Playable consoles/games: Atari 2600 – Pacman, Atari 2600 – Missile Command, CBS Colecovision – Donkey Kong, MB Vectrex – Minestorm, MSX – Nemesis, Atari 520 ST – Arkanoid, Amiga 500 – Lemings, Nintendo NES – Super mario bros, SEGA Master System – Alex Kidd, SEGA Megadrive – Sonic, Nintendo Super Nintendo – Super Mario Kart, SNK NeoGeo – Metal Slug, Atari Jaguar – Rayman, SEGA Saturn – SEGA Rally Championship, Sony PlayStation – Tekken, Nintendo N64 – GoldenEye 007, SEGA Dreamcast – REZ, Sony PlayStation2 – Okami, Microsoft XBOX – Top Spin, Nintendo GameCube – Star Wars Rogue Leader, Nintendo Game Boy – Tetris
I was invited a few months back by the very respectible Poptronics to participate in this exhibition which, now that I’ve taken the time to explore the website a little, actually looks pretty interesting. For the « interviews » section of the exhibition, I was asked to revisit the ugly Invaders! brouhaha, as well as to opine on the age-old debate yawn! on the relationship between art + gaming. I am also in pretty cool company; folks like Nicolas Nova, Invader, Isabelle Arvers, Frédérick Raynal, etc.
I’m particularly interested in the scenography of the exhibit which attempts a mise en scène of the both the public and private act of old skool gaming. Video games have over the years often been constructed as a very private act — not all that different from the act of reading –, while at the same time utilizing explicitly shared media such as the family television set as its transmission device. Even in the context of collective gameplay the ultra-tricked-out PC often encloses the gamer through various devices, in an attempt to surround the gamer within their specific perspective of the game world/gameplay. The Gameboy of course created the ultimate template for this enclosure and will further cement this relationship via the 3ds. And yet simultaneously, this configuration has very much been called into question, thanks to phenomena such as Guitar Hero/Rock Band or Nintendo’s own Wii.
The question therefore become, how to expose such a configuration; how to exhibit the game as both image-sound media object and human-computer apparatus. This is not only a question of gameplay, although there is of course that aspect as well: we cannot very well pretend to exhibit the video game as cultural artifact without in some way exposing its various forms gameplay from within the immersive shell. But it is also the notion of another form of shared configuration, specifically of the human-computer embrace that takes place when we sit down and pick up the joystick in its invitation to play. There is an interesting spectacle in that embrace, or at least when considered as a phenomenon in and of itself.
There are also a few other curiosity pieces, such as Sega’s stereo-laserdisc « Time Traveller » which I was actually able to play a few weeks ago at California Extreme 2010. It’s a strange pseudo « Hollogram » device, which plays more or less like laserdisc classics such as Dragon’s Lair. The cheez-y gameplay sucks, but of course you knew that already. Nevertheless it sure feels like an under-explored technology that I wouldn’t be surprised to see recycled in some modified form over the next few years.
Quick post to link up to the Gamerz 05 video that just went live and where you’ll find a few seconds of my bitPong installation. I also shot my own video of the piece, in which I take advantage of this little known device called a tripod, but since I still haven’t had the time to edit it I shouldn’t complain. When I finally find the time to link up the gazillion things I’m working on right now, you’ll hopefully understand why the silent treatment. Until then, here’s the video, with some of that all-around-sloppy-soup that we have come to know as Jankenpopp:
I have finally found a venue to show a decent working version of bitPong, a piece I created some time ago when I was still working on the close relationship with phsyical implementations of data and their aesthetic consequences.
The idea is simple: a two-player game, based on the uber-referenced Pong, here played with 8-bit controllers. When I say « 8-bit controller », I mean literally 8-bit, i.e. 8 buttons, each representing 1-bit of data. Collected together, this byte represents a 256 value variable which is used to control a visual paddle representation within the game. To aid players in the conversion of 1-bit discrete switches into their collective base-two 8-bit value, each button has been labelled: 2^n, i.e. two to the power of zero, two to the power of one, two to the power of two, and so on. This is otherwise known to mere mortals as the values 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128. To move your paddle, you must add each of these values together in order to position it somewhere between position 0 and position 255.
For those who know little about how the computer works internally, this is how the computer moves from the well-known binary 0 | 1 value, to complex values such as the letters you are reading right now: by associating a different value to each bit (the 1 values of « 0 1 0 1 0 1 » get converted to « 0+2+0+4+0+8+0+32 », otherwise known as the value 42) the computer can use a physically limited scheme (0 or 1, on or off, yes or no, true or false) in order to represent a far greater sum of possibilities (here a number from 0 to 255). bitPong plays off of this configuration and brings its dynamics to the surface of the playing field. In order to take control of your paddle, you will have to quickly master binary encoding.
In this Victor Vasarely inspired version of bitPong, hexagons populate the playing field and create an added diversion. Therefore, bitPong has now turned into something like a two-player bitBreakout. I was actually inspired by the following sign which is posted on the wall just next to my installation, indicating the escape routes out of the museum.
