abstractmachine

I’ve been following the various forums commenting my Invaders! installation as much as my busy schedule allows me (I’ll be away for a residency all week, so the assassins will have to start looking elsewhere). At this point, it goes without saying that I am apparently responsible for the latest flash-in-the-pan in the world of video game controversies. It appears that controversy is easier to provoke than more significant forms of experience, and given the current reaction, I suppose the only conclusion I can come to is that the piece has failed in more ways than one. Whatever the case, as ultimately it is not for me to dictate people’s appreciation (or lack of it) and the work has to speak for itself, I have so far avoided trying to justify the work, in any moral sense of the word. Art is not about morality, or is so only at its’ darkest moments. But this does not preclude an ethical approach, and to an ethical discussion of it. And it does not preclude offering some personal context to the work and its inception.

Since this is now a blog eat blog world, and I have been taking advantage these past few years of the platform that blogging offers me, I believe that I have at least some responsibility in taking seriously the many comments, especially from those within the gaming community, and obviously over at Kotaku where the response was the most varied and interesting. So here is an attempt at some context, for what its worth…

• “We do know, however, that the 8-bit tower jumpers and the negative score applied to each WTC tower to indicate damage aren’t going to sit well with, we’re thinking, everyone we know who doesn’t hate freedom.” - Michael McWhertor

Sadly, the work has been discussed, largely (but with some exceptions) based on this early report in which the journalist did not even play the game. For me at least, a video game is at some point always going to be about its gameplay. Ironically, the same journalist finally did play the game, and found some merit in it. But by then, the cat was out of the bag, and we had a media circus on our hands — at which point I simply shut the piece off, and turned off ongoing discussions with the many news outlets that wanted not to discuss the piece, but instead my reaction to the reaction, which again is not really my role. News cycles thankfully are short, and it is my impression that with Leipzig now over, we can all calm down a little and those interested can try again to discuss the game itself. But from the point I was attributed as “hating freedom” (on what merits, please?), the whole thing was basically Game Over as far as I’m concerned, and confirmed my original concern that a commercial games convention might not a viable venue for work of this sort. Somewhere in there, I naively figured that gamers, given all the controversies they have weathered over all these years, would have the sophistication to see in the gameplay itself something else than a simple black vs. white, for vs. against, you are with me vs. you are against me posture, or “message”. There is no real “message” in GTA, and hopefully there is no real “message” in my work, and certainly not that I hate freedom. I continue to believe that the game offers something far different than hatred in fact, and personally I always felt a certain sense of release at the end of each wave, just as in the original game. Just as I felt some very mixed emotions, difficult to neatly organize into “pro” or “contra”, when the whole “War on Terror” kicked in. Sure, there is something definitely ambiguous about defending the towers in a game, and some complex emotions that, indeed, might be a little too raw, or odd, for some, even in an 8-bit representation that is highly stylized and presents itself immediately as such. But whatever one decides in the end, I have heard many a cry within the gaming world that we need to take into account the internal logic of games, and that means actually understanding the mechanics of its gameplay, and respecting its figurative tropes. In this regard, it really surprised me that Kotaku would be the first ones to fall into this trap. I can understand in the case of Fox News and NY Daily News, but Kotaku?

• In his interactive large installation, the players must prevent the catastrophe by controlling the well- known cannon at the lower screen border with their bodies and firing it using arm movements. Like the original, this trial is ultimately unsuccessful, thus creating an articulated and critical commentary about the current war strategy.” Press Release, Computerspiele Museum

This was the press release, made by the organizers of the exhibit, and never a direct quote by me. I should also point out that neither I, nor the organizers, claimed that this piece was “anti anything”. The curator who commissioned this piece called it a “critical commentary”. This is not really the way I would have phrased it, since I don’t believe art is in any way equivalent to commentary, but I don’t see any real problem in his statement either. I was perfectly fine with it, and as I said before “I approved this message”. But I think it important that we understand that the role of “critical” work is not to provide a specific message “against” anything, and I know for a fact that the organizers of the exhibition and I are on the same wavelength on this issue. “Critical”, is often used expediently to describe disapproval, but it is more effective when considered a form of discernment, distancing, or scrutinization. This should be sufficient to explain our willingness to defend the irony and ambiguity of the piece, and should have been an obvious flag that this was not a flippant piece merely seeking to shock. The events of September 11th were in many ways complex, and as I have stated before, a complex, i.e. the site of unprocessed events. This is perhaps the true meaning of the event, and why people are so upset over my rehashing it: perhaps September 11th is entirely un-processable, and that we wish it to remain so. This too is a valid point, and I have noted it.

