Videogames and Art

Description

Videogames are firmly enmeshed in modern culture. Acknowledging the increasing cultural impact of this rapidly changing industry on artistic and creative practices, Videogames and Art features in-depth essays that offer an unparalleled overview of the field.

Together, the contributions position videogame art as an interdisciplinary mix of digital technologies and the traditional art forms. Of particular interest in this volume are machinima, game console artwork, politically oriented videogame art, and the production of digital art. This new and revised edition features an extended critical introduction from the editors and updated interviews with the foremost artists in the field. Rounding out the book is a critique of the commercial videogame industry comprising essays on the current quality and originality of videogames.

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• ART
• General
• Design
• General officer

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783201310
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Copy-editor: Ed Hatton
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-419-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-132-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-131-0
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
Introduction
Grethe Mitchell and Andy Clarke
Section I: Overviews
From Appropriation to Approximation
Axel Stockburger
Meltdown
Rebecca Cannon
Videogames as Literary Devices
Jim Andrews
High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima
Henry Lowood
“Cracking the Maze”: Curator’s Note
Anne-Marie Schleiner
Section II: Artists on Art
Two Interviews with Brody Condon
Andy Clarke
In Conversation Fall 2003 and Spring 2012: Interviews with Joseph Delappe
Jon Winet
Figures in a Landscape: In Conversation with Gibson/Martelli (igloo)
Grethe Mitchell
The Idea of Doing Nothing: An Interview with Tobias Bernstrup
Francis Hunger
Staying in to Play: The Works of John Paul Bichard
John Paul Bichard
An Interview with Eddo Stern
Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell
The Isometric Museum: The Sim Gallery Online Project (an interview with Curators Katherine Isbister and Rainey Straus)
Jane Pinckard
The Evolution of a GBA Artist (2004)
Paul Catanese
From Fictional Videogame Stills to Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1991–2005
Suzanne Treister
Virtual Retrofit (or What Makes Computer Gaming So Damn Racy?)
M.A. Greenstein
Perspective Engines: An Interview with JODI
Francis Hunger
How Independent Game Development looked in 2002 (an interview with Julian Oliver and Kipper)
Melanie Swalwell
Medieval Unreality: Initiating an Artistic Discourse on Albania’s Blood Feud by Editing a First-Person Shooter Game
Nina Czegledy and Maia Engeli
Section III: Games and Other Art Forms
Should Videogames Be Viewed as Art?
Brett Martin
Some Notes on Aesthetics in Japanese Videogames
William Huber
The Computer as a Dollhouse (excerpts)
Tobey Crockett
Networking Power: Videogame Structure from Concept Art
Laurie Taylor
Fan Art as a Function of Agency in Oddworld Fan Culture
Gareth Schott and Andrew Burn
Will Computer Games Ever Be a Legitimate Art Form?
Ernest W. Adams
Notes on Contributors and Artists
Introduction
Grethe Mitchell and Andy Clarke
Introduction
When it was released in 2007, the first edition of this book, Videogames and Art , was one of the first books to provide a complete overview of the field of videogame art – that is to say, art produced with or influenced by videogames. At the time, there had been a batch of exhibitions of this type of art, but no academic books on the subject, and we therefore sought to redress this balance by assembling a collection of essays which struck a balance between providing a voice to individual artists (either through interviews, essays about their work, or essays by them on other subjects) and placing this work in a broader cultural and critical context. By doing this, we hoped to show that even though this area of digital art is comparatively young and exhibits a wide variety of different styles and techniques, it nonetheless forms a sufficiently distinct and coherent artistic movement – united, to some degree, by a set of shared techniques and aesthetic concerns – and is therefore worthy of being taken seriously as an art form.
This revised and expanded second edition has provided us with the opportunity to include new chapters and update others within the book. Among the new chapters in the book are interviews with the artists Eddo Stern and igloo (Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli) – plus a chapter by the artist John Paul Bichard on his own work. In addition, the existing chapters on Brody Condon and with Joseph Delappe feature new interviews with them which bring these sections up to date. Both of these chapters are effectively doubled in length by the addition of these new sections. Paul Catanese has added an extremely interesting and insightful addendum to his chapter, describing some of his recent experiments with the iPad and outlining some of the pros and cons of this device in relation to his previous work on the Gameboy Advance. Other chapters have had minor revisions and updates.