The installation as well as tomorrow’s lecture are my attempt at a response to Suzete’s invitation to present something around the subject of « computational instinct ». The subject is vast, and this piece is by no means to be considered my definitive response. But it has allowed me to work out a certain framework for thinking the subject of instinct, and from which I’ve come up with this proposition « no.1 » in what could easily be extended into a series.
While I suppose there are a lot of directions one could take the concept of « instinct », I actually decided to avoid the whole innate vs. aquired debate, and focus instead on the environmental conditions of behavior, in other words looking at existence not from the perspective of a subject (transcendental or otherwise) in conflict with its biological predispositions, but instead from the perspective of a being historically embedded in an environment; i.e. a question of « Umwelt » as a formative ingredient to embodiness. From this perspective, instinct is not some contrary force acting against us, but rather the residue of our environmental context that exposes itself through our behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, instinct could then be considered a context within which behavior takes place; it is the behavorial framework that reveals something about the nature of our consciousness and how this consciousness is shaped by our negotiations and inscription within the world.
Which leads me back to this first experiment which like all experiments is about exploring the limits of a concept. While the concept of Umwelt is highly cybernetic in its conception of stimulus and effectuation, I found it more interesting to approach the concept of Umwelt from a purely temporal perspective. So I asked the question: what is our temporal behavior? and its corrollary can we experience other temporal existences? And if indeed the answer to the latter is yes, is our experience of temporally divergent worlds limited to communication or can we also simulate such environments, through immersion or other means?
In « Bohlen’s Experiment No.1 », I have recreated a machine described only on paper in Philip K. Dick’s 1964 science fiction novel « Martian Time-Slip ». In the novel, Dick suggests that communication could be made with autistic children via temporal variation devices:
« There’s a new theory about autism, from Bergholzlei, in Switzerland [...] It assumes a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic individual so that the environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot cope with it. In fact, he is unable to perceive it properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded-up television program, so that objects whizzed by so fast so as to be invisible, and sound was a gobbledygook, you know? Just extremely high-pitched mishmash. Now this new theory would place the autistic child in a closed chamber where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slowed down. Both sound and video slowed, at last so slowed that you and I would not be able to perceive motion or comprehend the human sounds as speech… » – Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip
The novel goes on to discuss an attempt to build such a device, but which ultimately fails for various reasons concerning the intrigue.
Obviously, a similar device has already been made for the image: it’s called « 24-hour Psycho » and « Five-Year Drive-by (The Searchers) », by Douglas Gordon. And stretching the image this way is fairly easy, at least from a technical point of view: just slow it down. But I got to thinking about the sound, which is continuous medium and not discontinuous like the film frame: how could we stretch the sound in a more consistent way while avoiding the chipmunk effect?
In my first attempt at creating Bohlen’s device (Bohlen being the character hired to actually build such a thing in Dick’s novel), I decided to create a purely audio communications device wherein one could communicate in real-time and yet to two divergent scales of real-time. You speak into a microphone, and out the other end your speech is stretched from anywhere to 1x to 100000x. You can adjust the speed with a dial.
Therefore, you co-exist in two temporal scales, and yet both, while temporally divergent, can still be considered real-time in the cybernetic sense; it is merely the biological rythm or scale of that real-time that has shifted. Indeed, as my colleague Jean Cristofol has argued within our various theoretical working groups (cf. « lenteur »), real-time is a temporal form, and not a measure of speed. s
Speed and feedback are in fact two very different temporal forms.
On the technical side of things, this piece is little more than a real-time adaptation of Nasca Octavian Paul’s Paul Stretch algorithm. Basically, it uses FFT to analyze the frequencies of the sound at any single point within the wafeform, and then scrubs through those frequencies indepedently of the temporal constraints of the incoming audio. The result is fully comprehensible speech, no chipmunk effect, and yet stretching on a scale which can go from seconds, to days, and even (if desired) years. As anyone who has heard 9 Beet Stretch knows, the result can be quite beautiful.
While there are some other questions I’m asking as well in this piece, notably the question of consciousness in relation to the speed of computation, I’ll discuss all that tomorrow. This talk will also be reproduced in a publication some time next year. I’ll also try to add some photos to this post once I’ve had a moment to return to the exhibition space with a camera.
On Saturday, I’ll be speaking at « code_source », an exhibit organized by Etienne Mineur (cf. Incandescence) as part of the Féstival international de l’affiche et du graphisme de Chaumont. The exhibit will attack the question « what is interaction design? » through a historical survey of software, hardware, theoretical productions and games from this still-emerging field. There will also be a section devoted to the creations of art and design students from France, Colombia, USA, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, China, etc. This is where I fit into the picture, as several works from our Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence will be documented in the exhibit (more details to come).