• “[H]e made the original in 2001. What fucking point was there there? There was none. This guy is a jack-ass. There was no “War on Terror” when he made this piece of shit. He was just trying piss people off. And now he’s coming back and spouting off illogical bullshit that Art Aficionados and Critics will try to defend by creating a message that was never there.” - Ad-hominem at 01:50 PM on 08/20/08

It is absolutely true that there was no “War on Terror” when I originally made this piece. It is also true that this was a very different piece back then. In fact, on September 10th I was simply working on a mod that upon waking up the following day had taken on an eerily new significance. The whole connection happened almost as an accident.

On the first day of the exhibit, I made the following statement to AP: “I originally produced the work for my own needs, as a personal attempt to unravel what had become an ontological knot due to the many symbolic layers that had mixed themselves in with an extremely violent act.” I’m sure I’ve pissed off a people right there with my rhetoric, but I really do mean it quite literally: I had no idea at the time what to make of the whole damn thing, hence the ontological knot. To put it in a manner of speech for those in the forums: I just kept saying to myself what the f@#$ was that!?. On the one hand we had innocent citizens perishing in an extreme violence heretofore unseen in such a public form of witness, and yet the entire thing felt precisely choreographed for us, almost — gulp — sophisticated in its use of our media as a form of warfare. They was frikkin’ with us Americans on multiple levels, and using our own language to boot. They had obviously been watching our movies, and playing our games. At which point I started to realize (and I was not alone in this) that Al Qaeda had somehow tapped, quite intimately, into our collective projections of fear and destruction, and had invoked an often rehearsed metaphor of invaders descending from the sky. Twisted, indeed.

Since then, this whole event has evolved over time, as has this piece, as the cultural discourse on the World Trade attacks shifted. We have seen many different cycles in this process, and many attempts to re-appropriate the symbols and language used to describe the event itself. Meanwhile, we as Americans have resorted to tying ourselves ever tighter to the icon of the terrorist’s explosive-laden belt. At the symbolic level of political theater, it is as if we have decided that in order to give truth to our military resolve, we somehow had to integrate the figure of the terrorist as our figurehead. A strange emblem, indeed.

For my part, I have lived through a very different experience of a city under siege by terrorists, held hostage by random acts of extreme violence that paralyzed us for months, and yes there was gruesome dismemberment and death involved. I am sure those wishing my death will regret to learn that I and members of my family were to have been precisely at the time and location where one of the dismantled bombs was set to go off. It was a sickening prospect, as it was precisely designed to kill and maim children. So I get you, when you tell me that terrorists aren’t f@$#ing around, and that this still is the real deal. I know this very well to be true. And sure, the New York and Washington attacks had no comparison to those that I lived through and give me no understanding of the suffering of those who perished. But it does give me some perspective. And I remember a very different response, and a very different form of military and political resolve. Above all, and this is the point, I remember a very different use of political iconography. These are all choices we make collectively, and it takes place as much on the physical and political battlefield, as it does in the media war. Video games, as many have pointed out, have not been neutral on this front.

But, as you have correctly reminded us — and thank you for looking –, despite all this posturing this was obviously not what the piece was originally about. To suggest otherwise would be absurd. For Leipzig I was simply trying to return to that moment, thick as it is now with the veneer of the current war strategy plastered over it. I still remember a very disturbing emotion, at once very raw, and yet immediately mediated. Against all of the bazillions of quotations that all of us have placed around it, I was attempting to tap back into that instant, and revisit it. Perhaps my choice of a quote here and an icon there suggested a too-obvious form of caricature that has attached itself to this event. Perhaps the idea itself is purely tasteless. Perhaps. Meanwhile, as I switch the channels on my american TV set, commercials bombard me with “World Trade Center Commemorative Coins!” in yet another attempt to bury this moment in insignificance. So, if people out there feel I was trivializing the event in giving it the form I did, I can accept that, and I’m certainly willing to hear their arguments — quite numerous at last count in the various forums. But consider our current context nonetheless.

