[-empyre-] Art cred and advocacy

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Hi, Paolo,

Thanks so much for such a stimulating opening post. It rekindled my disappointment with the Smithsonian "Art of Videogames" show because it seemed to be much more a promotion of design than of gaming (even in the traditional, corporatist sense).  Although the weekend I was there also featured "interactive" gaming geared toward kids in the central court, the theme was dress up and shoot 'em up rather than anything truly collaborative or social.  Clearly the MOMA's embrace of gaming as design also fits this trend (but I wouldn't expect MOMA to embrace gaming as new media since it declared the death of new media in a show a few years back -- even its recent forays into "new media" in the "media gallery" have been more video and display based rather than computational and interactive).

An aspect of the history of social gaming was the early importance of socially oriented CD-Rom and net.art.  When I curated CTHEORY Multimedia (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu) with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, we were delighed to receive politically oriented pieces whose interactive aim was intellectual collaboration rather than 'winning.'  I think that a lot of socially-oriented artists and collectives went in the direction of designing interactive CD-Roms and net.art pieces, such as VNS Matrix, Linda Dement, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda, Art Jones, Muntadas, Suzanne Treister, the Labyrinth Project (Nina Menkes, Kristy Kang, Marsha Kinder), and Michelle Citron (you can find references to their works on the Contact Zones website, (https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu).  I don't think we'd associate these artists with gaming in the "Art of Gaming" sense, but they certainly filled the void of social gaming at the time.

Looking forward to hearing more.

Best,

Tim


Director, Society for the Humanities
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York. 14853
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of paolo - molleindustria [paolo at molleindustria.it]
Sent: Saturday, March 02, 2013 11:17 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] Art cred and advocacy

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hello empyrialists,
thank you Claudia and Renate for inviting me.
I'd like to start by reframing the introductory post. Just a little bit.


If your filter bubbles include gaming circles you have witnessed the
many collective cheers, hoots, and metaphorical stadium waves raising
upon every glorious step of the videogame medium toward high-culture
acceptance.

The repeated "video games can never be art" claims made by Roger Ebert
from 2005 onward forced a multitude of North American game developers,
critics and players to confront the mysterious Art Thing, possibly for
the first time in their lives. Their honor, their reputation and, most
importantly, their favorite pastime was being attacked by a prominent
tastemaker.

In the following years, a fierce movement of DIY art criticism emerged
within the game industry. Programmers started to google terms like
"aesthetics"; game journalists filled their indignant counter-articles
with pictures of Duchamp's Fountain. Every strange, intimate, weird
looking game was measured for its potential to defuse Ebert's argument.
Even hardcore gamers started to cry while playing (and wrote extensively
about it) demonstrating they also had feelings. Those little sprites and
polygons really mattered to them.

As the narrative goes, from that cycle of shame and pride emerged a new
sensibility. While the gaming community matured and developed higher
cultural ambitions, the blinded masses of non-gamers and the mainstream
press became more and more sympathetic to the popular form.

The recent move by the NEA to include games as possible recipients for
grants has been interpreted as a federal seal of approval (although, in
the past, the agency funded videogame projects through individual artist
grants). The exhibition "The Art of Videogames" at the Smithsonian,
shortly followed by the acquisition of 14 game titles by the MoMA, has
been saluted as the ultimate institutional validation of the "games are
art" truism.

In the midst of the celebrations it wasn't appropriate to wonder whether
or not the Smithsonian show was a populist publicity stunt "generously"
supported by Entertainment Software Association. The curatorial process
involved an online poll asking netizens to vote for their favorite games
- it didn't make a big difference since only 5 among the 80 chosen
titles were actually playable.
And I haven't heard many commentators reflecting on the fact that the
aforementioned MoMA acquisitions were part of the Architecture and
Design collection. What does it mean to put Pac-Man right next to swanky
furniture? Is the hip and yuppie field of interaction design
imperialistically claiming videogames? Are games furniture? Can
architecture make you cry (like videogames, of course)?

For those who don't hang out in certain niche art circles, it doesn't
really matter that artists have been appropriating, hacking, and
creating videogames (and videogame culture) for about 20 years now. It
doesn't matter that a myriad of game-themed art exhibitions swept across
the digital art world, arguably becoming its most popular sub-genre.
Last night Stephen Colbert cracked a joke about the exotic idea of
arcades at the MoMA but we rarely see games presented in relation with
computational, interactive, combinatory and digital art, or even with
relational aesthetics or performance. All these forms are way more
related to games than the kind of art that collects dust inside museums.

These issues did not matter because that exciting, pedantic, fractal,
never-ending dispute we call "art" was never the point of this debate.
The point was to "elevate" the cultural status of videogames as a whole:
as a medium and as an industry.
For gamers it was a retroactive validation of the countless hours they
spent moving pixels and polygons around: "We knew we weren't wasting out
time!"
For the industry it was a way to snort some of that magic art dust
without accepting the responsibilities that come along with a privileged
space for cultural experimentation: "We don't want just weird artsy
games in galleries and museums. We want Pac-Man!"

The game industry and the culture surrounding it can be best understood
as a traumatized child or an abused pet. Throughout the years videogames
have been repeatedly treated as cultural punching bags and convenient
scapegoats. The folks personally involved in this field reacted to the
long stigmatization by developing a certain brand of groupthink, a
perennial persecution complex, and a compulsion to stick together no
matter what.

In the past I've been accused of damaging the reputation of the industry
by making games about controversial issues; works defying players'
expectations or rejecting clearly defined goals were dismissed as "not
games".
Now games for social change are often mentioned as symptoms of the
"maturation" of the form via New Age gurus like Jane McGonigal.
Independent/artsy titles are presented next to idiotic shooters to
support the launch of the new PlayStation. Imagine the toilet industry
using Duchamp to achieve cultural validation (and possibly get art
grants and tax breaks in the process).
What did not change between now and then is the tendency to
conceptualize the gaming field as an  homogeneous space devoid of conflict.

I would love to see a conversation *not* informed by the catch-all
attitude of the "Videogames and Art" controversy of these recent years.
If we are talking about games we must learn to qualify the objects in
question. Because there are major differences between a commercial
product like Pac-Man and a personal and profound game like Cart Life.
The lack of critical discourse within the game industry should not
influence the way we treat games outside of it.

And while we push arcade cabinets in and out of museums we could also
try to complicate the terms of the debate.
Instead of asking ourselves if and how games can be art, maybe we can
start to think how art can be more like games: popular, participatory,
accessible and yet complex; able to engage people deeply and for more
than a fleeting moment; capable of providing richer experiences the more
you get intimate with them.

Love,
Paolo

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