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:
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.
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.
Video: Invaders! (From the Gameworld exhibition, Laboral, Gijòn, Spain)
Last update 01/09/2008 (see below). See also my attempt at context.
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.”
update (01/09) : Some people continue to be under the impression that I created a game in which the goal is to bomb the World Trade Center. Herein lies the power of rumor, suggestion, and above all controversy. I made no such game. In Invaders!, you are very clearly defending the towers, on the side of America, and there is no option to play the role of the invaders. Any suggestion to the contrary is probably under the influence of one early report, in which the flames of the towers were the only thing that remained. This reporter did not understand that the work was interactive, and this inaccuracy was eventually corrected. If, from there, people are still offended, fine; and you are welcome to comment your objections here or on the many blogs that have been covering this story. But I found it quite telling when, yesterday, upon correcting someone poorly informed on this matter, this same person replied, “Then what is all the controversy about?” Indeed.
Stéphane Cousot and I are announcing today the public availability of our OpenCV Library for Processing. Although the library has been ready (in various states of undress) for a few months now, we have been using the intervening time to learn more in-depth how OpenCV works, debug, simplify method calls, test the library in real-world situations, add various features, plan out features for future releases, and — most importantly — write coherent documentation for those Processing users discovering OpenCV for the first time. It might seem like a light start, given the limited number of functions we’ve made available from the impressive Intel library, but we wanted to make sure each component worked as promised. Also, we wanted to make working with it as painless as possible for Processing users, and follow the Processing logic of getting complex things done with a limited number of simple methods. And finally, we wanted to make sure it was stable enough in a real-world installation context.
For the features, you have internal (via OpenCV) and external (via Processing) capture, basic image treatment (threshold, comparison, extraction, etc), contour tracking, face & body tracking, and a few other little goodies thrown in here and there. So, as it stands, you can (for example), recognize someone’s face, grab the outline of that face, and go into the image data of that person’s face to extract the face data. Or, you could use infrared filters with lights pointed at or placed on your body (see below), a multi-touch surface, or some other artificial lighting condition to grab light blobs for finger or body-part tracking and use that data somehow in Processing. There are obviously many possibilities.
Some of the things you cannot yet do, and which we plan to add to the library: motion history images and optical flow (pixel tracking), kalman predictions, color tracking, histograms, and obviously the list could go on and on. A lot of these functions I already have working in OpenFrameworks for an installation (soon to be announced) which will be exhibited later this summer. So consider the current release a starting point, with what we believe is a fairly clean start, but we could be wrong on that. The code is open, so go in and dig around — perhaps you can give us some good advice or add to the code yourself.
Special note: this library will also work for pure Java work, and yes, there is Java documentation.
So, why did it take so long? Well… when I say that we’ve been busy testing it in laboratory and real-world instances, I mean it. I’ve gotten some mail on this recently, so I should make things a little clearer: if you ever wondered why I don’t post as much as I (or apparently some of you) would like, it’s because I’m busy elsewhere working on so many @#&*$% projects. I do not just work on my own projects and I am definitely not a full-time blogger : I teach, run an atelier, collaborate with other artists, do research, write, write code, consult, curate, and somewhere in there, I’m a dad for two lovely and brilliant young (or youngish) women. Since I don’t have a secretary, nor a double, that means some creative Douglas-time-sharing. So when I’m quiet here, it most certainly means that I’m busy doing one of these other things. And over the past few months, that has worked out to about 50% of my creative work involving OpenCV in Processing and OpenFrameworks.
And on Stéphane’s side, he’s been just as busy working over the past six months on a gazillion projects for various artists, art students, and researchers; and only a part of that work involved this OpenCV library.
So, what have we been doing with it? The library has already been used in numerous projects at the Atelier Hypermédia, in external workshops at schools such as the Institut d’Arts Visuels in Orléans, as a research tool at the DRII laboratory (Dispositifs relationnels : Installations Interactives) at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and in two public works, one an installation for Gamerz 0.2 and the other as a component of a haptic dance performance-dispositif by Wolf Ka and his studio. Finally, we used the library to prototype an urban-design project by Lei Zhao for the Studio Lentigo, Marseille although this project was eventually finished in OpenFrameworks due to the high video performance demands of the installation. So all in all, about a dozen different projects over the past few months.
Here are a few images/videos with links for more information on the author(s)/works:
Lei Zhao, Node City (follow link for more videos).
Fabien Artal, Diplôme DNSEP (avec les félicitations du jury), L’école supérieure d’Aix-en-Provence. There is a video, but you’ll have to jump to 23:15 for Fabien’s installation.
Students of the Institut d’Arts Visuels, Workshop Légerté + Nuit des musées, Orléans (follow this link for — very poor quality — video).
I’ll leave off with these images from an installation Stefan Schwabe created with his collaborator Sebastian Neitsch in a public pool in Halle. As swimmers wade about, their movements are tracked by a camera and modify an image built out of 4 overlapping projectors, projecting onto the dome of the rotunda. It should be mentioned that, like Lei Zhao’s Node City, this piece used Processing only during the prototyping phase (the final work was created in vvvv). Nevertheless, Stefan & Sebastian’s project was an important one in our year-long experimentation with various forms of video surveillance in art and design installations. (See Stefan’s website for video of this installation).
Update: I used the wrong terminology. Oops. We decided to call this version v01, precisely to suggest that there is still much progress to be made. Previously I called it v1.0, which is a very different idea!
On the purely cultural side of code, geeks, and computers, there’s always ytcracker and MC Frontalot:
Which led me to this song, which is kinda ok (euh, maybe not):
I could go on and on, but at least it gave me an excuse to link to this cheezy rock song which tortured us in the 80’s. To be honest, it isn’t really about the same kind of code, but who cares — I mean come on, check out that hair!