• “Art. Because the word “pretentious” is just far too long.” - ArcaneDevice at 02:47 PM on 08/23/08

That’s pretty damn funny.

• “So its means that we should fight against terrorism with more than “one cannon”, and that in order to defeat evil/invaders, we must fight it with more force and in multiple ways. I just think you went about it with a poor choice, and at least you tried something.” - ADAM!!! - 25 August, 2008 @ 01:15 am
• “Personally, I quite liked the futility of the game and that you can’t ever win against the “invaders” - very apt.” - Kazzahdrane - 21 August, 2008 @ 04:06 am

The way in which the game play was designed, it is actually possible to endlessly “beat” the game by simply getting enough people to shoot at it with their arms, feet, head, whatever. The Invaders! will of course never give up, but that was also the power of coin-operated games. The “Game Over” screen is an integral part of its narrative arc; one can nevertheless delay that arrival, finding different strategies of keeping it at bay, and that was always the emotional power of this form of gaming.

When Andreas Lange asked me to make the piece multiplayer, one of the first things that I tried to do was to find a balance between playing the game by yourself, and playing it with others. I spent quite a lot of time on this aspect, and ran several different simulations on the frequency required to actually keep the game playing, eternally. In one simulation, the piece had ran over a week, and had an astronomical score. I even changed the bit-width of certain variables, just to make sure that scores could grow big enough. This possibility was programmed-in, if you will, as an extreme possibility, and I was quite hoping to see someone attempt it in Leipzig. Now, since you have to actually move your body with a certain velocity to actually shoot, this will obviously tire you out. But it does not preclude using others to take over while you recuperate, or even mounting some sort of mechanical device in front of the camera and just let the thing play on autopilot. There’s always a way to trick the machine. You can shoot the way I suggested in the instructions, and then there’s how people will actually do it. I’ve seen videos on the web of a fellow that pretty much figured out the necessary velocity to trick the camera into giving him multiple shots (he also looked pretty silly doing it, but at least he got a high score). But my point is that there were some creative strategies to be found there, and I figured that some ingenious soul (American or otherwise) might find their own trick. Who knows how long people could have kept up the fight?

• “1. This guy doesn’t believe video games are capable of being art. He outright said this. 2. He created it September 12th, 2001, not just recently. 3. He himself has changed what he claims the meaning of the artwork is a number of times. He has called it (Himself, mind you) a) A study in Mathematics B) A game in which the common man can fight back against the invaders C) A weak, meaningless piece of work that has been diluted by the Iraq War and D) A commentary on the current warfare plan.” - Ad-hominem at 09:56 PM on 08/22/08

I’ll leave the mathematics part for another debate (I was probably talking about algorithms, but I might be wrong, feel free to send me the quote). But I have definitely said in the past that video games are not de facto Art, which probably — in most discussions — refers to the “fine arts”. It is definitely an “art form”, but I have always said that the whole “games as art” debate is less about art, and what-is-art (yawn, boring!), than about art institutions and therefore respectability. Art institutions have long, complex histories and ideologies, and I’m not sure video games want to be a part of some of these institutions anyway. But they are definitely of a different ilk in their current form, and I also think that video games, the industry, and its most ardent proponents, still have a lot to learn on this front. There is definitely a tendency towards a fairly myopic vision of gaming and its reach, and yes this includes the core gamer crowd. There is a whole world out there of critical gaming, art games, call-it-what-you-will that I suspect many people out there have never heard of.

Oh, and if people think that by creating a minor scandal in a commercial game faire I am somehow moving myself up the art ladder, they clearly have no idea how that world ticks.

