The Art of Game and the Game of Art*
Philippe Codognet**
In our
so-called post-modern society, the myths of novelty and tabula rasa are always trendy values, proof against economic
recession and NASDAQ’s fluctuations … Therefore “new technologies” enjoy some
eternal youth, although they are nearly 60 years old (invention of cybernetics,
information theory and computers date back to the 40’s) and the “videogames
revolution” is turning into some permanent revolution since over thirty years
now : Pong, the ancestor of game
consoles was released in 1972[1], the first computer game spacewar in 1962 and some authors even trace the genesis of
electronic games back to 1958[2]. On the virtual battlefields of arcade games, battalions
of brave humans are successfully defending the earth since more than twenty
years against the hegemony of Space Invaders and Aliens
alike. Computers and videogames are now massively widespread in the
contemporary society and are taking major part in our everyday life. They are
certainly, in a subtle but nevertheless very concrete way, developing new
cognitive abilities which open gamers
to a different perspective on the world. Portable consoles (such as the
new Nintendo DS and Sony PSP) are becoming
wireless and, together with GPS-enabled mobile phone games, let us foresee the so-called
ubiquitous networking society that will soon be ours, surrounding us with a
data-gas of information-filled radio waves, a new eco-system to be decoded and
understood by digital machines only. Contemporary Art is not isolated from the
society and therefore involved in its global changes, including technological
ones. There is indeed a long tradition of interest in technological utopia by artistic
avant-gardes, for instance the Italian futurists in the early 20th century or
the Russian constructivism in the 1920’s. The current trend for digital
technologies in Media art is certainly to be seen in this historical tradition But
let us rewind history and look back at the deep roots of our digital world,
before the system crashes and we need to find the reboot button …
In 1697,
the German philosopher/mathematician G. W. Leibniz invented binary notation and
considered his discovery to be imago
creationis, that is, at the image of the Creation[3].
He used the motto unus ex nihilo omnia :
from nothing, the One creates everything… Indeed, with the numbers zero and one
only, all others could be constructed and therefore the whole universe of
numbers, in the same way as, in Christian theology, God created the world from
nothingness. This idea is perfectly at work in videogames, where complex
virtual universes are built from simple (but long) strings of 0’s and 1’s.
Therefore, digital computer technologies have been able to digest the whole
world little by little, dimension after dimension, reifying indeed Leibniz’
dream. Binary notation thus became the Universal Language to describe non only
the linearity of numbers and texts, but also the flatland of images and,
moreover, virtual environments in 3D.
But this universal language makes it possible for dynamic computation in
order to (re)create and animate in real-time the illusory and illusionary worlds
inhabiting the mass memory of our dear electronic machineries. But those
virtual worlds nevertheless engender, beyond the electroluminescence of CTR or
plasma displays and the metallic shadows of microchips, real feelings for us
all - gamers...
Both in
the pioneering gaming spaces restricted to the actual limits of the screen such
as Space Invaders and Pac-Man, or the huge, quasi-unbounded
virtual worlds of current 3D games that could be explored, level by level, for
entire weeks[4], the computer
system swallows the player in his immaterial universe and help him to produce
the adrenalin that the mass media spectacle cannot procure anymore.
Nevertheless, videogames operate much more at the abstract and symbolic level rather
than in the purely sensory sphere. The simple 2D drawings of Space Invaders and Pac-Man already worked as hybrid semiotic signs, more symbols than
icons (in the sense of C. S. Peirce)
and make it possible for gamer’s empathy[5]; Technological progress in graphic engines and
computing power certainly favor a shift towards iconic mimesis which would
nevertheless not fully escape the non-figurative aspect of fiction. Is it
possible that, during the last twenty years, videogames replayed in fast
forward mode the history of Western art, from medieval symbolism to the
conquest of the ideal and Euclidian space in the Renaissance ? But then, what about
self-awareness and serpentine tricks of Manierism and Baroque, what about the
mirrorical returns of the medium on
itself ? Maybe these concepts simply went out along some shortcut open by
technological innovations, and technically impossible for classical painting or
sculpture.
