Games as Art – Riven

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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.

Strandbeests!

First of all, did you know there was a show called Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention?

I didn't, but now I wish I got bbc1 so I could watch it.

Anyhoo, Theo Jansen builds wind-powered sand creatures. We've discussed early, non-digital computers, so I think I can include these beesties on my blog. 
A few thoughts:

1. They are amazingly beautiful. It has to do with being able to see the mechanics of their skeletons; they move as fluidly as biological organisms but look like machines. I like being able to see the complex series of physical algorithms that must be executed in order to achieve motion.

2. Jansen refers to them as animals and hopes that one day they will be able to "live" on their own on the beach. He's constructed ones that can detect when they hit water, and reverse motion, and ones that detect when a storm is coming and peg themselves to the ground.

3. This makes me think about a different sort of participatory art. Not art that people participate in, but art that participates. You know? We've talked a little bit about artificial intelligence, and Grosser presented to us his painting machine that arguable has its own creative agency. I think Jansen's sand animals bring up a similar idea, that of the machine as thinking organism. Living art. Only with these, they would potentially exist as a community, a herd on the beach. Maybe they could even be designed to make art of their own? Sand sculptures?

4. Of course what sets these apart is that they are powered solely by the wind. So the source of creative agency is the earth itself, in a much more direct way than usual.

Reload the love!

I liked all of the pieces that Ben Grosser presented in class on Thursday, but found I could relate in particular to "Reload the Love!" I have thought before about how the aesthetics of Facebook condition us. First, there's that soft warm blue theme. That's the same color they paint on the inside of insane asylums to calm the patients down. And then bam! It's punctuated with an exciting pinch of hot orange-red, a chip of chocolate in the vanilla theme. I am entirely aware of how my eyes are magnetized to the top right-hand corner of the screen every time I load my Facebook page; of the fact that I get a little rush each time I see one of those little red virtual goodies light up.

But I never really thought about the totally consumerist pattern of the Facebook notification system. As Grosser points out the crucial thing about notification is that once you click on them, the exciting red number goes away. It works exactly the same as any other mechanism that powers the consumer-culture machine: it conditions you to want something that is short-lived, so that you buy into a system that will supply you with more. So, it conditions you to want notifications -- and the way to get notifications is to post frequently. Facebook thrives off of people posting; the more posts they make, the more time they spend on the site, the more ads they click on, the more brand-pages they "share."

That's all pretty obvious when you think about it but what I like about Grosser's piece is how he hones in on one tiny detail about web-design that essentially powers the whole beast. I think it's a beautiful example of, to use his words "how software [in this case, UI design] prescribes behaviors." It's also intensely creepy. In the past, I've put myself on Facebook-post hiatuses in order to limit my opportunities for time-wastage. It's a lot more boring if you never get any notifications. Now when I do that I will with the consciousness that I'm resisting their system. Which I suppose I can use as an excuse for complying with it in the first place.

The Available World

Mark Amerika's piece Grammatron got me thinking of other uses hyperlink in text I've seen. Most notable is some of the work my one of my creative writing professors, Ander Monson, who apparently in his former life was a hacker but now is an essayist/fiction-writer/poet dude.
One of Ander's preferred ideas is that of the labyrinth, which he applies to his work in various ways. One of his volumes of poetry, The Available World has a companion site , which, like Amerika's piece, uses hyperlinks to create a webby, non-linear literary experience (though I'd contest the classification of Grammatron as literary). Monson's site can be read alone, but it is best experienced as a companion to the physical volume. The website includes some poems that are in the book, and some that aren't.

What I can make from Monson's interest in pairing web and page (which he does with another book, an essay collection, in a different format) is something about non-linearity. I'm still going through it in my head. When you read a book, it's like following a thread. You know that you will see everything the thread sees; even if it doesn't tell you everything, you'll know you read everything it had to say. But a website is different. Part of the fun, and the stress, of reading on the web is the constant need to (literally and figuratively) keep tabs on everything. What are you missing? Where did you start and where did you end? Did you find what you were looking for or forget about it completely?

So what does Monson want to do by offering us both? I'd probably have to read The Available  World a couple more times. As I mentioned in my first post, with poetry form has got interact with content, and I'm still absorbing the poems themselves. But I like the interactivity of his website; the responsibility, you might say, that it puts on the reader to be explore the labyrinth; to make their own adventure.

Wavefunction

source: http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/wavefunction.php

 
--> This video appeared in my Facebook news feed the other day. It is a kinetic sculpture that responds to the body movements of the public who walks past it. It's part of whole Surveillance Art exhibit put on in Italy in 2007.
I like this piece because it reacts to the viewer, which makes it seem to have a personality of it’s own. In particular I like that there is a delayed reaction, so that the viewer must turn around to see the effects of their movements on the piece.

I’m curious about the use of chairs. I guess an empty chair suggests human presence, or the idea that humans do occupy this piece even though they aren’t visually represented in it. Also, a block of chairs like this looks like chairs in an a theatre or auditorium, a place where people go to all watch a spectacle. At the same time, the piece itself is a piece of surveillance art, meaning it relies on surveillance technology, which is sort of the opposite of the type of surveillance that happens in a theatre or an auditorium. One is done en masse, directly, and by consent; the other is covert, performed remotely through the use of machine, often without the consent of those being watched. There’s something strange here about how the surveillance aspect of the piece affects (causes movement in) the empty, plastic chairs (which may imply an empty plastic public?).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer says in his artist’s statement:

The idea of a 'function' as a field for artistic experimentation is a motivation for this piece. Other references include: the mathematics of dynamic systems, capable of generating complex non-linear, behaviours, the materialisation of surveillance and turbulence and the anti-modular reinterpretation of the work of modern designers such as Charles and Ray Eames.

I like the idea of the “materialization of surveillance and turbulence,” that we can create art that manifests the invisible act of watching. Also, that the piece involves the generation of complex movement would qualify it as displaying Class 4 behavior according to Wolfram’s classifications, which as we discussed in class, seems to be the most pleasing type of behavior in art.