ART: Videogame diaries
Portrait of the Artist as a Video Gamer at the ICA
The following is a collaboration between ERO's electronic media editor, Kevin Quince, and ERO's arts editor, Bunny Smedley.
One of the great all-weather truisms of contemporary cultural theory is the observation that boundaries don’t really work any more — not only that it is growing increasingly difficult to draw a line separating art from design, fashion, advertising, graphics, performance, animation and so forth, but perhaps more importantly, that these days no one really seems to feel the urge to draw such lines. Are we living through the last days of that post-renaissance, eternally problematic newcomer, ‘art’? Or is this simply one more example of modernism’s inability to distinguish wood from trees and to do anything other than theorise about either? Who can say?
In any event, last night ERO sent two correspondents to the ICA for the Playstation2 Creative Awards and the preview of Primal Art: Portrait of the Artist as a Videogamer. One was Kevin Quince, our resident expert on electronic stuff; the other was Bunny Smedley, ERO’s arts editor. Here is what they made of it all.
Bunny Smedley: Well, at any rate it was quite a good party. There must have been a hundred people in that little black-walled theatre at the back of the ICA, working their way through quite a lot of wine and the ubiquitous Becks, standing around chatting animatedly while more or less ignoring whatever it is they were supposed to be previewing. Or in other words, even though it was at least in part the launch of a PlayStation®2 video game called ‘Primal’ as well as an awards ceremony, it looked just like any private view, except with a woman who drew semi-permanent ‘Primal’ logos onto the hands of willing victims, and another woman who wandered around in a sort of sub-Laura Croft outfit being photographed, and PlayStation plinths on which bits of ‘Primal’ could be played, and of course the sheer preponderance of people who, um, looked as if they might work in the computer industry — although since looking geeky is now a form of looking smart perhaps this is just another example of the collapse of our long-treasured cultural categories?
Kevin Quince: It was more fun than many normal art parties, anyway.
BS: Anyway, over the heads of the Becks-drinkers there were three screens, as there generally are in the ICA theatre. On one, the intro sequence for ‘Primal’, designed by the BAFTA Award-winning SCEE Studio in Cambridge, was playing. Meanwhile the other two screen showed the shortlisted entries for the PlayStation2 Creative Awards. These were all short animated films produced by students at Bournemouth, Westminster, Abertay, Edinburgh College of Art, the University of the West of England at Bristol, and the London Institute. Unfortunately, since the ‘Primal’ intro dominated the sound, it was hard to get anything more than a very sketchy idea what the films were really like, even if one really tried. Still, they all looked very contemporary and rather handsome, and ended up working well as party wallpaper, which is more than one can say for a lot of art out there.
KQ: And they were short and interesting, which is better than those interminable films that people like Bill Viola or Sam Taylor Wood do.
BS: The film I liked best, at least during this phase of the event, was one by Selina Cobley, a student from Edinburgh, called ‘Takuskanskan’. It was a beautiful, mysterious little tale, half dream and half children’s story, apparently executed in something like pastels. It featured a small dark creature, ursine or phocal, lithe and fresh and minky, who emerged from the sea, chased after a cloud, and tried to make the cloud into a sort of life-raft; then there was also another animal, deer-like, with Christmas decorations in its antlers, and a forest that caught fire ... oh, it all made a sort of poetic sense at the time, or at any rate imposed its own visual logic over ours heads, as it were. Simple but subtle, sweet but not cloying or arch, with nothing obviously detatched, affectless or ironic about it, it stays in the mind. But then it had a stronger ‘story’, a more insistent narrative pull than the other films. With some of these, one film seemed to flow into the next without an obvious transition, given them a baldly inconsequential feel.
In a way it was hard for me to see what the films really had to do with PlayStation2 or with video games. One of the films, an adorable fantasy about a cartoon car-chase, seemed to allude to video games and to poke fun at their conventions, their need for visual naturalism and fiddly special effects. But the others seemed a world removed from those reflective metal surfaces, glowing torches and random explosions. Or to put it another way, it is hard to imagine the flickering, pastel-like forms of Selina Cobley’s film becoming part of a video game. Or are there video games where gentleness, humour and playfulness figure crucially in the proceedings? Because I don’t really follow video games, it is hard for me to be sure. All the video games I’ve ever seen seem to involve encountering monsters in spaces coloured like Anselm Keifer paintings and then spattering them all over the walls. I guess that has something to do with why I don’t really follow video games.
