Games as a collaborative art

[Note from Shaun: The following is a guest post from Alan Owen. Alan makes video games for a living at Plug-in Media. Amongst his claims to fame are working on two BAFTA award winning games (I and II), and making games specifically for the BBC and the Tate gallery. Alan and I happen to share the same Scottish grandparents and while I was in England recently we found time to catch up. One of the things we chatted about was Barnabas' earlier guest post on whether video games are art. Here are Alan's thoughts on where you can find the aesthetic in games...]
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The tactic of ‘logical defusal’: Denied.

In direct answer to the question ‘can video games be classed as art?’, my first draft of this post summarised a need to be rigorously clear in our definition of the terms ‘game’ and ‘art’. This is an important point to make, because it is very easy to concisely answer the question with an explicit and limited definition of each term, and an application of simple logic! The answer to the salient question is directly related to the individual asking it, and to their particular phrasal of definition: “does this ‘game’ (as I define the term) constitute ‘art’ (as I define the term)?”. Rigorously enforced definition empowers one to slice through that ‘unknown quantity’ of subjectivity, and simply get on with things...

This was, alas, seen to be a bit of a cop-out, and hence deeper thought stimulated by my diligent editor! I took such constructive criticism amicably, because Shaun hit me with a very valid point - in sidestepping the question, I’d cheated myself (and the reader) out of any enlightenment that might have been forthcoming from an appraisal of aesthetics, ‘the philosophy of the nature of art’, as it relates to the video game. So, without recourse to disarming logic: are games art?

Collaborative art

I’d like to entertain a more suitable classification for video games as a form of collaborative art, by which I mean ‘art’ executed by a number of individuals working cooperatively to create some coherent entity. In my day to day job I both participate in, and perceive other people around me, diligently working each within their own sphere of expertise to realise some greater goal: a creative digital entity that has (generally) the primary purpose of entertainment. Within my own company, the scale of such projects is relatively small (carrying a budget to match), but big games are big business, with an industry on a scale comparable to Hollywood moviemaking. What do such video games give to humanity that makes them worthwhile, beyond just a means to waste time?

Aesthetic value can be manifest in many ways within a video game, but this value can sometimes be rather hidden from the casual player or spectator. In the following paragraphs I’ll shine a light upon just some such ‘artistic’ modalities that I am conscious of when I play a video game - travelling through layers of progressively less visible aesthetics and into my own domain; the invisible.

The obviously visible:

Poetrees

This is something I saw on the internet that was kind of nice. It seems that the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh is haunted by a mysterious artist. The artist takes books (not library books, thankfully!), turns them into sculptures and then surreptitiously places them in the library. A more thorough story on the sculptor is here (though not the identity).

Chris Scott/flickr

The library itself named the first work, a poetree... so don't blame me for the title of the post. The image above is a movie theatre with the characters leaping out of the screen and challenging the audience (a different angle below).

Chris Scott/flickr

There are lots of other equally nice sculptures, such as the original poetree, as well as a pleasant detective mystery to go with the missing identity of the surreptitious sculpture. All can be seen at the news article, so why not go read it?

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Leonardo: A Painter at the Court of Milan, for the Twenty-First Century

Study of Arms and Hands, c. 1474

Study of a Woman, c. 1490

Earlier this month, one of those once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions opened in London: Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. It runs at the National Gallery until early February.

This isn't a review, since I haven't seen the show. But it amazes me that an exhibition like this exists, so consider this another 'live stream' post—a placeholder for reflections and mullings on and around Leonardo's unbelievable images, with some suggestions about why we are seeing more of this work; and subject to being updated with new links, reviews and so on.

To state the obvious, it isn't easy to put together an exhibition like this. In fact there has never been, and will never be, a 'complete' Leonardo retrospective in the manner of a Picasso, a Judd, or a Richter survey—those big, bulky exhibitions that cover the full range of a capacious individual's oeuvre, and of which one can say, with a certain admiration, "I am large, I contain multitudes." These kinds of shows are necessarily overwhelming because they cover a multifaceted life. But in this case the reasons are practical: some of these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes are site-specific (painted directly on a wall), and they are universally under bureaucratic lock and key: all Leonardo's work, from the most magnificent painting to the quickest, most fleeting of drawings are owed by institutions and individuals (and the Royal Family). So the problems of red tape for any curator contemplating this kind of mountainous show is unimaginable.

Studies of Water passing Obstacles and falling, c. 1508-9

"Nature, red in tooth and claw." and blue, and green, and yellow, and...

