HOMO LUDENS, MEMENTO MORI?

Last February the 17th the I-Dissabtes (Saturdays) in Mediateca Caixaforum hosted a workshop of videogame projects “acceleration” by Joan Leandre and Vanni Brusadin which ended up to be a talk about artistic intervention in games for obvious practical reasons: how to give a workshop in only three hours?

I decided not to attend the talk for various reasons and because I’m afraid that if things go on like this the only mantra I’ll be reciting in my PhD dissertation will be Huizinga-Callois-Aarseth (there is also an agenda setting in the digital art), but when I got to the place at the last minute to look for some friends I found a couple of worth mentioning issues in the narrative sense. Fashion splash, anyway (by now).

The first one are the creations by Palle Torsson based on movie scenes, the Evil Scenes. Torsson takes scenes from famous movies and modifies them with a videogame software to create three-dimensional settings without characters. The result is both disturbing and interesting because of:

The use of cinematic material. In my paper essay Tempus fugit (previous to this blog) I wrote about the need to promote the creation of digital settings because good (digital) stories cannot be told without them. The fact that these settings work as skins for future videogames doesn’t assume originality (the material isn’t created by the user from scratch), but it means a certain set design reference.

The degree of realism deliberately achieved. It’s a question I only consider in strictly aesthetic terms and it’s the reason why I tend to withdraw from games, as I previously commented in ART, GAME AND NARRATIVE: AT THE END, A QUESTION OF TASTE.

How this creation is related to the copyright of the original material and remix culture. How to legitimate the use of an obviously imported creativity? (Every creativity is imported, Lawrence Lessig would say, but what happens when the importation is so obvious?)

The remarkable fact that all selected movies are violent (Psycho, The shining, Clockwork orange, and so on).

The second issue that raised during the talk is nothing new under the sun, but war simulation games relating to real facts such as Kuma War reminded me that we live in a time of multiple docummentaries, that is, of multiple fictions. The difference between CNN News and Kuma War might end up being the intention, or not?

I wouldn’t be able to take in this last issue in a future academic research, but narratives (and here I use narratives in a let’s call it pejorative sense) generated by news broadcastinge feed the collective imaginary in terms of imagination, not information. Therefore it isn’t so strange that when I’ve looked up the term storytelling in the Internet one of the senses I’ve come up most often with isn’t that of literary fiction, but the strategies (“stories”) made up by corporations to talk their employees into something (for instance, the goodness of dismissing a lot of people).

Now someone might argue that Baudrillard would be happy if he read me, but it’s not true. In both Evil Scenes and Kuma War, violence is all around. Violence seems to be central to our current identity, or at least, in the way in which creations such as Torsson’s seem to rethink the history of modern cinema; Cronenberg scholars would also be happy by reading this, but I wouldn’t join them either. Despite I don’t ignore the headlines bombarding me each and every day in the papers and the critical purpose of political games, I insist on what I said regarding last year’s Game as critic as art conference: please, could we reflect on our contemporary condition in relation to other issues?

YOU HAVE TO CHANGE WITH THE TIMES

The problem of the beginning of the year is that it seems to linger on whether you want it or not well into winter. There aren’t many cultural activities and time can only be filled with personal reflection, or, in any case, with wandering thoughts about good and bad intentions to be forgotten by springtime. I’ve been wanting to write for some days and not necessarily about the same old stuff, but I don’t find motivating events, not even to be held in the next days. So I’ll have to keep with my wandering thoughts.

Some days ago I went to the press lunch for ARCO art fair, and I deeply regretted the nonexistent presence of art (more) related to technology all over the festival. The reason might be the change of management and 2007 could be regarded as a transition year, but I’m worried. The good perspectives of 2006’s Black Box section (art projects related to video and new media) are thwarted by the fact that this year will be devoted to videos from art galleries, and the once buzzing Experts section (new media conferences) will be entirely focused on collectionism. So it’s video and transactions, basically.