Several designers, yours truly included, were also asked to discuss the subject of interaction design for the French graphic design magazine Étapes in conjunction with « Code_source ». We were all asked the same set of questions related to the definition itself of Interaction Design as well as the historical landmarks that influenced us. The selected designers were: Geoffrey Dorne, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Jean-Louis Fréchin, Gabriel Jorby, Éric Viennot, Projet Mü, and abstractmachine and have just been published in the May 2009 edition of Étapes (#168). Here are a few photos of my interview.
You can read the article yourself for my full comments, but here are video links to the four historical events I chose to highlight: Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad (1963); Myron Krueger, Videoplace (1972-); Seymour Papert, Logo (1967-); Steve Russel et al., Spacewar! (1962). These are fairly standard responses, I know, but I was dealing with an audience (graphic designers) that often confuse (contemporary) software with the conceptual frameworks that made them possible. From this perspective, some history can do little harm.
Of all the interviews, I thought that Jean-Louis Fréchin’s list was the coolest:
The dissociation of gold and the dollar, thereby « announcing the birth of a society of immateriality and exchange »
The personal computer (« augmenting people’s capacities and means of expression »)
1969, the year of the moon landing, for its’ introduction of « mass transportation (747), hyperspeed (Concorde) and networks (Arpanet) », i.e. the concerns and constructs of our present world
So, as I mentioned above, several works produced in part at the Atelier Hypermédia over the past 10 years will be documented at « Code_source ». Here is a list of the works (sorry, in French, but at least I’ve included some images/videos) :
Le WebWaste est une poubelle sur Internet. Par l’activation d’un robot-éboueur, ses utilisateurs se font vider automatiquement le contenu de leurs poubelles (sur ordinateur) dans cette décharge collective (Internet). Les document s’empilent sur le serveur de la décharge. En visitant le site web www.webwaste.net, n’importe qui peut ensuite naviguer à travers les images, textes, sons et vidéos dont d’autres auraient souhaitaient se débarrasser. On peut y chercher de l’inspiration, ou y flâner par curiosité — avec la possibilité bien sûr de récupérer des fichiers pour une consommation chez soi. Les règles sont ouverts, on peut y faire ce que l’on veut : jouer, manifester, dire la vérité ou proliférer des mensonges — c’est aux utilisateurs de choisir.
Dans l’Atelier Hypermédia, nous trouvons qu’il est parfois pratique de suivre le principe de « Just Fuck Around® » quand il s’agit d’apprendre une nouvelle technologie. Dans ce visualiseur/jeu, il n’y a pas eu d’autre but que d’apprendre les fonctionnalités 3D de base du logiciel multimédia Director. Ce modéliseur 3D a été le résultat d’une heure d’expérimentation avec quelques heures d’ajustements par la suite. Il n’y a pas réellement d’autre but que celle de l’exploration d’une nouvelle forme.
Le flux télévisuel est pris en tant que potentiel, un potentiel d’images, de mouvements et de signes. Le processus y extrait, de façon automatisée et en temps réel, toutes les parties d’images qui ont changé lors de la diffusion de l’émission télévisuelle. Il les capture et les redistribue ensuite de façon spatio-temporelle sur une boucle de vingt-quatre images. En l’exposant au spectateur image par image, il agit ainsi sur la diffusion elle-même, en gardant en mémoire et en présentant potentiellement plusieurs fois chaque fragment d’image. L’esprit hypnotisé s’habitue aux fragments, voire les attend et tente de les recomposer. Mais cet effet recherché de rémanence n’empêche pas un effacement progressif de la configuration. Car chaque fragment additionné à la boucle est présent et répété jusqu’à ce qu’un autre le recouvre et ainsi de suite jusqu’à sa disparition et son oubli.
Lors de son passage à l’Atelier Hypermédia, Nao expérimentait principalement avec les formes interactives où image, son et jeu se mélangeaient en une seule entité audiovisuelle. Pour ses performances extra-muros, Nao a décidé de créer un instrument nomade qui nécessiterait uniquement une machine connecté à Internet pour être joué.
Tetris adventure est une variation autour du célèbre jeu de réflexion, mais se jouant désormais en ligne de commande. Il faut entrer manuellement les commandes au clavier dans la console pour faire se déplacer les pièces. Ce changement au sein même du gameplay instaure un rapport au temps différent. La réactivité du jeu n’est plus immédiate et impose au joueur de faire preuve de davantage de stratégie et de réflexion.
Il s’agit également d’un hommage aux premiers jeux d’aventure textuels (Adventure ), où le joueur devait entrer en toutes lettres les instructions.
Quelques faits intéressants à propos de Tetris adventure:
-Tetris adventure est déconseillé aux dylsexique, dixlesquique, dyslexiques.
-Tetris adventure est conseillé par le Medef pour former des dactylos plus performantes.
-L’homme qui a 8 doigts à chaque main est également le champion du monde de Tetris adventure.