The picture above is a 'brainbow' created by a lab in Harvard - it is a fluorescent microscopy image of the hippocampus of a mouse genetically engineered to express three fluorescent proteins. Depending on how the genes of the individual neurones are randomly recombined, each cell will express a different combination of the three proteins, giving each a unique colour! I love the beauty of the resultant image, and it is a great example of the meeting of scientific and aesthetic research that is becoming more and more widespread. Another example is given below - natural fireworks revealed by labelling actin microtubules in dividing cells. These pictures and plenty of others are available in an online exhibition run by the journal Cell at the Cell Picture Show. The images are incredible and there are explanations of what's being shown for those without a biology background - well worth a visit!

Image rights belong to Cell and the original creators.

Three Impossible Images

1.

Marianne Moore, A Jellyfish (1959)

Of course this first one isn’t even an image, but a poem—a lyric. In this digital audio file at the SFMA Poetry Center you can hear Marianne Moore reading it. Listening to this clip is lovely, because it gives you a sense of the witty, self-depreciating charm of the personality behind the language.

If this poem is an ‘image,’ it is a drama of the almost-visible, starring a jellyfish. Quite a specific, individual jellyfish, swimming around as they do, and momentarily caught in a small poetic narrative. It is the jellyfish that is both visible and invisible: fluctuating, transparent, ethereal, sometimes translucent and sometimes highly colored, jewel-toned, gem-like, strangely compelling, very beautiful, intensely desirable, and alive.

The first lines of the poem contain so much all-over movement that you sense the liquidity before articulating it. Yet when the “arm/ approaches” everything changes. Suddenly it hits you that there’s no glass barrier, an aquarium or a zoo, to separate the person from the jellyfish, so that that this might actually be an eco-drama: a story of ecological ethics in which the arm is in the ocean with the jellyfish.

And this realization introduces two important other movements. When the arm drops back it registers fear, but also something else. “Abandon[ing] your intent” isn't exactly giving up. There’s a hint of purposeful letting go: a deliberate act of relinquishment, or an instinctive reaction to the liveness of the jellyfish’s quiver.

This poem is a kind of motionless animation. It is a drama in which what is not visible becomes more practically significant than we can see, so that a very attractive ‘thing’ is not removed from its environment.

...But That Was [Yesterday]

Hello dear readers,

So on Monday we will be receiving our second ever guest post. That almost makes us a legitimate, web-worthy, ready to be viewed by the masses blog, right?

To tide us all over until that momentous moment I will let a discussion from the comments on the last guest post spill over into a new blog post. As you might remember, that post was on whether games can be classified as art. In the comments, Michelle pointed out that one way in which games challenge our definition of art is that the interaction which is such a necessary element of games, also lessens how contemplative they can be. And in "conventional" art, contemplation is almost the entire point and purpose.

While I think both Barnabas and Michelle would argue that games need not be contemplative to succeed in becoming art, this needn't stop me from trying to point out some contemplative games.

So, as some candy for the weekend, I give you ...But That Was [Yesterday] (which was actually buried in a list of recommended games in one of the links in Barnabas' original post).

source: jayisgames.com

Go here for the game designer's blog post about the game. At the link you can see links to other games by the same designer. How My Grandfather Won The War is also a very good game that forces the player to think about the game while playing. Difficult, but good.

I like ...But That Was Yesterday. It is not a game so much as an interactive story. The game elements are there not to give you a game, but to force you to take part in the story. When events happen to the character, the actions you are forced to take then force you to think about and also even feel to a certain degree what is happening.I think it is done well, it certainly drew an emotive response out of me when I played it. And I think it did so in a way that was only possible because of the interactive element, not despite it.

If you have the time (which you do because it shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes) it is well worth a play through, especially if you don't normally "play games". Give this one a try. Once you've played it through, your thoughts are certainly welcome in the comment section. As are links to other games that might pass the contemplative test.

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Elegy in the Turbine Hall

I was sad to realize while in London in September that I was narrowly missing two shows at Tate Modern: an impressive looking Gerhard Richter survey, and Tacita Dean's commission for the Turbine Hall. Dean's work opened last night to a chorus of reviews, with lots more undoubtedly to come. I'll keep an ongoing roster of interesting commentary at the end of this post.

The piece is called FILM. It's a striking installation of poetic cinema: a jewel-toned, silent, 11 minute film presented as a monumental projection onto a 13 meter screen nestled toward the back of the Turbine Hall. The projection system uses 35mm film and a cinemascope lens turned around at 90 degrees to achieve the very unusual vertical format. And it contains no digital post-production － all the visualizations, superimpositions, and image combinations are made with "analog" methods: during production, inside a 16mm camera, and with splices on a Steenbeck editing machine.