• “Yah, this has obviously become more about the artist and the WTC than Space Invaders. Way to steal the thunder from the game itself, jerk.” - art_zombie at 01:45 PM on 08/20/08

Yes, that might indeed be true. But I’ve always signed my work as a form of responsibility — unlike, by the way, some of those making threats not only against me, but against members of my family. If that makes me a “douche bag” who deliberately offends so many people and then tries to pass it off as “art”, so be it. I don’t see the artistic merit in merely offending people, but then again, I think your point is that this work was not really all that successful as a piece of art. And that too, might be true. I would like to mention again, that I think it is a shame that this debate is not discussing the gameplay, or at least starting from that point, instead of vague first impressions concerning the work, riddled as they were with very specific incendiary rhetoric, almost designed for a headline on Fox News. But back to your point, I happen to think that the work was not in any way an insult to Space Invaders, a brilliant game that has taken on its own mythological status, and that in fact my take on it is really something else altogether, and that most people get this, or should. Space Invaders is, in fact, like many Japanese games, a very innocent affair, and joyously so. One fights with no clear political context, and it is as ethically ambiguous as cleaning your bathroom of mold, or shooing away ants while you picnic. So when I allude to certain aspects of that game, I am very obviously reading it on a whole other level. I am, of course, reading history backwards, as if that wasn’t already obvious. If somehow someone confuses this with the original game itself, or its makers, it is unfortunate, and I am indeed very sorry for that.

• “I have an idea for a piece of performance art you might be interested in, it involves me shoving the Eiffel Tower up your ass until you choke on your damn colon and begin to vomit your own lungs.” - Sus - 21 August, 2008 @ 04:06 am

I’ve never been all that big on performance art myself. But if you wanted to make a game of that, I’d definitely want to play it.

Update (27/08): Ok, so it appears that most of the debate has finally turned into something more constructive, even if I still feel that the whole thing is quite overblown and not worthy of our time. However, there remains one final complaint that I find quite valid, and indeed cause for confusion, and that is concerning why I actually took the piece down. I tried to adress this in my original statement, but given the numerous demands for comment, apparently more context is needed there too. Here is more or less what I said to a journalist last night:

The reasons for pulling the work are numerous and complex. There was above all the whole tone of the media circus which I have already commented at length, and of course I had placed the organizers of the Games Convention in something of a bind due to the fact that Taito is one of their clients. On the legal front, we discussed the matter briefly and came to the conclusion that any claims of infringement were untenable, and that it was important to defend a work of art in principle. But unfortunately, other concerns had in the meantime raised their heads, thanks (in part, but not entirely) to the various threats on me (whatever) and my family (wtf!?) — in other words that modern form of the witch-hunt, a favourite sport of our times. It was at this point that I made my decision, which obviously places serious doubts on my credibility (no big deal, I’ll survive), but at least had the advantage of slowing somewhat the momentum of the most extreme elements. For all of these reasons, and others too involved to get into here, I again take full responsibility for the decision to take down the work.

Obviously people will have their own take on all this, and I invite you to think whatever you will.

• Installation: Invaders!
• Concept & Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Assistant: Stéphane Cousot
• Development Library : OpenFrameworks
• Exhibition: Games Convention
• GC ART Special: From Outer Space / Space Invaders: the Anniversary Show / 30 Years of Space Invaders
• Curator: Andreas Lange, Computer Spiele Museum
• Location: Leipziger Messe GmbH, Hall 2, Stand H11
• Dates: 21-24, August 2008
• Video: Invaders! (From the Gameworld exhibition, Laboral, Gijòn, Spain)

Update (24/08) : If you haven’t heard, this piece has stirred quite a controvery. I’m keeping the comments open for people to opine in their own manner and leisure. If you are interested, there is also significant debate here and at many other sites commenting on the affair. I obviously have a lot of things to say, and while I’m tempted to try and correct some of the most exaggerated misconceptions, as many commentators have mentioned the damage has already been done, the responsibility is ultimately mine, and it is therefore up to others now to make up their own minds.

Next week, my old piece from September 2001 will yet again be recycled, only this time in a very large scale edition, with some significant updates, all in celebration of 30 years of Invaders falling from the skies. Invaders! will this time be a multiplayer affair, with improved tracking (optical flow, yada yada yada…), a high (and low) scores leader board, and a stronger tie-in to the historical narrative that originally inspired me to make this version in the first place.

For an idea of how the physical interaction works, check out this video from the Laboral Gameworld exhibition in 2007.