Liste des commandes:
[gauche] déplacer la pièce à gauche
[droite] déplacer la pièce à droite
[tombe] faire tomber la pièce
[tourne] faire tourner la pièce
Tetris adventure a été conçu et présenté à l’occasion d’Eniarof 0.4, une fête foraine revisitée, qui laisse (entre autres) une large place aux détournements de jeux vidéos.
8=8 est un groupe de 4 programmeurs / 4 compositeurs / 4 VJs / 4 musiciens / 4 artistes. Tout les quatre apportent leur propre sensibilité esthétique et techniques dans un instrument numérique collectif: L’Hypertable. Par le déplacement de leurs mains sur la surface de l’Hypertable, images et sons sont générés, créant une opportunité unique d’improvisation musicale. 8=8 utilise l’Hypertable pour y jouer des programmes / instruments originaux, dans des contextes de concert / performance / demo.
En 2003, Douglas Edric Stanley crée « L’hypertable » – dispositif d’image/surface interactive. En 2005 il invite trois de son atelier à Aix-en-Provence à se joindre à lui : TM (a.k.a. Thomas Michalak), univers grouillant et mécanique ; Naoyuki Tanaka (artiste japonais résidant à Marseille) ; JankenPopp avec son monde teinté de fraises tagada et d’énergie punk ; et enfin l’univers d’ abstractmachine, plutôt sobre et conceptuel. L’hypertable a été co-produit par le CIREN, avec le soutien d’Arcadi, le DICREAM, et le SCAM.
The mashup-machine est un instrument electronique qui prend la forme d’une boite en bois surmontée de quatre boutons lumineux. Chaque bouton de la taille d’une main permet la manipulation et le mixage intuitif de plusieurs sources multimédia aléatoires. La machine est une interface polyvalente, dynamique et expérimentale qui a été utilisée de 2005 à 2007 lors de performances AV et de concerts lives, elle a également été présentée en tant qu’installation sonore interactive lors de festivals et d’expositions collectives (Eniarof 0.2.2, Festival Emergences).
Deux GameBoy reliées par un câble sont posées sur une réplique miniature d’une table de pingpong. Les visiteurs sont invités à jouer a une version classique du jeu vidéo « Pong » (jeu de tennis). À la différence du jeu original la balle n’est pas visible par les deux joueurs en même temps mais passe d’un écran à l’autre en créant la surprise.
Partant du concept de la machine schizophrénique chez Deleuze et Guattari, le « Gameboy nucleus » est une technologie pour laquelle les facultés de commandes auraient été mises à l’extérieur de la machine construisant ainsi une machine en perpétuelle reconstitution. Autrement dit, ce « nucleus » suit un processus de « physicalisation » dans laquelle l’algorithme, le programme, ou le code, s’exprime à travers des objets tirés entre fonctionnement physique et fonctionnement logiciel.
« Objets Orientées-Objet » (workshop), Douglas Edric Stanley avec l’assistance d’Anne-Laure Schneider et de Pierre Rossel, 2005
Workshop avec les étudiants de l’Haute École d’Art et de Design Genève avec la participation de l’Atelier Hypermédia ESA Aix-en-Provence
Ce workshop de 5 jours exploraient différentes possibilités de l’utilisation du dispositif « Hypertable » créé à l’origine par Douglas Edric Stanley pour son logiciel de cinéma algorithmique Concrescence. Trois étudiants et un enseignant ont terminé des projets pour lors de ce workshop : Pierre-Erick Lefvbre, Jana Korcjomkina, Pierre Rossel, Baptiste Coulon (dans l’ordre d’apparition des projets).
« Déplacements » est constitué de 24 ventilateurs formant un rectangle. Chaque ventilateur est « pixel », sa vitesse de rotation et l’intensité de la lumière de ses LED varient en fonction du niveau de gris correspondant au pixel de référence. Cet écran de ventilateurs est piloté par un ordinateur sur lequel tourne un programme simulant un automate cellulaire intitulé « Le jeu de la vie » (créé par John Horton Conway en 1970). C’est un modèle mathématique où chaque ventilateur est une cellule. «Déplacement » en tant que détournement de cet objet, composant de l’ordinateur, devenant image. Il ne s’agit pas d’un « déplacement » physique mais d’un mouvement, d’un flux.
Stefan Piat travaille sur la reconstitution de monuments et d’espaces en utilisant un système de mosaïques photographiques et vidéographiques qu’il relie dans des cartes dynamiques et interactives. Dans Forsinicola, Piat construit le Fort Saint Nicolas à Marseille. S’y mèle non seulement des images de formats divers, mais surtout des images avec des temporalités multiples, allant du cliché instantané à la chronophotographie (Marey/Muybridge) en passant par des ralentissements et des images-panoramiques. Le tout s’agrège dans une forme qui peut se décomposer et se recomposer selon les mouvements du joueur et du programme.