That would be because the piece is a strong polemic for the material of film, and a claim for the differences between celluloid and digital. Tacita Dean talks about celluloid film as her medium here and here, likening it to oil paint. She wrote an impassioned manifesto for it earlier this year, and in the exhibition's accompanying catalog surveys 80 cinematic artists about this question of filmic obsolescence. "Pitched against this," she writes － 'this' being the film industry's absolute turn to the digital in recent years － "art is voiceless and insignificant." You don't have to be sympathetic to this point of view to still hear in it a Shakespearean question －"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?" In a sensitive documentary, produced by the Tate to contextualize the show, Dean describes the intensity of her commitment to this medium around a question of intimacy:

Film and digital are just different mediums. They're very intrinsically different: they're made differently, they're seen differently. Film is my medium, just as oil is the medium of painters. I need the time of film for my work, and the atmosphere of film.

Anticipating the end of celluloid is like waiting for a tsunami to arrive. A lot will change when the wave finally hits, and there have been plenty of indicators of its encroaching already － practically for a generation. But we're probably near the crucial moment now, which adds a certain pathos to this work. The last lab in Britain that would process 16mm film closed during the production of Dean's FILM, and inexperience in the Dutch lab that was able to process it resulted in some major errors.

The material medium of celluloid film has remained essentially unchanged since cinema was invented in the nineteenth century. I think this is partly why its passing away is experienced so emotionally, as an enormous loss, by cinephilic aficionados. But the analog/digital debate can easily devolve into a retrograde fight, which is why I think it matters that Dean claims that her stance isn't absolutist but aimed at demanding ongoing choice between the two:

that analogue film might be allowed to remain an option for those who want it, and for the ascendency of one not to have to mean the extinguishing of the other.

I'd be curious to hear from people who are able to actually see the piece since my sense of it is, of course, digitally mediated.

Reviews, Tacita Dean, FILM, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 11 October 2011–11 March 2012
(in chronological order, more or less):

e-flux, press release
Background interview at Phaidon Press
In the artist's voice, the making of: a lovely process documentary from the Tate

Sylvie Lin, The Disappearance of Film－An Interview with Philippe-Alain Michaud (Art Taipei Forum)

Adrian Searle, The Guardian
Emily Eakin, New Yorker
Sarah Kent, The Arts Desk
Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman
GertiesGirl, Inscape (blog) 
Jackie Wullschlager, The Financial Times
Charles Darwent, The Independent
Alison Roberts, This Is London
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Royal Academy of Arts Magazine
Cate Smierciak, Berlin Art Link
Sally O'Reilly, Art Review

And the last word, perhaps, to the curator Nicholas Cullinan:

In reading about Dean’s filmic works, which document edifices either derelict (Bubble House and Palast) or belonging to another era (Boots and Fernsehturm), or sitters captured towards the end of their life, a word that is all too often used to describe them is ‘nostalgia’. This characterisation of Dean’s films gives me pause. It strikes me as wrong, or at least reductive and misleading. Dean’s works have thus far tended to be written about in terms of ruins, remnants and obsolescence, and while those words may be applied to some of the subjects captured by her camera, the images within her films, and in FILM particularly, are not fragmented or entropic, but instead alive and vital. They are images which very much seem to be making a case for why they should, why they must, be preserved in order to go on existing. And this difference between my account of Dean’s work and those of others hinges upon a simple perception.

Where some see fossilisation in the subjects captured by her camera’s lens, I see revivification, every time the projector is switched on and these images are summoned back to life once more. If film is a medium that seemingly lacks a physical presence or substance, and is instead one which flickers and fades phantasmagorically before us and then persists largely in the memory, then this immateriality is echoed in Dean’s films, capturing that which is fugitive or fleeting – light changing, places or people before they vanish, time passing. Those who see only nostalgia in her films miss the point, because what I see in Dean’s work, and in FILM in particular, is wonderment at what can be salvaged by the camera’s lens. 

Image credits: Ian Nicholson / PA; Sarah Lee for The Guardian; Ray Tang/Rex Features, all from The Guardian; video from the Visit London Blog

Games are art.

[Note from Shaun: The following is a guest post from Barnabas Soon. Barnabas and I went to school together and often used to discuss whether computer games could be considered art. Barnabas has always thought yes, he is also the first person to give into my "will you write a guest post for us" harassment. Thank you Barnabas. Enjoy.]

What is Art?