The multiple anniversaries that coincided in 2006 and the stagnation of some institutions, both in Barcelona and Madrid, makes me think that we might be at a turning point that requires a renewal. This is why I’d briefly like to go through some tendencies that are representing the present and that could contribute some clues for a future development:

The spread of audiovisual art, not only through the economic success of videoart but also through the massive application for a panoplia of shows. Apart from the audiovisual images in museums (and I’m not referring to cinema for museums, but to the use of screens for a didactic purpose), big formats seem to succeed in media facade structures and much-talked-about sets such as Daft Punk’s. There’s been a certain controversy about the ecological expense regarding LEDs and different light bulbs, but there’s another essential question and is whether the big fish is going to swallow all the tiny ones.

The ever increasing convergence between art and entertainment. I see games and dolls all around. Even in the gallery circuit most attached to fashion (even if it’s disregarded as fashion there it is, selling drawings and leprechuans with ample success and an artistic touch) ludic aspects rule. In the one hand it’s annullating the dramatization of art. In the other, there’s the willingness to commercialize that encourages to blur frontiers. And technology is the perfect culture medium for such crossings.

Interestingly enough, in this context smallness seems to be represented by the heirs of contemporary art workshops, that seem to be the Dorkbots and Upgrades multiplying all over the world. The malicious question in this case would be the opposite to the previous section: will the presentation of these projects in progress be able to get down to specific proposals with applications that go beyond what’s strictly DIY?

And because I don’t want to behave exclusively as a poor imitation of our futurologist par excellence Vicente Verdú (our national “culture guru”), I want to contrast these ideas with things I deliberately didn’t mention before:

Internet art (aside from labels, whatever you want to call it). Is it (the) (hi)story?

Robotics. Has it been overcome by the prospects of generating spectacular audiovisual art?

Sound art. Has it got back to the circle of music lovers (sound lovers?) and/or has it been laicized through net radios?

LATE FALL READINGS: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA IN THE DIGITAL AGES

(Previous Spanish version posted on 12.14.06).

My second bibliographic explanation from late fall (even if I’m traslating it in the bleak midwinter) revolves around Experimental cinema in the digital age (BFI, London, 2001), a compilation of articles published by English experimental filmmaker Malcom LeGrice between 1972 and 1999 about these kind of movies and the structure and aesthetic modifications they are undergoing due to the digitalization processes.

The work can be divided among the historical texts, those about other artists, discussions, general theory and digital theory. This is probably why the most appealing parts for me (and those I have thoroughly been over) are the last two of them. Experimental cinema can be of interest inasmuch as it could constitute one of the possible filiations of digital narrative, although is not that clear how we would define “experimental”, that is to say, if the differences from conventional cinema lay on its ability for abstract representation, on its questioning of linear narrative, or on both aspects.

Despite Le Grice reflects on these two qualities (abstraction and lack of linearity), he is compelled to focus the debate mostly on the second aspect. As a great beliver of antiHollywood ways of creation, the author emphasizes in one text after another (see particularly Towards Temporal Economy, pp. 184-209) the criticism of the required narrativity attributed to cinema, and accuses narrative of becoming an authoritarian voice without any chance of replication (just submission or identification from the viewer) that generates univocal causalities.

Although it is true that most of commercial movies are not precisely characterized by encouraging critical thinking from the viewer, I believe Le Grice goes too far in his statements by assuming that experimental cinema has to be the right alternative. Any questioning of language is desirable because it implies questioning the unidirectional feature of (some kind of) discourse, but the ideas of making visible the role of the director or manipulating the speed, color or editing of the cinematic image do not guarantee a dialogue by themselves that rises consciousness in the viewer (even less if we take into account the ability of current design or advertising to absorb such experiments).