Que nous habitions là où Cézanne peignait, que nous y vivions ou que nous traversions quotidiennement les paysages que Cézanne a peints, nous sommes tous un peu des habitants de ses peintures. Le studio de création Digital Deluxe a conçu et réalisé Le Voyage immobile, une invitation à partager cet héritage commun. Mais de quoi s’agit-il ? D’un module itinérant que l’on va retrouver dans l’espace public : le centre ville, les villages, les lycées, etc. qui va offrir au passant une découverte sensorielle de l’univers du peintre.
C’est le Centre européen de création et de développement culturel (CECDC) qui a lancé cette ambitieuse réalisation en collaboration avec l’association Terre active. Elle permet d’évoquer, sans chercher à la reproduire ni à l’expliquer, l’expérience sensorielle que représentait l’acte de peindre chez Cézanne. Voici donc une promenade interactive, différente, et sans bouger d’un pouce, sur les pas de Cézanne. Une balade qui, du paysage à l’oeuvre, permet d’évoquer le regard de Cézanne sur la nature, de comprendre le passage du motif au tableau.
Production CECDC / Conception et réalisation Digital Deluxe / Itinérance et tournée Terre Active
Le système présenté est une installation venteuse, constituée de 15 ventilateurs disposés en cercle. Chaque ventilateur souffle en fonction d’informations fournies en temps réel par Internet et utilise le flux de stations météo du monde entier pour générer des dessins à la surface d’une feuille.
Chessynthesis est un dispositif sonore qui transforme deux joueurs d’échecs en des musiciens. Chessynthesis analyse en temps-réel les mouvements de chaque pièce sur le plateau, même celle qui se trouve dans la main du joueur. Avec ses informations, il interprète les indices tactiques/stratégiques du jeu, les tensions, les centres de gravité, et les transcode en de la musique avec de la synthèse granulaire.
« Episureo », Stefan Schwabe & Sebastian Neitsch, 2008
développé à l’Ecole supérieure d’art Aix-en-Provence et au Kunstuniversität Linz
The paths we choose to follow each day, to go to work, to move around in our own homes or even the ways we move during our free-time are mostly pre-defined by architecture, human crowds or subconsciously learned behaviours. During all this, the personal space we keep around ourselves depends on the place we are at and the people surrounding us. We all need privacy but also depend on social relationships and so-for on close contacts to other humans. Our aim is to show this never-ending, pulsing conflict and the trails the participants leave in space and time.
To realize this within an interactive installation, we had to find a place where the participants would stay for quite a while and where they would have to move consciously but also relaxed. We wanted the people to naturally communicate to each other so that groups would appear and we needed them to move in a quite large radius. A swimming pool is almost perfect for this. It is like a stage you step on and just by its architectural form, it already pre-defines paths the swimmers usually follow and with which we as authors can play. On top of that the swimming and the water might relax the visitors so that they have the time and mind to concentrate on the installation. This was never been done before, so not only the visualisation of movement and the dynamics of human crowds where our main topics now, but also the difficult task to convert a public swimming pool into a huge interface.
The picture on the ceiling responds via motion-tracking to the swimmers in the water. Depending on their movements, their speeds and their distances to each other, the visualisation changes and with the help of an underwater loudspeaker variant sounds are generated. Abstract graphics slowly appear and get more and more complex after time, showing trails, movements and the group dynamics in the pool. To picture
the whole movement and not only the one of each single swimmer, sometimes a kind of current appears that influences the whole visualisation.
développé au studio Lentigo, ENSBA Marseille avec l’assistance de l’Atelier Hypermédia ESA Aix-en-Provence
La ville est complexe, en perpétuelle mutation. Les flux d’images, d’information et de déplacement superposent en strates. Dans Node City, on se déplace à l’intérieur de ses strates via un système de navigation corporelle : autour de notre corps une projection au sol nous immerge à l’intérieur d’une carte que l’on peut explorer tout simplement en se déplaçant. Via un système de surveillance, on repère les promeneurs et leur propose un carrefour mobile de vidéos à explorer; en se baladant on découvre les différentes strates audiovisuelles de la ville.
shades of white, mêlant danse, images et son, a été pour le festival les affluents au pavillon noir d’aix-en-provence, en collaboration avec bruno péré. l’idée principale est une évolution de la lumière blanche au travers de ses trois composantes colorées : rouge, vert et bleu. les projections sont la seule source de lumière pour les danseurs sur scène. elles sont diffusées au sol, sur le mur du fond, voire les deux.
la majeure partie de ces histoires colorées est programmé, puis exportée en vidéo et montée sur logiciel vidéo. voilà un petit résumé sur ce que l’on a essayé de symboliser par ces temps colorés :
le rouge est le commencement, comme une naissance hésitante et fragile.
le vert correspond à la création d’un espace hésitant, une sorte de paysage sans dimension.
le bleu est le résidu, après l’explosion blanche des trois couleurs réunies.
tantôt au mur, tantôt au sol, la lumière est image. l’image est matière. le mouvement du corps évolue avec un espace coloré qui se raconte peu à peu. rouge. vert. bleu.
