Ebert vs games-as-art

What was a more interesting question is why Ebert claims games weren't art. He argued that because there was no unified artistic vision possible in a game, it wasn't "art". What he meant was because unlike a novel or film, the game narrative has more than one possible outcome. he also implied that games had no singular artistic vision- there was no "autuer" who guided the game- think Orson Welles directing "Citizen Kane" or Joseph Conrad writing "Heart of Darkness".
But the history of art is full of examples that are accepted as art, and great art, that contradict those criteria. Most movies are the result of the artistic cooperation. Even James Cameron has to accept input from other designers, cinematographers and so on. This kind of cooperation was normal fro the great renaissance painters, who often guided teams of apprentices in actually creating a "Leonardo" a "Raphael"or a "Donatello"(I'm not talking the turtles, here).
Much modern performance art, especially the extreme art of people like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden are based on creating situations (like lying for days under a sheet of glass in a public space) then seeing what happens.
Game designers and more importantly could look at defining "gaminess" as an artistic quality that we need more of, and produce games that are more artistic, as well as influencing artists to be more "game-like" in their production.

Loch Ness

"Loch Ness"

Stephen Lyons' "Loch Ness" asks what facts are available in an
electronic image and how this relates to the ontology of screen and
the space between it and it's audience. At first glance the piece is
confusing- a jumble of foam-core, paint, and wood scraps roughly
assembled in seeming disarray in front of a screen presenting the
image of a 1965 photograph of an expedition to photograph the Loch
Ness monster. To one side of the installation a video camera
apparently operates. It is not clear at first what it is capturing
because it is pointed at the apparent jumble but after concentrating I
realised that the image on the screen had been created by using the
forced perspective to organise a seemingly incoherent group of objects
into a simulacrum of a two-dimensional image.

After recognising the artifice involved in creating the piece, I began
noticing the occasional shadow of a gallery visitor sweeping across
part of the screen image, as the camera captured the shadow of a
gallery visitor falling across a section of the installation. The effect
was uncanny, as it would often occur on only one element of the image
even though other elements appeared to be on the same picture plain,
suggesting a shadow should fall on all of them.
The Loch Ness monster has long achieved mythical status, status fueled
by one famous photographic image that suggests a sea serpent, or the
head and neck of a pleisiosaur or an odd piece of wood floating in
the waters of Loch Ness. No physical evidence supporting the existence
of such a beast has ever been presented and survived scrutiny. The
blurry image purported to be that of "Nessie" as she is affectionately
referred to by the residents near the Scottish lake, has neither been
confirmed or debunked. By recreating a facsimile of a photograph of an apparent monster-
hunting exhibition, Lyons has effectively raised questions about the
facticity of images, as well as their ability to invoke mythos. What
is particular to this mythos is it's attachment to an mythic
interpretation derived from empirical science.

Cryptozoology is the title given to the study of such creatures as the
Loch Ness monster, the Sasquatch and the Yeti and even more fabulous
creatures such as the chupacabra. The film footage of a sasquatch
disappearing in the woods of the rocky mountains provides another
example of photographic evidence of a subject devoid of any primary
evidence. In Lyon's "Loch Ness" the artist has asked the question of
how we can claim facticity and providence of the object.
It becomes evident we must abandon the folklore that pictures never
lie, by examining images as intrinsically constructed.

Loch Ness explores the technological myth of photographic facticity
and the relationship between screen space and inter-subjectivity and
the epistemological questions it raises.

• Steve Lyons : Loch Ness 10/01/08 → 10/02/13
  
• Centre des arts
  actuels Skol
  372, rue Sainte-Catherine
  Ouest, espace 314,
  Montréal, QC
  H3B 1A2

Illusion and space in classical imagery

Illusion and space in classical imagery

Illusionary elements create the sense of being in the picture
"blurring distinctions between real space and image space"(grau 2003 p.
25) Grau's discussion makes it clear that his view of the success of
the illsions is dependant on the physical surrounding of the images.
Thus his description of a figure on the wall, a maenad apparently
about to step through the picture plain and into "the space of the
observer".
The description Grau offers apparently connects figures on one side
of the room with those on the other. For example he describes a a
demon about to flagellate a girl on the adjacent wall. That such
interactions seem to compress the distance between the walls in some
cases, and in the case of the figures at the far wall it seems to
widen suggests anachronistically a medieval notion of perspective,
with the physically more distant but pictorially more central elements
of the gods Bacchus and Venus occupying more area than would be
expected of a linear perspective, yet surrounded by compostional
imagery sugessting the Gods as the focus of perspectival lines.
This raises two questions; Is a surround required for an immersive
experience and does the interactivity of games imagery , especially
perspectival games achieve such immersion because the subject is
stationary but is induced by a shifting visual field that also
responds to player/audience response?
Villa dei misteri, room #5, Pompei
Les Fresques de pompéi ND 2475 f74x 1983
Dionysos bl820 b2j4
In Grau(2003)
Strocka(1990) p. 213
Borbein(1975) p.61
Wesenberg(1985) p. 473
Andreae(1967) p. 202

Photography; Momoko Allard, Solitary crowding, 2004-2009 digital c-print

Momoko Allard's photographs create seemingly spectral portraits of the passengers and surrounding landscapes viewed from the Chuo train line in and around Tokyo, Japan. In order to respect the etiquette expected, Allard photographed the images of the other passengers reflected in the windows of the train, sometimes obscuring the camera with her hand.