This is all taking place at the huge Games Convention taking place every year in Leipzig. This year Andreas Lange of the Computer Spiele Museum was nice enough to include me in the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Space Invaders with my somewhat ambiguous juxtaposition of this mythical game and the historical events of September 11th. He has also included a selection of various artefacts of the “official” Space Invaders game which will accompagny my large-scale full-body form of engagement.

Here is the press release (read : not written by me), which for once gets it pretty much right :

Space Invaders is one of the biggest video game legends. When the game landed in arcades world-wide in 1978, it initiated a previously unknown boom. Shortly after the appearance of the blockbuster pictures “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the “Third Kind”, thanks to Space Invaders, millions of mostly young players could step in to save the world from the alien invaders with their joystick in hand.

Space Invaders became a legend and a global icon. It is a frequently quoted art motif and remains omnipresent in our daily life. It is still as fresh as ever. The exhibition “Space Invaders: Die Jubiläumsshow!” (Space Invaders: the Anniversary Show) would like to pay homage to this evergreen and create an experience from its historical and current facets.

In addition to a comprehensive documentation, an original Space Invaders machine naturally forms the centre of attraction. Everything is overshadowed by the interactive large installation “Invaders!” by the French-American artist Douglas Edric Stanley.

The World Trade Center attacks mark a deep cut in our recent history that is still being processed. The French-American artist Douglas Edric Stanley has found an unusual – though obvious – metaphor with his work “Invaders!”, which is based on the 1978 arcade original. In his interactive large installation, the players must prevent the catastrophe by controlling the well- known cannon at the lower screen border with their bodies and firing it using arm movements. Like the original, this trial is ultimately unsuccessful, thus creating an articulated and critical commentary about the current war strategy. In this regard, Douglas Edric Stanley sees Space Invaders as “a social tale that can be related to historical tales without losing its poetic power” (D.E. Stanley).

update (20/08): Kotaku’s had a very negative reaction to the piece, and their community seems pretty pissed off. I think there’s some confusion in there, as per usual, but you can head over to their website for more on the controversy (here and here) .

update (21/08): PC World’s Game On blog has a much more measured response to the Kotaku post. There are several other reports as well, including this slightly more accurate one from Fox News which tries to flesh out a few of the details discussed by Kotaku. NY Daily News has also apparently jumped into the fray, calling World Trade Center victims to get their response — which in my humble opinion is just as sleezy and facile as anything else I’m apparently being accused of. Ah, the slow descent of journalism into endless tautological news cycles. Count me out.

update (22/08). Here is the statement I made last night concerning the removal of Invaders! from the convention:

“After three days of a steady downward spiral in public discussion of the piece, I have just given my agreement to the organizers of the Leipzig Games Convention to simply turn off the installation Invaders! While I realize the dangerous precedent of allowing the lowest common denominator dictate what is and is not a valid form of expression, unfortunately the current tone has totally obfuscated the original aims of the piece. While I take full responsibility for the uncomfortable ambiguity of certain aspects of this work, it was never created to merely provoke controversy for controversy’s sake, and unfortunately, this is what the piece has now become. The American response to this work has been, frankly, immature, and lacking the sophistication and consideration that other parts of the world have so far shown the work. Contrary to previous reports, I am an American, and it saddens me that we as a people remain so profoundly unable to process this event outside of some obscure, but tacitly understood, criteria of purely anesthetized artistic representation. Due to these profound misunderstandings, I simply feel that from an artistic point of view, the work has lost the ability to have any valuable impact, poetic or otherwise. I have not been pressured by the Leipziger Messe, nor by the Computerspiele Museum in this decision — to the contrary, they have offered their support in defending the right of artists to speak freely, and in whatever context they may choose.”

• Installation: C’est toi la patate !?
• Authors: Fabien Artal, J.C. Loewe, Raphaël de Staël, Amaury Tatibouët, Roman Viguier
• Direction: Douglas Edric Stanley & Stéphane Cousot
• Workshop: PlayVision
• Exhibition: Gamerz 0.2
• Production: Atelier Hypermédia, Aix-en-Provence School of Art, Transatlab

Here are some screenshots from « C’est toi la patate !? », the design-it-and-build-it-as-fast-as-you-can « installation ludique » we created in just under 4 days during the PlayVision workshop. The main goal of this installation was to use our still-in-construction Open Computer Vision library for Processing in a real-world context and see if it could hold up. Conclusion? So far, so good.