Some time has passed since my Invaders! installation started something of a $#!¥storm back in August at the Leipzig Games Convention. I tried to give the piece some context and gave a few interviews to responsible journalists, but ultimately the whole thing just blew up as people lost all sense of scale and started taking for granted all sorts of assumptions about the work. Ok, so that’s the backstory, and you can think of all that what you will.
But now that hipster pop acts such as Röyksopp are reportedly referencing the work (I have my doubts) and given that some time has gone by, it is perhaps finally possible to post this video which I have already been showing to crowds at various talks over the past few months. It’s actually not that great of a video, but it does shed a little more light on what actually was going on in Leipzig. As it has been reported elsewhere, there was something of a disconnect between the public reaction to the piece on-site, and people’s reaction on-line. Playing it was apparently very different than just reporting on its visual aspects, especially the types of images at the end of the video, I assume, where you can see the full extent of the damage of the buildings as the game matches ever more closely the historical progression of events (planes, impact, fire, structural damage, jumpers, etc). It would obviously be better to release a more complete video tracing the way in which the game itself mapped the historical events back onto the 8-bit classic, but given that the Games Convention itself wasn’t really the ideal place for this type of analytic meditation anyway, I’ll just go with this video testimony of people playing it, as it was presented. Some people only saw either the Kotaku image, or the Laboral Video, which made for another form of disconnect as people didn’t understand what was actually going on and therefore what the fuss was all about.
Here’s the Röyksopp video by the way:
If it’s true that Röyksopp is referencing my piece, that’s very cool, especially since it’s a great song. Again, I have my doubts since many pop acts don’t really use imagery all that critically, pull $#!¥ in from any direction, and therein pastiche everything into one big self-same pile. It’s always frustrating to see the extent to which music videos often end up whitewashing the images they reference. There is a long history to this tendency, although there is perhaps one recent notable exception: Justice’s « Stress » which was able to reference Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and recontextualize it with a new political charge which it successfully maintained throughout, going so far as to provoke significant debate in France concerning the ontological status of the image (Is it protest? Is it glorification? Is it criticism?):
Pulling all this back to the Invaders! debate, I actually had an interesting public conversation with Louis Bec last november at the Biennale Figures of Interactivity while presenting this work. According to Bec, there are certain complex calculations in mathematics that require the introduction of a « zone d’ombre» in order to be resolved, and that if you do not in fact include this shadow region, the equation becomes incalculable. Bec tried to draw an analogy by suggesting that September 11th had become culturally unthinkable, and that in order to re-render it imaginable so as to process it, a certain « zone d’ombre » is required, which he suggested comes here in the form of a historical reconstruction (or simulation) of the event which reconstructs the violence in a highly symbolic form so as to able to process it. He went on to create similar analogies with animal simulations of violence and combat in play, and so on. That last part is actually part of the general narrative gamers often use defending the role of violence in video games and I don’t know if I want to get lost down that path because the argument hangs on a certain subtlely that often gets lost in translation. But beyond this idea of simulation, for Louis, the ambiguity of this work « on violence » is merely one of the pre-requisites of needing a shadowy region in order to render the violent act re-thinkable.
Antonin Fourneau and I are gearing up for the next Eniarof which begins construction next Monday and will open March 27th and 28th for two evenings of fun (18h-24h), open of course to any and all publics (animal, mineral, vegetable, fantasmagorical, whatever). I’ll post more at a later date concerning Eniarof itself, what it is, etc, but for the moment I will simply mention that we have some great special guests this year, including Nicolas Boone (cf. BUP) and Etienne Cliquet, along with previous eniarofers (cf. Charcutrie Brilliant), the students of the Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, and finally all the various stragglers and hangers-on who will throw up attractions with whatever means they can muster. This will all be taking place at the École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence and we’re open to all sorts of propositions, so if you want to join in on the fun, make yourself known and we’ll figure something out. Make sure you read the Dogme Eniarof first, as it gives the general theme of that-thing-otherwise-known-as-eniarof.
Anyway… long story short, before I get submerged by the Eniarof beast, I wanted to post a fun attraction my daughter and I made in a couple of hours for Eniarof. She’s 12, has seen every digitalinteractiveroboticgenerative thingamajig you can throw at her and really could care less. Twenty million screens and a gazillion sensors? Yeah whatever. It networks halfway across the globe and into space? Hasbeen. When she was four she shook the third arm of Stelarc, at five she was introduced to a man named Naut Humon, and over the years has met all sorts of other wonderful extraterrestrial constructs. Zzzzz. Next! So what could I possibly propose to peak the interest of a been-there-done-that 12-year-old? Actually, for years she’s been asking me to make something that matters, you know, something people might actually care about, like, for example, something with horses. I actually do have a wonderful installation along these lines (think Elephants, Stallions and Giraffes) but which has yet to find the right exhibit/curator, so she waits and waits still. So I finally gave up waiting, and as Eniarof was coming up we found a few available hours and created a horse simulator we are calling Henniraof. The functions of this horse simulator are simple: you wear various iterations of horse heads and bodies made out of cardboard, and prance about in an arena we will build for the occasion with similarly low-budget materials. Add one webcamera, one Optical Flow algorithm, a MacMini, some speakers and some horse noises and you have yourself a really fun horse simulator.