Although each essay and interview featured in the book is self-contained, they have been arranged in a series of themed sections so as to provide a logical progression. Even so, the book can be read in any order without compromising understanding or enjoyment, and our intention is that it will, as a whole, provide a comprehensive and rounded overview of the various forms of videogame art, and indicate some of the ways in which videogames overlap with art.
The first section of the book will, together with this introduction, serve to orient the reader and introduce some of the key artists, concepts, genres of work and terminology in this field. It opens with an essay by Axel Stockburger, who introduces some of the major genres of work in the field of videogame art and places them within a broader theoretical framework. Rebecca Cannon follows on from this concentrating primarily on mod art – that is to say, art which is created through patches or modification of first-person shooter (FPS) games. She also describes the work of a number of artists such as Julian Oliver, Brody Condon, JODI and others who have contributed interviews or essays featured later in the book.
Jim Andrews covers another significant field in his essay: art which appropriates the videogame form and consciously uses it as a vessel into which to pour other meaning. It is easy to trivialize this sort of art as just being novelty games or parodies, but to do so is to miss the point. Parody mocks the original, but these artworks treat the original game with respect – appropriating its form and using it as a medium for other content, such as references to art, literature or popular culture (anti-war and anti-consumerist messages are also common).
Further on in the first section, the essay by Henry Lowood provides an in-depth history of the field of machinima – animated movies made using the real-time 3D rendering capabilities of FPS games. This concentrates on the early history of this genre and manages through its focus on speedrunning (completing games in the fastest possible time) to highlight the performative aspects of this machimima before going on to describe some of the more narrative work now being produced by the gaming community. Note that although machinima has grown substantially in popularity and visibility since the first edition, we have not added any chapters on it, as space was limited and there have been a number of books released about it in the meantime, including Lowood’s own Machinima Reader . 1 The section concludes with Anne-Marie Schleiner’s curator’s note for the 1999 exhibition “Cracking the Maze: Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art”, one of the first to exhibit game modifications as art.
The second section of the book – which is also the longest – consists of a series of interviews with artists working in the field of videogame art and essays on or by individual artists. It features many of the artists mentioned elsewhere in the book and allows them the opportunity to discuss in greater detail the techniques that they use and the motivation behind their work. Being limited in space, this book can cover only a fraction of the artists working in this field; even so, we have sought to cover many of the major artists (as well as some lesser-known or less well-established ones), and to provide a balance between the various forms of videogame art.
The section starts with two interviews with Brody Condon – one from 2004, the other from 2012. Together, these trace the arc of his career in videogame art from his earliest works, such as the landmark FPS mod, Adam Killer , to his most recent work based around performances and live action role playing. The next paper forms a complement to this, featuring a similar pair of interviews with Joseph Delappe, an artist whose work has focused on a different area, that of in-game performance/intervention. This theme of performance is continued in the next interview, which is with Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli of igloo. In it they discuss, amongst other themes, the importance of performance, both of non-player characters and “visitors” in their large-scale artworks such as SwanQuake and Vermilion Lake . Eddo Stern, who collaborated with Brody Condon (and others) on Waco Resurrection, is also included in the book, in an interview covering his diverse body of work.
Tobias Bernstrup was the creator (with Palle Torsson) of the Museum Meltdown series of works (1996–1999), which recreated various museums in a FPS game. This early example of videogame art was a pioneering work and he describes it and his later work, such as Potsdamer Platz (Unreal Edit), in an interview with Francis Hunger. Katherine Isbister and Rainey Straus have also explored the idea of a virtual museum in their work – though in their case, they used The Sims , rather than an FPS.
The Fictional Videogame Stills (1991) and Fictional Software (1993) series by Suzanne Treister, discussed in her chapter, predates even the work of Tobias Bernstrup, making it one of the earliest clear and unambiguous examples of videogame art. Treister collaborated with John Paul Bichard on Condition Red (2004) and other projects (both game rel