The idea is very simple. You stand in front of a screen which acts as a surveillance-system/mirror. If you hold a part of your body still, the computer will take a picture of it and detach it from the rest of your body. Once you have detached the body part, you can play with it by moving your body around. The installation stores many body parts, leaving a sort of weak memory trail which (re)connects the successive players to one other over time.

We called it an « installation ludique » in response to an idea put forth by Jean-Baptiste Labrune during the opening Transatlab brainstorming session. I had been talking about Huizinga’s and Caillois’ theories around games and play, and Jean-Baptiste suggested we also keep in mind Winnicott’s theories around free play. The idea of a game open enough for the rules to more or less emerge during gameplay appealed to us greatly. This is one of the reasons there is no real specific goal to our « game », outside of the fairly obvious constraints of the interactive algorithm itself and the behavior required to achieve whatever it is you want to do. Jean-Baptiste also insisted that this model of gameplay has a power relation: it could be suggested that those who generate the rules, are exceptions to them.

Unsurprisingly, most people have been playing with the mirror from a purely narcissistic desire: fascinated by the pure game of self-recognition. Mirrors, apparently, still fascinate us. However, very quickly (in fact, almost immediately), people figured out that you could tell stories with it, and even salacious ones at that. By detaching your fingers in a suggestive manner and pushing them into suggestive configurations of body parts, one can in fact construct a compelling little marionette play, albeit a somewhat simplistic one. Funny that those two configurations — reflection and storytelling — should both be so immediately compatible in an interactive context, so easy to tap into. There is a great word for this which I used back in my pre-doctoral thesis on interactivity, namely « relation ». Relation, in French, can mean both a relation (in the English sense of relationship) and the act storytelling, i.e. the process of relating something to someone else. Interactivity, I wrote back then, was often about relation: what story is constructed in the liminary space generated between the player and the machine?

• Exhibition: Gamerz 0.2
• Dates: January 15th - 27th, 2008
• Location: Espace Sextius & L’école supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Artists: dardex mort2faim, Quentin Destieu, Romain Senatore, Sylvain Huguet, Paul Destieu, Benjamin Cadon, Sylvie Reno, Servovalve, Guillaume Stagnaro, Antonin Fourneau, Manuel Braun, Sidabitball, Confipop, Jankenpopp, Damien Aspe, Pierrick Thébault, Pierre Andrieux, Philippe Coudert, Pascal Silondi, Stephane Kyles, Grégoire Lauvin

It’s running late and I’ve still got some code to write, so I’ll have to write more about this later. But I wanted to mention that the GamerZ 0.2 exhibit will be opening tomorrow evening at the Espace Sextius in Aix-en-Provence followed by a concert at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art.

If there’s one piece that stands out above all the others, it’s this very cool Damien Aspe installation entitled From Russia With Fun. It’s great, and reminds me of Space-Invaders’ Rubikubism installations, only more art-pop (but still cool).

As for my participation, M2F found a little spot for the Atelier Hypermédia and the installation we built during our tiny workshop entitled « PlayVision ». The students have come up with a fun little project, all built in about 5 days total. It’s a sort-of live Mr. Potatohead, and you’re the Potato. We used, as previously mentioned, OpenCV inside of Processing, and Minim for the sound generation. The last two evenings I’ve spent a few hours stitching it all together and re-writing everything into cleaner classes, and so on and so forth. Tomorrow we finalize everything on-site and adjust the lighting with the organizers and fellow artists. Lighting is always a complete pain in the ass with video surveillance — gosh golly I sure hate adjusting lights.

• Installation: ^3
• Artist: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Exhibition: Les Pixels (2)
• Location: ASCA, Beauvais, France (Map)
• Dates: December 7-21, 2007

Quick post for one of the quickest exhibits I’ve ever had to prepare. I’ll be exhibiting ^3 (aka Cubed) at Les Pixels, an exhibition that opens in Beauvais today. Where’s Beauvais you ask? I have no idea, but who the hell cares when it’s THE authentic « Ville Internet @@@@ 2007 » ? (Love that logo!) It’s a tiny festival, by a young non-profit with the right attitude, so I said what the hell. Who needs sleep anyway?