I’ve included a link to the downloadable software. Remember, this was made very quickly and while it could be far more sophisticated this would totally defeat the purpose as an Eniarof attraction. Rule one when making an Eniarof attraction: once it works good enough for people to have fun with it, you should stop and move on to the next attraction. Rule two: do whatever it takes to get to rule one.
Added note, the source code will probably not work in your OpenFrameworks installation, since I’ve done some nasty hacking into my version of OpenFrameworks. When the next version of OpenFrameworks comes out its’ OpenCV module should have Optical Flow integrated in the basic installation; I’ll re-compile at that point. Sorry about that but I’m too busy right now. Until then, the code is simply listed here as a reference. Again, sorry…
That said, we plan to add Optical Flow into the next iteration of the OpenCV Processing Libraries which should actually be pretty easy to do in and of itself. It’s really just cleaning up the current library, updating to the new OpenCV release, and fixing some major architectural mistakes we made (impossible to use multiple instances, etc) in the first library that will take time.
The horsehead construction formula was designed by Lola in just a couple of minutes. Basically I left the room to get some industrial-sized staples and when I got back she’d designed this brilliant system, so I take no credit for the design (other than some vague notion of genetic influence). All of the elements are both structural and visual. The black tape reinforces the solidity, designs the look, and simultaneously protects users from the sharp edges of the big staples (it also helps keep the staples from ripping).
Ingredients:
Cardboard box
Tape (black gaffer tape gives great contrast with the brown cardboard)
4 x Necrobutcher-sized staples (or just cut coat-hangers into staples, whatever)
Pliers (for working with the staples)
Cutting knife or scissors
Steps:
Get a box.
Flatten the cardboard box by identifying the natural seam where the box was glued together and tear at this point. This should give you a flat piece of cardboard to work with.
Identify the ugliest side and remove it. In my example, I’m removing the side where the handle was torn off (probably through use — those eggs must have been pretty heavy). Keep this piece, we will use it later for the horse’s mane.
Fold the remaining sides together to make the horse’s head shape. You will probably figure it out pretty quickly by looking at the photos, but the basic idea is to make an elongated horse head by folding the two side-flaps over one another. I recommend folding the lower flap over the upper flap.
Chose the strategic points for the four staples and place the black tape on both sides (inside and out). Try to position the back staples at a strategic point: not too close to the edge of each flap so as to risk tearing the cardboard, but high enough to be used as the horse’s eyes once covered with tape. This is a judgement call, but you don’t really have to be all that perfect about it. We noticed that as long as you get the eyes close enough to the position of true horse anatomy eye sockets, imagination takes over.
Push the staples into the cardboard (using pliers, or an industrial staple-gun), fold the ends down as flat as possible, and place a piece of tape over the staples, in order to protect whomever from scratching/cutting themselves on the staples. Remember, Eniarof is an event open to animals of all ages, so let’s try to avoid meaningless accidents (thereby leaving room for meaningful ones). Of note: once you’ve placed the two staples at the horse’s muzzle your structure should be pretty solid and you’ll be able to work fairly easily on the rest of the horse head.
In order to make your horse even more solid, and simultaneously build his/her bridal gear, wrap one long piece of tape around the nose.
Cut out the ears. I suggest first making a drawing on the pieces you want to cut. I also suggest using the cutout from the first ear to draw the second ear. This should give both ears the same size/shape.
Create the mane with whatever scraps you have remaining and attach them with tape.
The method you use to make your viewport is up to you. Here I’ve started cutting from where the original handle-hole was cutout and simply cut horizontally to the same length on the other side. I then wrapped the edges with tape so as to avoid tearing the cardboard and eventually cutting the players’ own muzzles. Make sure that your viewport is large enough for the eyes and the nose. Note that you should now be able to see through the hole at the horse’s nose on the other side.
All horses should have a name. Naming your horse is a pretty easy affair. Remember, nothing is superfluous. Here we’ve chosen two names based on the cardboard boxes’ original packaging information: « Boulette » was the name of our first horse, and « Calibre » our second, although I now regret not having retained « Oeuf » from the packaging. Living in France it would have been easy to name our horse « Picard » or « Carrefour » (wheras in the States I suppose it would be « Kellogs », « Joe » or « Safeway », depending on where you shop), but then you’d have a lot of horses all with the same name, so « Boudin », « Tripes », « Sponges », or « Spam » is probably a better bet.
Voilà, you now have a horse puppet. Download the software, set up your camera and go get all jiggy wit’ it.
Some space was reserved yet again this year for the Atelier Hypermédia at the Festival Gamerz. Gamerz is a festival that explores the relationship between art & video games. This edition was co-curated by Isabelle Arvers who appears to be helping this promising little festival power up to the next level.