Likewise, the fact that there is commercial narrative cinema doesn’t necessarily imply that all the answers from the viewer stem from a sheer subjugation to what (s)he receives. It doesn’t seem to be no longer in fashion to talk about reception theories, and despite media have changed a lot since the first talks on resistant readings, the fact is that people, no matter how much media saturation they have to stand (or precisely, because of that) still haven’t become empty vessels ready to be filled with contents. They might consume more images, and the might get absorbed by addictive relations with the Internet or their cell phones, but people still give unexpected uses to media, educate each other by sharing music or video files and ask themselves about the reason to have so many television channels if none of them is actually to satisfy their interests.

What I mean is that the overview on experimental cinema provided by Le Grice is enlightening to understand a sociopolitical criticism of the historical notion of narrative whose echos approached me before without being able to give it a specific shape, but I think that his Marxist hint, if it could be considered like that, doesn’t apply for the current context. The old articles by Le Grice actually had a visionary quality, as they went ahead of the definition of abstract subject matters which would later appear on computer art or net art, or of the modular structures presented in digital narrative, but I don’t think that the frame in which those elements are currently developing is that of being able to put branching and interactivy on a level with freedom.

ART, GAME AND NARRATIVE: AT THE END, A QUESTION OF TASTE

(Previous Spanish version posted on 11.19.06. It has been edited to be self-contained).

Beyond the usual attendance to diverse festivals and conference, offering instant information on phenomena allowing me to “carve out” an opinion about the relations between art and technology, my academical studies compel me to think about the narrative specificites in the digital sphere, but no matter how much I think about them, and no matter how much I try to do research on phenomena such as experimental cinema and the rise of videogames, I have the growing feeling that the debate should be focused on different terms.

Where does it really lay the prejudice against interactive narrative, or, to be more specific, against videogames? I already wrote about the divergences between narrative and non narrative digital art, regarding aspects such as historical background and further development in the structure of cultural capitalism. I still endorse what I wrote before, but I’d like to add a complementary dimension to the analysis: that of the question of taste.

The world of art (something that’s often called “the art instution”) assumes a certain taste, a certain aesthetic ground. The same happens with the music and movie industries, and, more recently, with the digital technological industry focused on VR devices, games and so on. There seem to be some predefined aesthetics (not one model, but some coexistent models recognised as belonging to a certain sphere). These are not eternal and can (and must be) transformed, but they constitute starting points working as an (unavoidable?) cerberus, preventing or providing the access to certain spheres.

Taking this idea a little bit (too) far, we could say that there are “erroneous” aesthetics that become accepted when some acceptance mechanisms are built or relaxed. As an example, I have in mind the exhibition cinema. There are some ways of making movies (or video) that make it easy to access the art context (for instance, those records on performance art, or those moving images regarded as experimental because they “join” an aesthetic model which is more abstract than figurative and narrative). There is another obvious way of access which is the passing of time: age allows Dziga Vertov, Nosferatu or even Alfred Hitchock (maybe because of the providential intervention of Douglas Gordon in the last case) to become artistic material.

In relation to games, art games have managed to build bridges between art world and commercial games up to this day, often resorting to the critical strategy of reverse engineering. But reappropriation shouldn’t be the only means to generate art. And maybe, in this same sense, aesthetics are still an obvious obstacle. Because, from an aesthetical viewpoint, Scarface the game can’t be compared to the movie it’s based on, 1983’s Scarface (needless to say it doesn’t stand up to the original film). Am I saying this because I’m not exactly a fan of polygon aesthetics? But taste is something you can educate. Should we educate our taste to include more mass culture phenomena, the same as we gladly accept tacky movie aesthetics because we’re used to them? Should we put some limits to this?

The answer is so complex that still scholars start by quoting Kant to analyse it, but I’d like to start to sow some dobut with a question: why we have been able to accept art as ugliness, completely awful works, and nonetheless we are sometimes reluctant to other uglinessess because apparently they are way too commercial?

SECOND EDITION OF THE CATALAN ASSOCIATION OF ART CRITICS SYMPOSIUM: MEDIA BIENNALES

(Previous Spanish version posted on 11.14.06. It has been partially edited to be self-contained).