According to Google's definition, art is defined as:

"The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."

Following this definition, for me, works of art, be they painting, sculpture, drawings, literature or film are a medium in which the creator is also trying to convey a message, reveal something interesting, create a visual impact or create an emotional impact.

Are video games art? 

A video game is also a medium in which the creator is trying to convey a message or create an emotional impact. If art is a creation that makes you think, imagine or feel, then just as film, literature and TV can be art, games can be art.

In the same way that film and comics have evolved, changed and eventually gained acceptance in mainstream society as art; video games are now following this same trajectory. They have evolved from merely being simplistic simulations to something much greater. They have evolved into an experience.

Unlike the passive mediums of books and film, games are an interactive medium. They are dramas that require audience participation. If you don’t make choices, the game will never continue, the story will never unfold. Your character will remain there passive, or worse, die. This interaction, and the mental, psychological and emotional commitment required by the player sets games apart from other mediums. It is also because games can reproduce the same feelings that other forms of art can elicit that numerous games can be considered ‘art’. The experience of a video game is multimedia. Sound, graphics, interface and interaction with the game world and feedback of your actions all come together to create the experience.

Like any other medium, there will be good games and bad games and others that are downright weird. Your enjoyment of video games will depend a great deal on your personality. Strategy games like Simcity which simulate running a city are video games which wouldn't probably be classified as 'art', but are still fun and interesting in their own right and can often teach us valuable lessons about life.

Moving images, everywhere

A few years ago the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris opened a large public exhibition titled Le Mouvement des images (The Movement of Images) -- information and images here. The Centre Pompidou is France’s National Museum of Modern Art, covering both the 20th and 21st centuries, and it boasts one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of film and moving image art.

Le Mouvement des images was based on a straightforward but quite radical premise: that the art of the 20th century should be re-read through the cinema experience. What this implied was a reconsideration of assumptions about the relation of art and technology to include not just film and photography, but also the traditionally plastic arts: painting, sculpture, drawing. In short, the exhibition was “a redefinition of the cinematographic experience widened to include all the visual arts.”

The strength of the Pompidu’s collection meant that the exhibition’s curator Philippe-Alain Michaud had an opportunity rarely available to curators and academics - he was able to work directly from the museum’s holdings to literally re-organize the canon of modern art relative to the idea that the filmic and ‘static’ arts both reflect a technological influence. For example, in relation to series of drawings made by Picasso several minutes apart in 1970, the artist is quoted as observing “It’s the movement of the painting that interests me, the dramatic effort from one vision to the next.” Taking a dynamic principal like movement as subject tends to alter the painting’s emphasis from fixity to flux.

I mention Le Mouvement des images because it seems a good example of a perspective from within the arts relevant to the interdisciplinary interests of this blog. In part, this is because Michaud understands film to be something far more pervasive than Hollywood blockbusters: he defines ‘cinema’ in a way that includes the moving images that are a ubiquitous part of our daily life, including those on the internet, on iPhones, webcams, and in scientific laboratories.

Part of my interest in the specific art/science crossover comes out of the observation that moving images are an increasingly integral, even methodological component of contemporary scientific research. Some of my current reading on the topic goes so far as to suggest that filmic tools like live-cell imaging are changing biology by introducing a dynamic imaging process into the heart of the scientific method. In that vein, it is probably not a coincidence that a couple of Shaun and James’ recent posts have involved links to films - of animation by stop-motion, by cell structures, and by particles.

So if it seems viable to revise the history of Modern art from the point of view of dynamic images, can we extend that perspective to science? I’m curious about the perspective on film as a research tool from the other side of the art/science equation.

Image credit: Gerhard Richter, Halfmannshof (1968), Offset print on lightweight cardboard. Based on a photograph taken by the artist from a moving train.

Collaboration

I'm currently in New York engaging in a kind of anthropological data collection - looking through museum archives, conducting interviews, etc. One of the targets of my stalking is Anthony McCall, an important artist, and whose medium is light. Among his current projects is a large public commission from the U.K. which will coincide with the 2012 Olympics. It’s called Column, and the materials are ‘air and water.’ McCall says the work came essentially out of sharing a bottle of wine with an old friend, a physicist and inventor named John McNulty.

Some links to press descriptions of Column, which will draw a dynamic line of mist into the vertical horizon and disappear into the sky:

The Guardian
The Telegraph
Creative Review - including a video clip of the piece in scale model

And a couple of recent interviews:

Museo Magazine - on the technical backdrop to Column, other large public projects in New Zealand and New York, and on the social texture of public art
Bomb Magazine