I’m a little late with this one, given that I was trapped in the snow in my little village for several days. I actually missed the opening and had to assist the last days of the Atelier Hypermédia’s contibution via lots of ftp and sms. Debugging and adjusting variables over cellular is not really my idea of fun, although it’s certainly not the first time. So I’ve only now been to the exhibit to actually see/document the works (and fix a couple bugs).
Our first contribution is from Florent Deloison, a 5th year student at the school and who is presenting his installation « Recession Kid »: an 8-bit role-playing romp through the fun of mass-layoffs, offshore banking, slum landords, and free-wheeling stock market pimping. While the game harkens back to old-skool RPG’s, it adds some minor sophistications to the genre by indexing the gameplay to real-time fluctuations of various on-line data, ranging from live stock market values to weather conditions on wall street.
The second installation is called « Twiist » and is a game from Jane Antoniotti which, while intended as a conceptual work, is actually quite fun to play. We built this one from the ground up in about three days when our previously planned installation went AWOL. Adding snow into the factor, I consider this quite a feat. Jane’s idea was to build a game using the Wii Balance Board, transforming it into an un-balanced board. Basically, during gameplay, the board periodically de-axes its center of gravity, and the player has to twist themselves into various improbable contorsions in order to re-produce, on screen, the ideal image of beauty. For Gamerz 04, Jane decided for a decidely Baywatch edition for the beauty model.
While making « Twiist », we wondered why Nintendo had never thought of this idea, for example by tying the Balance Board into their underwhelming Photo Channel. In the Atelier we were playing Flow on a Playstation 3 last week and were wondering, in a similar vein, why there aren’t any decent uses of the the Wiimote as simple and obvious as WiiPlay. Anyway, in Jane’s Twiist, the game was programmed to dynamically adjust to whatever photo is fed into it, and could easily be integrated with some simple OpenCV-style face detection + blob detection from within one’s own photo library. So any photo library could feasibly be fed into the game. There are in fact many potential variations to Jane’s game and would be pretty easy to program. Too bad we don’t have easy access to WiiWare (along the likes of the iPhone App Store, or even Microsoft’s XNA Creator’s Club), otherwise we would have been happy to port it to the real Wii. Again, the industry’s overprotective economic model is confounded with a contemporary version of shooting oneself in the foot. Nintendo has called one of their series « ArtStyle », with one of their games looking suprisingly similar to this old program created in 2004 in the Atelier by Yannick Aïvayan. Given that on rare occasions what we design is not so dissimilar, it makes no sense to me why we can’t distribute on that platform. But there you go, again: business models. But I’m rambling…
Of note: both games were built with Processing and Twiist uses Osculator to pull the data off the Balance Board and send it to Processing via Open Sound Control. For those looking to use the Balance Board, be careful of this little gem: early Balance Boards (April-May 2008) send their data out strangely and Osculator can register two of the four pads. This makes no sense of course, since the board works fine on the Wii itself, but there you go. Be forewarned. Camille Troillard, the creator of Osculator, has just sent me a beta test of the latest incarnation which fixes this problem. He is still testing, but my version works and on a balance board that previously worked incorrectly.
Also of note, both games use heavy doses of Polymorphism for more variation and evolution in the gameplay. Basically, if you are going to be doing any moderate to serious game design, you should know classes, objects, inheritance, and polymorphism. I have an old blog post on this subject.
Two other notable works at Gamerz, and from Atelier Hypermédia alumni to boot:
Antonin Fourneau’s R+R (at the Galerie Sextius), a totally killer head-banging apparatus where you don a heavy-metal-approved wig, and violently bob your head up and down, provoking ear-splitting guitar riffs that (with the proper frenzy) pump it up to eleven.
Manuel Braun and Virginie Le Gall’s « Fais-moi mal », a masochistic punching ball with an integrated speaker+accelerometer+arduino: as you punch the ball, the ball cries out for more. Probably one of the more gadgety installations by Manuel, but fun nevertheless and well-designed.
There are many other interesting installations, for example France Cadet’s Sweet Pads or Paul Destieu’s installation at the art school gallery which I can only describe as an autistic tennis match: the machine throwing and catching its own tennis ball, all day long. Er, uh, maybe that’s tautological tennis? Tennis recursion loop?
And finally, there appears to be a promising evening on January 28th with a contemporary take on the endlessly recycled ideas begun by Radúz Çinçera’s « Kinoautomat ». This time, the interface is your mobile phone: the film « E1000 » asks you to turn your cellphone on before the movie begins, and to use it in order to interact with the movie.
The students have organized an exhibition to kick-start the year and asked me if I could add anything. Since I’ve been working on a series of tempermental clocks over the past two weeks on all sorts of platforms (iPhone, embedded, clock, watch, computer, etc), I figured I could throw one in for their exhbition. I’ll try to get some pictures and post them here, but basically this one is a clock that hides the time whenever it detects someone looking at it.
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.
“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
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.