The second edition of the local symposium (with an international focus) on art criticism was devoted to the biennale phenomenon: what are they, what are they for and why do they exist. Generally speaking, as it happened in the previous edition, most of the presentations of the keynote speakers featured a highly intelectualized (academical?) discourse, the round table of local curators and critics added some fresh air to the event (maybe those three speakers where the ones most able to understand the intention behind biennales), and there was a minimal, but significant intervention halfway between contemporary and digital art.

That presentation was given by curator and critic Gunalan Nadarajan, who has specialized in “media biennales” and who’s going to work as the artistic director for ISEA 2008. After presenting the features of biennales in general, Nadarajan went further on his analysis of the specific traits of media biennales.

The proposed criticism turned out to be very suggestive: institutionalized indifference towards media arts, exclusive focus on video, technofobia and lack of infrastructure and adequate technical resources, among others, and of course the prime category (at least according to my analysis up to date), existence of parallel communities (the curator put a very understable exemple: why a media artist and a painter both working on minmalism can’t communicate with each other?)

Nadarajan talked about his experience in the recent Ogaki biennale and the Perth biennale (whose next edition is to be held in 2007): following the speaker’s ideas, these biennales share the basic features of any other biennale (the exhibition ones) but have an additional feature (the ability to become platforms of research and production).

The presentation ended by highlighting the size, time, distribution and relation with technology divides separating the two kinds of biennales, and stressing that technological fetishism does not only belong to the biennales that make it explicit, but to any art having an instrumental and uncritical relation with the materials is working with.

To the criticism of Nadarajan I would like to add a couple of ideas in both directions, to balance things up:

-When someone is talking about media art, there tends to be an explanation of how things work often because is necessary, because the work is interactive). That’s not so usual with contemporary art works. A discourse has to be articulated in all circumstances to explain what is being presented, no matter its nature. “Throwing” the work at the audience with a defiant attitude which seems to say “I dare you to understand this!” doesn’t suffice.

-The problem of the content happens with any kind of biennale. Not only because there could be technofilia (actually, there is), but precisely because biennales show too much content. It’s something similar to the syndrome of festivals of any kind: there are many things, but, will I be able to see them all?

WHAT IS THIS BLOG ABOUT?

Tempus Fugit is a blog about the intersection between art and technology. The Spanish version started in March 2005 as trilingual tryout of writings in Spanish, Catalan and English, but soon I dropped the last two options because it was much easier to focus on a single language.

Nevertheless, I always missed the chance of addressing to the English speaking community. This is why I am going to try to write some of my posts in English, specially those regarding international issues.

In time, the Spanish version tended to revolve allowing the following subjects:

The relations between contemporary art and digital art. Why can’t they be together? Why should they be separate? I read about both fields in order to try to create paths of communication between them. To read a sample of previous posts on that, I translated SECOND EDITION OF THE CATALAN ART CRITICS SYMPOSIUM: MEDIA BIENNALES.

The relations between digital narrative and digital art in general. My main research interest is digital narrative understood as the whole of creations analyzing non-linear, interactive (or not) art. I am currently preparing my PhD on that, and I am also the author of an essay about it Tempus Fugit, interactive storytelling (Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani, Girona, 2004). To read a sample of previous posts on that, I translated ART, GAME AND NARRATIVE: IN THE END, A QUESTION OF TASTE.

My readings on contemporary digital culture, divided by the season in which I am reading them. My last post on readings is translated as LATE FALLS READINGS: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA IN THE DIGITAL AGE.

My reflections on digital events and what is going on outside the Internet, entitled URBAN SCENES. This scenes will be further developed in English as soon as I have something interesting to write about (I don’t want to make it too local).

So, I hope you enjoy my attempts at trying to make English my second writing language, please be patient with the mistakes and feel free to add any comments you wish to make.