If you just happen to be hanging out in Slovenia this weekend, don’t forget that tomorrow is the last day of the latest ENIAROF incarnation: Sloveniarof.

Eddo Stern just posted the video we shot of his installation Darkgame. This is phase two of what looks to be a very intense game. I’m impressed with the game’s development roadmap, but I’ll let Eddo talk more about it when he’s ready. It should be very cool.

I have just uploaded onto YouTube three videos documenting the three concurrent exhibitions (Feedback, Gameworld, Labcyberspaces) opening the new Laboral Centre de Arte in Gijón, Spain (March 30 - June 30, 2007).

I have also included a short video documenting in more detail my installation Invaders! which is part of the Gameworld exhibition. This is a site-specific installation that I coded from scratch in just a few days using the Processing programming environment. In this video I’ve added some extra footage of the tracking software at work:

I’m obviously privileging my own work in the Gameworld video (hey, get your own camera). But I was bummed that I couldn’t include more footage of one of my favourite pieces, Eddo Stern’s Dark Game, especially since Eddo and I filmed about 30 minutes worth of footage. I didn’t have enough space on my disk to make a copy before handing over his cassette, so I’ll just wait for Eddo’s edit and link to it here later.

The curators for the three exhibitions were: Gameworld (Carl Goodman, Daphne Dragona); Feedback (Christiane Paul, Jemima Rellie, Charlie Gere); Labcyberspaces (Alex Adriaansens, Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Christiane Paul, Gerfried Stocker).

There are too many artists to list here. I should also mention that I missed a lot of works in my documentation. If you want to see it all, you’ll just have to go there yourself. Also I need to get some sleep. I have a plane to catch at 06:00 tomorrow morning.

Oh, and sorry for the quality of my crappy 300€ camera. My big-fancy-camera’s tape deck just died again. It’s the second time I’ve had it repaired only to have it die just after the repair warranty expires. Thanks Canon!

 Invaders! [2:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Gameworld [8:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (566)
 Feedback [08:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (610)
 Labcyberspaces [8:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (559)

So I’m back in my hotel taking a quick pause before heading back to this huge exhibition, where I plan to finish filming the other installations. They apparently see things in a big way here, although I doubt how long they can keep it running at this scale. To give just one example: various persona from the digital arts community were flown in from all over the world, just to be here for the opening, instantly giving it the feel of one of those internationale festivals where you meet all the same people over and over again. And then there is the expanse of historical digital, electronic or mechanical works; it’s quite staggering, given the cost of just the equipment for such a show. At the Feedback exhibit this makes an interesting mix: Eddo Stern, Mary Flanagan, Nam June Paik, Sol LeWitt, Vera Molnar, Hans Haacke, Lygia Clark, Marcel Duchamp, Marie Sester, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Paul Sermon, Roman Verostko, JODI, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Casey Reas, Harold Cohen, Cory Archangel, Manfred Mohr, Wolfgang Staehle, David Rokeby, etc. And I’ve only mentioned half of the artists.

Then there’s our exhibit where I absolutely love Walter Langelaar’s nOtbOt, and of course the Pongmechanik, Furminator, 650 Polygon John Carmack, TFT Tennis, Darkgame, etc. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Note: I was lucky enough to take this quick snapshot of Invaders! as it passed by on the regional television, followed by the lovely Rosina Gómez-Baeza Tinturé.

P.S. I’ll write more about the coding-part later. But just for the record, I ended up writing everything in Processing from scratch with about 2 days of coding mixed with another two days of installation troubles. It uses the OSC, OpenGL, Camera, and ESS libraries for Processing. The tracking software took about two hours, and half of that was just making some little adjustments. Amazing how fast you can make a working installation on-site with Processing.

