion of art as one of the means for truth:

"The more important issue today is the main contradiction between
capitalistic universality on one hand, universality of the market if
you want, of money and power and so on, and singularities,
particularities, the self of the community. It’s the principal
contradiction between two kinds of universalities. On one side the
abstract universality of money and power, and on the other the
concrete universality of truth and creation. My position is that
artistic creation today should suggest a new universality, not to
express only the self or the community, but that it’s a necessity for
the artistic creation to propose to us, to humanity in general, a new
sort of universality, and my name for that is truth. Truth is only the
philosophical name for a new universality against the forced
universality of globalization, the forced universality of money and
power, and in that sort of proposition, the question of art is a very
important question because art is always a proposition about a new
universality, and art is a signification of the second thesis."
("Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art" in Lacanian Ink 23).

I suppose what I like most about Badiou's discussion is not that it is
a unique point....  but it resonates with points that I have struggled
to understand through my own research....  and that I have heard
repeated by many people in this community (and elsewhere).  Many want
something from art.  Many seek to identify that aspect of creativity
which suggests not simply improved efficiencies, but helps us chase
down different efficacies (as in exploring new modes of creation and
making that empower people to make the world).   Certainly, this sense
of agency was running through previous discussions of "Creativity as
Social Ontology."

To return to videogames.... it's probably a lot like anything people
make or do.  There is a whole lot of worthless and even harmful
(either in its mode of production or its content) shit that industry
creates.  Then there are games which, as Daniel Cook describes, are
well-designed and with an internal mode of consistency.  I think about
how great a deck of playing cards works as a utilitarian object....
they become a framework for all sorts of human encounters...
theology (gambling and divination), work (gambling and hustling),
socialization (friendly games peppered with conversation or learning
how to deal with disappointment/success without making everyone think
you are an asshole), learning (math and memory games), even seduction
(strip poker).    And then there are games which aren't really games
at all....  but art.  They might have formal game-like qualities, but
have a different function within social life.  In the same way that
sometimes TV is art and sometimes some cut up trash glued to something
is art.  Not all trash is art, but some art is made from trash.  I
live in an economically depressed community, and even trash day is a
spectacle of utopian desire.  The comfortable tend to buy lots of shit
and throw lots of it away every week.  The least comfortable (the
evicted) have all their belongings thrown out on the curb at the end
of the month.  And then, in between, everyone else picks through the
weekly trash to find objects that can be resused, refurbished, sold,
kept, etc.  But even amidst all this cleverness and waste, I would not
say that these practices are art practices, they are borne from a
combination of need and a perverse culture that demands consumption
and denies people the opportunity to produce.   But, every once in a
while, I see people making art from the stuff that they have
scavenged.

In most cases, video games are just products (much moreso than other
games because of their technical apparatus).  And they are products
that people get really wrapped up in, just like a ten year old might
think that Justin Bieber is the greatest artist that civilization has
ever known.  There are real desires tucked away in that kind of
absorption, many of them are utopian.  There are real moments of human
cleverness stitched into the branding and production of Justin Bieber,
many of which are either intuitively or connivingly keyed to
capitalize on the cycle of human desire and disappointment.  (Even
kids know how to play games of psychological predation: "You're ugly,
but I will give you some attention if you....").  On the one hand, we
don't want to mistake these low forms of manipulation and the
dysfunctional culture they perpetuate for art.....  these are
techniques, yes, powerful ones, even.  On the other hand, we shouldn't
mistake things that aren't art for manipulation and dysfunction, many
games are thoroughly uncreative and repetitious, but still serve a
very healthy and necessary social function.  So, maybe we need three
categories.  Games that are a scaffolding for users to play on.
Commodities that seem like scaffolds for play, but are really just
mechanisms for sucking away people's money.  And Art that seems like a
game or a commodity, but is a mechanism for engaging with questions of
ontology.

Peace (And a happy new year).