3D
virtual worlds popularized in the computer and video games of the 90’s express
an important paradigm shift, which is not without resonance with what was
happening in contemporary art at the same time. Indeed, the first-person point
of view and subjective camera have revolutioned the domain of videogames, in
particular since the release of games like Wolfenstein
3D (1992) and the magnificient Doom
(1993). Despite an incredibly simple scenario (« hunt-and-kill ») and
rudimentary graphics, the immersive effect was totally operational, maybe even
too much for certain people, as the gamer was totally engaged - mentally if not
physically - in the virtual universe. More recently some innovative game design
tricks appeared which would further enhance immersion, in particular the
possibility to not only wander in the virtual space but also to interact and
use objects. This was introduced by Half-Life
(1998) through the use of the « E » key of the keyboard : by using
this key and pointing on certain objects, the gamer could trigger some
predefined action, such as calling an elevator, opening a valve, or even drive
a railways bucket. This “manipulability” of the world, although extremely
simple as each object contained its own teleology, induced nevertheless a deep
feeling of immersion and of coherence in the virtual world. This was further
achieved in games like the superb Metal Gear Solid (1999) and moreover Deus Ex (2000) where clicking on an
object could lead to some complex manipulation : virtual computers could
connect to Internet and let you read your email (or hack someone else’s) and
virtual cash could be drown from ATMs … Such interactivity has been vastly
improved nowadays, for instance with the new Half-life 2 PC game which incorporates an impressive physics-based
simulation engine making it possible to manipulate and use objects in a very
realistic manner. With such digital tools ready to create virtual worlds and
somehow play with reality, it was tempting for contemporary artists to use game
engines turned aside from the normal course and appropriated for their own
artistic purposes. An interesting example is given by two French artists known
under the collective name of “Kolkoz” who have been reusing existing game
engine technologies to create compelling and ironic virtual environments. In
their installation work for the Biennale of Lyon in 2001, they created (with
the 3D engine of the Half Life PC game) a multiplayer game in which four
players can play through four different computers that were available in the
Museum. However the virtual playground of the game was but an exact replica of
the surrounding exhibition in the Museum, including the current exhibition. The
whole Museum has been digitalized and put into the computer which was inside
the Museum, etc … This was therefore a play between virtuality and reality, an
ironic question asked to the visitor. What is reality ? What is virtuality ?
What is possible in one world which is impossible in the other ? It was also a
play with the classical exhibition scenography as visitors could see both the
installation from the outside (a lounge room, framed with large glass windows,
thus offering live portraits of gamers absorbed in their digital play) or from
the inside, that is, not only when entering the lounge room but when entering
the virtual environment in an active way in front of a computer. Those artists
further developed these ideas in their following project, kolkoz.org,
were they proposed art collectors to digitalize their own houses (with their art
collection) and create a virtual 3D model of the house, with all furniture and
art works, that could be used as a game playground. Moreover different owners
of “digital houses” could connect and extend into a larger playground, and
interact together … This is again a play between reality and virtuality,
rendered in an immersive vivid way through computer technology and interactive
game play.
Interestingly,
immersive 3D games - from the ancestor Battlezone (1980)[6] up to Doom
an its current avatars in 2004 (Doom 3
and Half-life 2) – amount to a shift
from the cartographic paradigm, found for instance in board games such as Go,
Chess or so-called God-games (Sim
City, the Sims, Back and White,
etc)
to enter the ichnographic paradigm,
that is, based on the notion of path.
We move away from the metaphor of the map to the metaphor or the path,
we move from the third person point of view (God’s eye) to the first-person
point of view (avourive). This shift also happened in contemporary art. The
notion of the « cartographic eye in art » appeared some years ago[7] as a theoretical tool to better understand
certain trends of 20th century art and in particular American post
modernism of the 60’s and 70’s, with artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert
Morris ou Robert Smithson. However in the later decades of the 20th
century and in particular since the 90’s, new artists adopted a different
paradigm and rather favour an ichnographic process in their works (i.e.
subjective vision). This is for instance the case with Swiss artist Pipilotti
Rist, in her various videos and installations, e.g. Pickelporno (1995) or Ever is
Over All (Venise Biennale, 1997), even more in her current installation
work in Kanazawa Museum, (Japan, 2004). Some of the works of Douglas Gordon and
Bill Viola, in particular the Nantes
triptych (1992), also seem to witness the same approach. Maybe are those
artists trying to express the feeling that in our current global world nobody
could represent or organise any territory in a complete manner, even in an
abstract way. These ideas have also been tackle by contemporary artists using
traditional media, like for instance in the “global networks” of American
artist Mark Lombardi, which are huge (several meters long) sheets of papers
exhibiting the complex and hidden relationships between politics, economics and
the underworld. Those works cannot be gazed at in a single vision, but need to
be analysed little by little, the eyes following the complex structure node
after node, building an incomplete but effective knowledge. The complexity of
the structure (graph to follow Michel
Serres, rhizome to follow Deleuze, or
network in a computer-based
terminology) can never be fully apprehended neither visually nor conceptually. Anyway,
as said Morpheus to Neo in the blockbuster movie The Matrix (1999) : « There
is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path ».