• Exhibition: Gameworld
• Location: Laboral Centro de arte, Gijon, Spain
• Dates: 30 march, 2007 - 30 June, 2007
• Curator: Carl Goodman
• Associate Curator: Daphne Dragona

• Curatorial Advisors: Chris Burke, Alexander Galloway, Henry Lowood, Julian Oliver, Helen Stuckey

• Games: Spacewar (Graetz, Russell, Wiitanen); Star Raiders (Doug Neubauer); Zork (Marc Blank & Dave Lebling); Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov); Civilization I & II (Sid Meier): Sim City (Will Wright); Super Mario 3 (Shigeru Miyamoto - Nintendo); Warcraft series (Blizzard Entertainment); Doom (ID Software); Sensible World of Soccer (John Hare - Sensible Software)

• Experimental: Flow (Jenova Chen, Kellee Santiago); We Love Katamari (Keita Takahashi - Namco); Braid (Jonathan Blow et al - Number None); Border Games (El Fiambrera Obrera); Arcade Wire (Ian Bogost, Gonzalo Frasca); Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (Danny Ledone); 2nd Person Shooter (Julian Oliver); Darkgame (Eddo Stern); Once More With Feeling (Ken Perlin - NYU MRL); Facade (Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern); Invaders! (Douglas Edric Stanley); axbx (Brent Gustafson); TFT Tennis (Dirk Eijbouts); Pongmechanik (Niklas Roy); AR Tennis (Hitlab New Zealand); Furminator (Fur Collaboriative); Movie Sandbox - Animachine (Friedrich Kirschner); Domestic (Mary Flanagan); Endless Forest (Tale of Tales)

• Machinima: Sheik Attack (Eddo Stern); This Spartan Life (Chris Burke); She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh); Avatar Portraits (Eva and Franco Mattes); 650 Polygon John Carmack (Brody Condon); FPS and WOW (Aram Bartholl); Screen Shots (John Haddock); Readyplayed (Ludic Society); LARP (Brody Condon); WOW and Need for Speed 2 Documentary (Aram Bartholl); Boys in the Hood (Axel Stockburger); Dead in Iraq (Joseph Delappe); The War Room (Joan Leandre); Notbot (Walter Langelaar); Retroyou (Joan Leandre); Space(E)scape (Workspace Unlimited); Super Mario Sleeping (Miltos Manetas); Super Mario Movie (Cory Archangel & Paperrad)

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be in Spain all week preparing for this exhibition. Although I don’t have the time, I said yes simply because it’s a pretty impressive lineup for an exhibition on classic video games, emerging games (such as the lovely Flow), critical games (ex. Darkgame), art-games, unheimlich avatars, etc. I should mention that I grabbed the above list from the Braid blog [link] and not from the Laboral website itself which has yet to publish a full list. So this list might be incorrect/incomplete. But since I saw some of the behind the scenes activity, I do know that many of those artists and/or games will be there, and I just love the list itself even if it is innacurate : Katamari Damacy? Check. Sheik Attack? Check. Furminator? Check. Pongmechanik? Check. Super Mario Movie? Check. Shigeru Miyamoto meets Mary Flanagan? Whynot!?

From my point of view (and Carl knows this already), I will be showing what I consider to be one of my weakest works — a fairly personal work from 2001 that I feel has lost its context, long since stolen by other events; in fact, events that have purposefully been designed to render it unreadable. I’m of course talking about the Iraq war, and you have to give it to Bush when it comes to appropriation: if he were an artist, he’d been an even greater thief than Picasso. But I trust Mr. Goodman’s judgement, as I appreciate his take on gaming as an emerging art form — and no, that doesn’t mean that I think video games are art; I used the word « emerging » there (sheesh, get a life).

So I’m installing a work that the public seems to enjoy, not only because everyone loves Space Invaders, but because you can play it with your body. Further proof that the future is EyeToy and the Wii.

For this exhibit, I’ll be re-working the surveillance code quite a bit, and trying to plug OpenFrameworks into the system, not only because it’s cool, but because it’s ultimately the way to go — surveillance should really be done with hardware specific compiled code, although I might start a flamewar with that comment. I’ll also be adapting the program to the space, but I’ll have to get there before I can start work on that.

I’ve also been looking at plugging in oscpack, because OpenFrameworks is too early (not even public beta) and all the planned libraries such as OSC aren’t linked up yet. But oscpack unfortunately doesn’t do the actual routing, so I might end up using MIDI instead. And if all that doesn’t work, I’ll fall back onto some other tried and true solution, i.e. Processing or (gasp) TrackThemColors.