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".

Andrew Ballantyne: Architecture: a very short review

Ballantyne's Architecture: A very Short Introduction deals more with the meaning of architecture. The "why" of a given structure, design and so forth. The most compelling question, that he asks on page 3 is 'Do I want to be the sort of person who lives in a place like this'? He introduces this question a few paragraphs earlier withe the example that the ratio of motorways to parkland shows how much our society values each relative to the other. How do we dwell in the world and how do we chose that mode of dwelling?

Whence subjectivity; ears, eyes or head; Yoko ono's TAPE PIECE lll/Snow Piece

Yoko Ono's TAPE PIECE lll/ Snow Piece(1963) raises questions of where subjectivity lies in conceptual art. An allusion to Zen Master Hakuin and Czech Fluxist Milan Knizak(Wolsey p.8) the piece records the sound of snow falling then the tape is cut up and used to tie up gifts. The recording is not listened to.

What does it mean that art engages audience with the knowledge of, but not the sensual experience of some aesthetic phenomena? The mild denial of the sound, and the desire for this "object"- the sound which is not heard- question what an aesthetic experience is when much of the experience remains hidden and unexperienced. It seems rather like enjoying dessert by reading the dessert menu.

reference

Wolsey, Merrilee, Perceiving Voices in Contemporary Art: An Auditory Exploration of Image, Sculpture and Architecture, MA Thesis, Department of Art History, Concordia University

an exploration of the video game as architecture using phenomenological methodology

Phenomenology is an attempt to make rigorous accounts of subjective experience. One way of briefly illustrating the problem is by considering the following quote attributed to musician Fats Waller regarding what Jazz is;

"…if you hafta ask, you ain't never gonna know!"

Phenomenology attempts to offer a rigorous approach to getting answers to such questions without resorting to mysticism or metaphysics on one hand or reducing experience to the denigrated status of qualia. Qualia is term used to refer to experience as a minor phenomena produced by the physical universe.

When we play a video game, if it is successfully executed, we become immersed in a two dimensional representation of a two or three dimensional space. We may become a medieval Persian prince as in the game Prince of Persia, even though we are female. We may become immersed as an acrobatic Asian female leaping across the roof tops of a futuristic Tokyo, as in the game Mirror's Edge although we are clumsy, Caucasian males.

Our identity then becomes briefly mirrored on either side of the screen. Within that screen we have both landscapes and and architecture, whether it is the expansive worlds of games such as Myst or the multiplayer online worlds of games such as Second Life or World of Warcraft.

And at what point does the game itself become an architecture? We experience moving through an environment that we interpret as "Bricks and Mortar" even as we sit on a couch or perhaps perform the "Wii dance" as they simulate riding a snowboard, fighting monsters or bowling. Is this an essentially architectural experience albeit a virtual one?

The Polish Philosopher, Roman Ingarden offers a perspective in his book "The Ontology of the Work of Art". As a phenomenologist, he is interested in how we consciously experience phenomena, in this case specifically architecture. As an psychologically interior experience how does "brick & mortar" differ from pixels on a screen? Both are intended structures; That is to say a creative vision went into their creation. The individual encountering them treats them as objects with mass, oapacity and presence.

Are video games art?

The placement of video games in relation to other disciplines raises several problems. In a post on this topic, Brett McCallon, writes about the The High Art of Bioshock.

"Any person can read a novel, listen to a hip-hop album or watch a movie, if he has even a shred of interest. But comparatively few have the equipment and know-how needed to complete a top-tier video game."

This reveals a failure to understand that reading is interactive. This does not undermine his arguement that video games can be evaluated as high art. However, it does raise the question of specific modes of critique for discrete genres and of more broadly applicable critical approaches.
Gonzalo Frasca argues for specific modes of criticism in his essay "Simulation versus Narrative". Ludology, or the study of games and video games in particular persues an alternative semiotical structure of simulation in contrast to narrative. While he allows that both simulation and narrative share common elements, Frasca argues that video games 'are a just a particular way of structuring simulation, just like narrative is a form of structuring representation'.
The popular critic, Roger Ebert, dimisses the possibility of a fine art interpretation of video games.

"Ebert, himself not a gamer, bases his argument on the fact that games are interactive. To paraphrase his point: because games require input from a player in order to move forward through their narratives, player actions necessarily subvert authorial intent."

Ebert fails to realise that the subjective intentionality of the audience always subverts authorial intent to some extent. "The Death of the Author" an essay by Roland Barthes forcefully argues that no interpretation or appeal to authorial intention is possible.
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence:

' "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling" Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.'