Therefore, if “seeing is believing” then experimenting in first-person is
something radically different and it opens to another cognitive dimension, far
from the refried vertigo of global spectacle and a priori knowledge. This is
indeed a key aspect present in the game culture. Other contemporary domains of
collective imaginary are also contaminated by this concept, as the “frontline”
images displayed in the media coverage of the wars in Koweit/Irak, Serbia or
Kosovo, not to mention the idea of “embedded journalists” during the recent
invasion of Irak. No more ordnance survey maps depicting army progress but
subjective views from missiles dwelling on their preys as sole information. « This is not a Nintendo game » even
declared in 1991 General Schwartzkopf, commander-in-chief for operation Desert Storm in Koweit… But this
aesthetic tilt is also a semantic one, as in subjective vision there is always
a part maudite (devil’s part, cf.
Georges Bataille), which could not be seen nor apprehended and thus will always
escape full understanding. There is no light without shadow, no life without
death, as exemplified in the acme of the Baroque. But here again, videogames
are heading a paradigm shift, echoes of which will soon reason in other
domains. Because first-person point of view is sometime too immersive and
self-involving. With later games such as Tomb
Raider and its sequels, one could think that the gaming industry is getting
away from (gamer’s) subjectivity, even so far back to the society of the
spectacle and golden third-person heroes in creating one more Hollywood heroin.
In TR, the player is put behind a camera which is following the game heroin, as
in an anime. Anyhow, looking back at the history of film making, experiments
with subjective camera are rather scarce, the only movie filmed exclusively
with subjective camera to enter anthologies being Lady in the lake by
Robert Montgomery (1947). Consequence of the convergence between video games
and cinema, the current trend in the game industry is indeed to put back the
player in the passive spectator, as exemplified by the long scenes in Full Motion Video – that is, high
definition pre-computed animations which show a deterministic narrative action,
as in movies - which are the more
omnipresent in current games. There is thus some kind of conceptual battle
between opposite forces : on the one hand the (original) game culture impulse
towards “open”, social and immersive
game arenas where gamers are active and experimenting new sensations and on the
other hand the entertainment industry which would like to put the gamer back to
its seat in a passive way to consume some “closed”, second-hand feelings and
germ-free vertigo. Certainly too subversive for the global infocom society is
the development of an active cognition process in the gamer’s mind which would
envision the knowledge of the world through the discovery of one’s possible actions
in and on it. We should
also remember, in the same line of thought, the words of the cybernetics
pioneer Heinz von Foerster; one of the theoreticians who influenced the school
of constructivist psychology: “If you desire to see, learn how to act”[8].
For von Foerster, “perceiving is making” and all perception is therefore
created by the subject’s action upon his environment; perception is active.
Experiments have shown that sensory organs (in animals and humans) can be
trained to better perceive expected signals before the brain considers them. Therefore, by analogy, it would not be
unreasonable to think that a key issue to understand experiences in virtual
worlds would be to be able to perform actions and observe their consequences in
order to learn the rules governing the artificial environment – maybe simply by
trial and error. This is obviously easier to do in a virtual world than in the
real one, and this cognitive process is therefore put to use in many computer
games and thus now intuitively performed by videogame-educated kids. It might
be possible that this ability to develop cognition by action is indeed
gradually replacing the more classical humanist tradition of learning by books
and letters …
A key point in game and interactive installations is the place of the spectator
into the artwork. The ability of
games to lead to deep integration of the player into the gameplay and to
therefore amount to cognitive immersion, by letting him perform intuitive and
meaningful actions, is certainly the
main novelty of this sub-genre with respects to new media art. A simple way to
achieve this is to physically engage the spectator into the artwork, as
exemplified for
instance in the installation SYS*016.JeX*02/SE-FX\
360° by French artist Mathieu
Briand, which has been presented also at the Lyon Biennale in 2001. A trampoline is set in the middle of a
circular room, on the wall of which are
76 cameras and 2 video projectors. Spectators can enjoy playing and jumping on
the trampoline, watching their performance on the two video screens. However from time to time (about every 20 or
30 seconds), the image freeze and a circular pan is done with the 76 cameras, freezing
the spectator/player in the air, as if he was somehow in zero-gravity. This is
a real-time version of the so-called “Bullet Time” special effect that has been
used in the movie “The Matrix”. But
this work goes being a purely visual and ironic phenomenon and it refers to the
illusionist value and lure of reality, a "reality" that could be
observed by rotating it, as a tri-dimensional object in a 3D modeler or
industrial design software. This camera panning up to 180° or even 360° also
reminds the camera movements that could be found in video games such as Street
Fighter, Mortal Kombat or Tekken, especially at the beginning or end of the
fights. Hence it is clear that the characters on the stage (i.e. the spectators
…) are simulacra that could be fully observed, in a virtual obscenity that
allows for no dead angles nor shadows. There is no unseen, untold or un-thought
in such a world. As a special effect in the movie "The Matrix", this
device is at work in the virtual universe of the matrix, because this is a
world of total surveillance but also because one can modify and recompose the
"real" at will. It seems that Mathieu Briand's work displaces this
interrogations towards a more intimate and inner place. Spectators are facing up
with their own image, but an image from the outside, a serial, real-time and
machine-based image. Each spectator is seen from an impossible point of view
composed by 76 eyes .. At the opposite side of the incarnation of spectators in
avatars found in classical virtual systems, Mathieu Briand proposes to
de-compose, de-construct and de-incarnate
the spectator in the real world, through multiple synchronized viewpoints.