Davin


On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 5:05 AM, Rafael Trindade <trirrafael at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, folks,
>
>
> Not a few times I've prepared myself to post something and got to stop just
> because your messages did my job better :) I just regret missing this latest
> topic, for I was afraid that kind of contention would happen. I find it a
> pity, and I'll try to show you why:
>
> The Picasso instance is not - OK, is not to me - as silly as might seem to
> some of you. I didn't reply it before for the reason cited above, and - I
> believe the main motive amongst us all - vacations!
>
> Back to Picasso-gate, what Daniel meant to me is the most pretty obvious
> thing: the same thing Duchamp and the conceptual artists and lots of people
> didactically showed us - that there is no such thing as an essentially,
> trouble-free, object of art. This is not only a contemporary feat; more
> rigid systems of yore demanded - as today - lots of training, education,
> sensibility and adequation to norms, institutions, artes poeticae, and
> dialogue with past canons and coetaneous artistic circles. What is to say,
> even believing so, there was not a pure, isolated, intrinsic aesthetic value
> in any object in any era. The example can make you cringe, but carries lots
> of elementary truth. The de-corporification of art, the stress on its
> relational, institutional, ecological nature does not imply art is valueless
> or an ethereal fiction. This is a sense a whole century have striven to
> build; not only about art, but about [social] reality itself.
>
> So Gabriel Menotti's response is not in conflict with Danc's sayings. We can
> find in videogames dependence on circuits, on a whole material ecology, on
> some modes of reception (recognition of genres), and a will of tradition
> (like I said weeks ago). Most human experiences are bound to some sort of
> will-to-canonise (gaming, being part of a gang, any nostalgia), not only the
> highbrow stuff. So you can relate games and art. BUT they are realities
> crested on very different social and technological complexes.
>
> One cannot fail to notice the enormously difference of weight canons have in
> arts. As someone - I forgot, sorry! - have told us here, art is, generally,
> about to associate, to enrich, to open more and more possibilities
> (according to old prescriptions, as synthetically as possible). This depends
> on the intrinsic properties of the object, triggered by a set of apparatuses
> linking it to synchronic circuits and diachronical traditions. There's
> nothing alike in videogames, even the most complex and beatiful; even the
> most distant from the childishly-irrational, fascinatingly-creative,
> absolutely freak and impatient mobs that makes, among other reasons, artists
> interested in 4chan-ness and gaming cultures.
>
> Everybody who happen to be into so-called "literary" fiction is familiar to
> the formula (which I believe only in some degree): books have to do with
> books, not with "real" stuff to which their tales could point at.
> Heretofore, people had learnt that Romeo and Juliet are not about some
> Italian couple more than they are about, say, Pyramus and Thisbe; that you
> cannot (would say some rigid and enthusiastic Victorian teacher) understand
> Molière without reading Bocaccio (and Scachetti, and Terence, and
> Menander...). The same has gone to arts. One can say that contemporary
> painting is not the same activity the pre-Raphaelites have practised, and
> one is right. But the pre-Raphaelites did not understood art the same way
> Raphael did, and his Greco-Roman models even happened to know they were real
> artists themselves. Every tradition is a will of tradition; every
> transmission is really, really impure. But this constitutes art; those
> "baggages" are the very elements which compose Culture with capital letters.
> By the way, I don't see why refrain from call Deleuze - or any other
> philosopher - "baggage"; it sounds very the-great-conversation-ish, and
> strikingly sounds a bit deleuzian, too (creation of concepts, instead of
> search for truth etc).
>
> I could say it simpler and faster:
>
>> 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".
>
> What's the big deal? Isn't it just what Danc said? Can you say that the
> history of videogames, as art's, is a long theoretical exchange? So why
> "shallow" and "ridiculous"?
>
> I believe games and art are very different realities, which can be compared
> if we formulate the right questions, and then we can find lots of common
> traits. This would be desirable depending more on our interests and projects
> than the inner truth lying within these realities. What really inspires me
> in discussions like this one in -empyre- is the confluence of these
> projects, and the possible exchange between them. There's no need to a
> subversive, inter- trans- or cross-disciplinary agenda to do that. And no
> need to protect theory from our theoretical exchange. All of us have been
> pretty theoretical up to then.
>
> I'm so sorry I have to post and run; I have a trip which would make me
> unable to read e-mails. Well, thank you all for the marvelous time \o\
>
> Happy New Year,
> Rafael.
>
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