We always interpret, even if the text is simple.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, "The Death of the Author", in Aspen #5-6, Fall-Winter 1967,Roaring Fork Press, NYC. downloaded 15/09/2008
Frasca, Gonzalo, "Simulation versus Narrative" in The Video Game Theory Reader, Wolf, Mark J.P. & Bernard Perron, eds. Routledge, New York, 2003

Virtual Architecture; Sarah Jane Gorlitz + Wojciech Olejnik, mm, 2007. Video

The video installation mm by the artist duo known as Soft Turns creates a video trompe l’oeil using two video projections on opposing walls of the main gallery at Optica. Sound effects suggest dripping water, and reverberations suggest the empty corridors and subway platforms that appear on the walls. The perspective is that of a camera traveling through a mysterious subterranean structure.

The first impression is of a vast network of empty spaces. As the videos play out the appearance of rising water suggests the images were electronically manipulated. The reflection of the water doesn’t look …normal. As the videos continue to play and loop a realisation develops that the scene portrayed is a maquette. The video’s stop motion creates a further illusion of movement in a series of subway corridors.

“They are made not as direct replicas of actual places…these spaces are presented in situations which often fall just outside of physical reality…Each becomes a non-place, an illusion, a gap between the real and what appears to be its modelled double.”
-Gorlitz. S and W. Olejnik. “mm”, Artist Statement, March 2008

Audio effects and opposing walls create an architecture within the gallery space, redefining the experience of it. As both projections change over time, the faint audio cues suggest additional changes that might or might not be visible. When video images happen to synchronises creating mirror images the experience becomes especially disturbing because it reinforces the sense of being in narrow hall way. Rising water appearing in the corridors adds to the often claustrophobic response- despite the the open volume of the gallery.

“mm” raises issues of virtuality in architecture as electronic simulcra become increasingly difficult to differentiate from “bricks and mortar” constructions. A sense of disorientation-la nausée?- accompanies this installation. The question of how these 21st century constructions will affect our culture through our Pleistocene senses and instincts is raised but only minutely answered by this affecting installation.

“mm” at Gallerie Optica 372 Ste-Catherine O suite 508, Montréal
until April 19, 2008

references
State of Play Virtual Architecture 1.0:

Terra Nova:Virtual Architecture

CARVING SPACE: RESPONSIVE VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE TOOLS GO OPEN SOURCE

Two new essays about virtual architecture

Designing Virtual Architecture (2000)

Landscape and romantic topology: Emily Shanahan- Forest for the Trees

This exhibition uses the geometric form as a simile for synthetic forms as contrasting with natural organic forms. "Shaped tree","Prism" and "Horse Skull and Yellow Flowers" all share a tetrahedral shape as central to their composition.

"...removing the image from a credible context in Shaped Tree, the white, leafless tree floats in a space that remains undefined as either an interior or exterior environment."

-from Forest for the Trees artist statement

...an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter...How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs incline neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.

-taken from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html downlowded 10 April,2008

"These works address the relationship between natural and artificial constructions, specifically within the context of landscape and still life painting."

-from Forest for the Trees artist's statement

Shanahan's work attempts to address the portrayal of the natural world by at once using an almost surreal deconstruction of images of trees, birds, flowers and skulls. The recurrent theme of the tetrahedron suggests a metaphor for modern physical science as a trope for nature. Yet all these images occcur within the symbolic realm of the hyperreal. Forest for the Trees becomes another element in a symbolic reality. While it does not explicitly reference electronic media, it occurs within the context of a audience who is as aware of landscape as framed in the television and video game as is experienced by walking through a field. Indeed, the reorganisation of perceived natural images become par excellence the simulcra of Baudrillard's hypereallity. The relative banality of these subjects do become unsettling because of their displacement from a perceived natural order, yet they also serve to comfort the audience with a familiar in an increasingly disoriented perceptual envitronment.

A human figure appears in three works; "Nightingale", "girl with ribbons" and "Cold weather".The sentimental quality of these works seem disconnected from the received themes of the exhibition. As a romantic trope this creates an unfocussed statement. A cloud of notions infuse this exhibition about the portrayal of landscape in an increasingly hyperreal culture.

Forest for the Trees at Room and Board Gallery 372 Ste.Catherine west Suite 427, Montréal, QC until 12 April, 2008.

Pictures and Objects at Blogger

So after experimenting with Word press, I've decided that it is easier and more efficient to use Blogger.

Look for more visual culture criticism here.