In the
field of digital arts, the concept of interaction has repeatedly been
identified as a fundamental characteristic and this notion is one of the
fundamental advances brought by the use of computers in art installations. In
the paradigm of the interface, interaction has often been considered as a
necessarily reduced and incomplete dialogue between the human and the machine,
as a means of access that will always be frustrating since it is always limited
and imperfect. In taking up this route, numerous artists have done their utmost
to devise interfaces that are more or less natural to allow for an improved
interaction with their digital works, as if the viewer’s immersion should
necessarily go through a complex technological apparatus with computer or
electronic elements facilitating the difficulty and ambiguity of interpretation
that all artistic production offers. That approach, however, forgets that
immersion is cognitive before being perceptive, the “reality” of a work clearly
being invented and recreated by the viewer and not just perceived and
undergone. Du Zhenjun, a Chinese media artist now established in Paris, clearly
situates himself within this new conceptualization of interaction. The
interactive technologies he uses are relatively simple, as the presence sensors
(through floor pressure or infrared detection) merely record and send binary
data: on/off, present or absent. Thus, far from technological artifice, he
rather invents an epure of
interaction, which, through its minimalism, makes light of any given
technological implementation. A key installation for this is “I erase your trace”, first shown in 2001 at the Exit festival, a yearly new
media event held in Creteil in the suburb of Paris. The spectator walks down a 4-meter
wide and 12-meter long corridor with a large gray carpet. When the viewer moves
within the perimeter of the carpet, an image tags along his steps. Four figures
stick to the viewer, bustling about to immediately clean, polish, scrub,
scrape, wash, and erase all traces or stains that his steps could have left
behind. The visitor cannot set foot on the floor without seeing them appear
under his heels with rags, brooms, brushes, and vacuum cleaners in hand, preoccupied
with erasing the viewer’s presence before he has even left. In I Erase Your Trace, the figures
projected on the ground (virtual characters) take great care to clean the
floor, closely following the viewer as if telling him that his presence has
disrupted some pre-established order and that he is in fact undesirable since
his literal presence can only soil the dark virtuality of this installation.
Borrowing from the formal vocabulary or tools of computer games, but with
different aims, modalities and media devices, the artworks discussed above present
a disrupted space between reality and virtuality, in which the viewer is
engaged, sometimes in spite of himself, in an action that takes him as if by
vertigo to a point he does not want to go, in a mental state he had
nevertheless thought banished from his sterilized vocabulary of
microwave-reheated emotions. The artworks somehow present themselves as concave
signs, lying in wait for a human presence, which it will take on an uncertain
journey toward the disturbed landscapes of his own consciousness—as if only a
“thought from outside” (Foucault) could circumscribe the new modalities at
stake in our contemporary society.
Therefore,
let us be optimistic, there will always be some game designers and some artists
to surprise us and get us out of our post-consumerist overdose …
Kolkoz
Installation work for the
Lyon Biennale (Museum of Contemporary Art), 2001
Lounge room with 4 computers
and multiplayer game
+ plastic replicas of
game weapons in several rooms of the Museum
Kolkoz
Sketch of the 3D
computer game for Lyon Biennale, 2001
Mathieu Briand, SYS*016.JeX*02/SE-FX\ 360°, 2001
Entrance of the
installation at Lyon Biennale
Mathieu Briand, SYS*016.JeX*02/SE-FX\ 360°, 2001
installation room
Mathieu Briand, SYS*016.JeX*02/SE-FX\ 360°, 2001
Sketch of the
installation : 1 trampoline, 76 cameras and 2 video projectors
Du Zhenjun, I erase your trace, 2001
Sketch : 4 video
projector and 196 floor sensors
Du Zhenjun, I erase your trace
Installation view at
Exit Festival, France, 2001