Games as Art – Riven

-->

UPDATE: The morning after I wrote this post, I read this article about how MoMa is adding an exhibit on video games, in which Myst is included. 

Can games be art? When we discussed this in class a few weeks ago, I honestly couldn't decide.  I found both Roger Ebert's blog post and Kellee Santiago's TED talk on the question to be unsatisfying. On the one hand, I feel the Ebert, as some one who evidently doesn't play video (or computer) games, can not possibly grasp the kind of emotive or aesthetic power they can have. But based on how she defines art in her talk, I don’t think Santiago herself is really an artist, nor really understands what art is.

I don’t play video games very much, but as a kid I had a few preferred computer games, which are effectively the same thing. The one that sticks most with me was the Cyan’s 1997 immersive puzzle-world game, Riven. I watched my sisters play the game but didn’t really get into until around 2001, when I was nine.

Riven is the second installment of a series of puzzle games that also form a story, which is why I bring it up in response to the question “can video games be art?” It’s the story component of the game that makes it memorable. The physical world of the game eerie and beautiful, the puzzles are complex and difficult, but the fact that you are taking part in a dramatic unfolding of events makes it more than just a game. It is different than video games that have a story line pasted in between levels, because the story is not totally revealed to you, and the characters and intrigue are genuinely developed.

So I think it begs the question, if a computer game can be like a novel, why can’t it be art? I think Ebert would point out that you can’t win at art – but you “win” Riven differently that you “win” other games. Sure, you solve puzzles, but and there are occasionally places you can “lose” (by solving a puzzle the wrong way, you can allow the evil brother characters to prevail), but it’s not really like you’re competing with anything other than yourself. I guess that makes it like (single-player) chess, which both Santiago and Ebert agree isn’t art. But Riven is different from chess because the emotional and aesthetic sensibility of the player are integral in their ability to solve the game. In that sense, it really is like reading a novel, where the reader’s ability to notice imagistic details and understand connotation greatly enhance their ability to appreciate (and “get”) the book.

         I think the crucial thing about art-video-games is that they engage the viewer on an intellectual and emotional level; they have to be about more than winning a competition or solving a puzzle. I’m not sure that Riven quite got there – I admit that while the storyline was good, it wasn’t masterful, about equivalent to any piece of decent genre fiction. But I believe it proves that the potential is there, and video games may achive the status of art much sooner that Ebert predicts.

GFP Bunny

 

So this is the post where we talk about the glowing green bunny! A few things to know:

1. The bunny, whose name is Alba, is fluorescent (GFP stands for green fluorescent protein) meaning that she glows green under blue light.

2. She’s not the first organism to have been genetically engineered to do this; scientists have used the DNA of GFP to make insects and mice do this for some time. She’s just the first to be called art.

Alba’s owner, the bio-artist Eduardo Kac, made a lot of people pretty angry with this… piece? It seems weird to call a living organism that. But I think that was part of his point.  In his essay “GFP Bunny” Kac states the core point of this “project” to be (this is a super long quotation but I think it’s worth including the whole thing):

1) ongoing dialogue between professionals of several disciplines (art, science, philosophy, law, communications, literature, social sciences) and the public on cultural and ethical implications of genetic engineering; 2) contestation of the alleged supremacy of DNA in life creation in favor of a more complex understanding of the intertwined relationship between genetics, organism, and environment; 3) extension of the concepts of biodiversity and evolution to incorporate precise work at the genomic level; 4) interspecies communication between humans and a transgenic mammal; 5) integration and presentation of "GFP Bunny" in a social and interactive context; 6) examination of the notions of normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, hybridity, and otherness; 7) consideration of a non-semiotic notion of communication as the sharing of genetic material across traditional species barriers; 8) public respect and appreciation for the emotional and cognitive life of transgenic animals; 9) expansion of the present practical and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to incorporate life invention.

I think a lot of people who don’t read Kac’s essay on his piece assume him to be a mad-scientist with a God-complex, or at least a quack who wanted to gain attention by acting like a mad-scientist with a God-complex. But as his statement suggests, many of the objections that people raise in response to the GFP Bunny are exactly what Kac wanted to people to think about in making his piece: the potentially disturbing effects of genetic engineering on our treatment and definition of life, the recognition of all organisms (animal, human, organic or transgenic) as life worthy of respect, and the potential expansion of the definition of art to include biological creations.

The GFP bunny relates to our class because it’s a piece of artwork generated from a code – only in this case, the code was genetic, not digital. It’s a conceptual piece of art, too – it challenges our definitions of what art is. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I don’t think that just because something challenges definitions, it is necessarily art. That’s my problem with conceptual art in general. I guess Kac’s piece works because it did illicit a big reaction, like DuChamp’s urinal. But it’s a bit creepy too. Do we want life to be art? I think about a future where we could design our own children.

Harold Cohen

            I really enjoyed Paul Cohen’s talk about his father’s work with AARON. It elided perfectly with an recent interest of mine, which is the question of machine agency and meaning of creativity. The paradox of tools like AARON is that the create things we ourselves can’t, but wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for us. (Weird though it may seem, contemplating this paradox always make’s me think of the NRA catchphrase, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” which, if you think about it, sums up perfectly the complexity of the question of technological agency).

            Supposedly, that AARON can create interesting, unique and representational images challenges the notion of the human mind as the exclusive source of creativity in art. I kind of think of it differently than that, though. I’ve always felt that the source of meaning in art came more from the viewer than the artist themself. Hence why we’re sometimes more moved by phenomena in the natural world than by works of art… it’s about what we see in the piece, not what the intention of the artist is.

            Though I also like Ben Grosser’s painting machine, I’m more intrigued by AARON. Though I’ve asserted that the meaning of art lies in the beholder, I don’t mean to say that art can be anything, and meaning, anywhere. I do believe that certain patterns, shapes, and behviors are intrinsically meaningful (whether for neurological or social reasons, I don’t know) and I like that with AARON, Cohen is trying to parse out what those are. That is, what rules about image-making make and image work? In that sense, he’s working with the same question that artists have always been grappling with.