Utilising the windows of the train as mirrors she has attempted to capture "the feeling of numbness and repressed time that defined this daily visited space". Usually she stood between 1 and 4 metres from the subject. Her choice of 28 and 50 mm lenses caused a greater impression of space than was actually the case.

This close proximity of the subjects lead to use the mirror reflections to hide her photographic activities. She said that in only one case that she knows of did a subject notice her photographing him, but said nothing. Although Allard was using reflection as a strategic device while taking these photographs, she says that reflections have appeared in other work of hers.

Originally trained as a painter, Allard feels that photography puts her in closer relationship to the subject, especially as she can photograph in a real environment rather than having to work in a studio.

Allard doesn't feel she will continue this series, but she does intend to continue examining how very isolated individuals try to negotiate through space, and how patterns and structures operate in space.

Bibliography

Allard, Momoko. Solitary Crowding, artist's statement downloaded 15 August, 2009

Photo courtesy momokoallard.com

Nazi Gnomes and censorship

A german artist, Ottmar Hoerl, has created a series of garden gnomes that display nazi-era symbols. Now he is being investigated for contravening German law that criminalises the depiction of symbols and gestures such as the nazi swastika and the sieg-heil salute.

Hoerl reportedly says he is lampooning the concept of the master race. A report on the BBC website reports that the ironic message was well received when the gnomes were exhibited in Belgium.

What I find disturbing about this story is that the works are subject to censorship and they were anonymously reported to German police. That this smacks of an authoritarian regime, and seems to reify the problem suggests that these policies and attitudes present a threat to democratic political process and human rights that was exemplified by the NDAP(nazis). That this might re-open a debate as to the nature of the German geist also might give other nations a chance to look at their own dark hearts.

Of course, how neo-Nazis would utilise a relaxation of censorship offers it's own problems. Perhaps reminding them how they look small and pompous might help- and that might require garden gnomes.

trepassing in art spaces

A recent essay by David Myers, a sociologist who studies MMOGs( online games like World of Warcraft) has raised a flurry of controversy about the ethics of his research. What he attempted to do was play a character," Twixt" who would singlemindedly use tactics allowed by the game but frowned upon by most players.

He obviously didn't reveal to those he played against that he wanted to see what happened when he breached the socially normative rules of the online community involved. Responses online included verbal abuse and death threats.

In considering the ethics of this research, it seems that one notion has not been explicitly discussed. That notion is that the community of players do not consider the game as a virtual space, but rather another space like one's living room, or a public park. The dichotomy between Myer's using the game as he would as a real space rather than a laboratory, but then standing back in his defense of his methods, as if he hadn't really gone out into the real world strikes me as an important paradox. Not in so much as he did not acknowledge this but in that different spaces can be felt contrived by some - "It's just a game", "it's just an art installation" - while others form a community heavily invested in the space in question and so perceive their digital space as authentic.

What is the difference between a digital space and an art installation? Is the different purely socially constructed, with those emotionally invested saying yes, it is our space, and other's having more equivocal relationships to the given space?

Are online games more real than gallery installations? More people play games than visit galleries, and when people stop visiting a space, then in Lefebvrian terms, it ceases to be a space. So does one vote, one visit activate a space to where a researcher must exact the same care as say doing ethnographic research in a livingroom?

Reflections after reading Ingarden

This morning I read Roman Ingarden's "Phenomenological Aesthetics- An Attempt at Defining Its Range" a nineteen page essay written in 1969. Reflecting on it helped me to further delineate my concerns, as well as raising specific questions about Ingarden's thought, art history and its objects and phenomenology and its methods. As such, these are mostly questions for consideration rather than answers.
1. a)There is a tension between an empirical description of phenomena and a subjective account of that phenomena. b)This reveals more than just that the mind is subject to error. c)It suggests the mind's observation of empirical data, as opposed to phenomena may in turn be subject to error. d)The empirical data is itself phenomena seperate from the phenomena it purports to describe. e)When we consider the colour red we can use positivist empirical methods to analyze the pigment, the light reflecting from it and received by the eye and the optics and cerebral structures that process light into images. But these are not the experience of the colour red. To reject conciousness as an intellectual cul-du-sac because it resists empirical analysis would be to banish perhaps the most significant of human phenomena- that of experience and so meaning itself. Perhaps the stage I have set suggests a radical scepticism, but as Heidegger presents in his book "What is Called Thinking" 'Needful to Say: Being, is"

2. d)Is there an aesthetics towards factual writing or does this stretch the domain of aesthetics beyond its limits?

3. Ingarden seems to suggest that the creator and audience share similar relationships to a given art object. Ingarden argues that editing a literary work is similar to the process by which an audience engages with the given work. He refers to poet sometimes composing 'in one go' and I interpret that as similar to my experience of "the stanction deer".