KQ:’Car Race’ by Chris Walley was rather impressive: video game as child’s colouring book, a gentle pastiche of 2-D game conventions evoking nostalgia for appalling video games of times past (BMX on the Moon, anyone?) and amusement at Walley’s treatment of the interface between game and reality. Some impressive flame effects heralded the destruction of a beautifully rendered 70s primary school and the escape of 2D Car into the 3D world beyond. Worthy of repeat viewing. I wonder if Walley is a fan of Flatland?
BS: As I think I mentioned, there were PlayStation2 plinths dotted around the theatre, where it was possible to play parts of a new game called ‘Primal’. ‘Primal’ features Jen, a girl with an improbable if enviable figure, a cute-ish gargoyle as a sidekick, and the usual needs to encounter monsters and kill them. Unfortunately, since I have so little aptitude with video games, during my first ten-minute encounter with the demo, Jen’s main adventure consisted in banging her head against a wall as I sought to work out how to make her move from the spot to which she seemed to be rooted. After a while, to my considerable excitement, I got her to travel down some shallow stone steps. This was pretty good, especially when I figured out how to make her walk really quickly, but before long it started to make me queasy, so I went back to looking at the films and talking to people. Also I had a suspicion that some boys were laughing at my ineptitude — and what art critic would want to spend more than ten minutes mired in that state of affairs?
KQ: The gargoyle, Scree, was better.
BS: It really was a mixed crowd. I met several people who worked ‘in the industry’, a few students who were there because their mate was one of the competitors for the award, and a girl named Sian from Calgary in Canada who was doing research into computer-based learning. Despite her lack of previous experience she was much quicker at working out how to use the ‘Primal’ set-up than I was. On the other hand, she had not heard of Mark Quinn, Dinos Chapman or ‘Sensation’ and so could not understand why I was excited that these two A-list yBas (‘what’s a yBa?’) were on the panel judging the competition.
KQ: Cash from Sony, I suspect, explains their presence. [Actually, we later learned that none of the competition jurors was paid anything — apparently they just like videogames! — Ed.] Personally I’m waiting for Pink Flag later this month to see them at work.
BS: After quite a lot of party, film-viewing and trying to get Jen to move along an icy ledge for no better reason than because it was either that or up the steps again, it was time for the awards, which were presented by Philip Dodd, the genial head of the ICA. As he pointed out, the judging panel — Mark Quinn, Dinos Chapman, two computer industry people (sorry, I didn’t have a chance to write down the names) and Mr Dodd himself — was more or less evenly split on the final choice, with the ‘industry’ people plumping for the obviously artistic selection, while artists went for a work that, as Mr Dodd wittily put it, ‘looked like a screensaver’. Thus it happened that Selina Colby’s piece was joint winner, rather than out-and-out favourite. Could it really be the case that I’d have sided with the games industry over a pair of paid-up yBas? Apparently so. What, I wondered, could this mean?
KQ: Perhaps Quinn & the Chapmans still think doing that kind of stuff is neat. They should stay in more, rendering porcupines in Bryce.
BS: Fortunately, the other winning work turned out to be very beautiful, too, so in the end I didn’t mind the result. It was a short film by Robert Miller from the London College of Printing and was called, err, ‘Short Film’. Actually it did look a bit like a screen-saver, but as Philip Dodd rightly said, it also looked like an allusion to a painting by le Douanier Rousseau — all green palm-fronds, claustrophobic foliage and threatening bursts of what might or might not have been summer lightening. Best of all, though, was its absolute brevity. Almost the worst thing about most video art — and I am not, in general, a fan — is its boorish willingness to go on and on and on, making what little point it sought to make at great length. Yet this work left one wishing for more, even after it had been seen several times. Concision can be very elegant. Again, it was hard to see this work’s relevance to video games, but the film itself was something I’ll remember.
KQ: Very lush texture, and not too long either.
BS: What, if anything, did the event tell us about the connectedness or otherwise of the videogame industry with other types of art and/or non-art? Well, it certainly managed to underscore the amount of creativity, visual wit and technical skill that can potentially feed into the creation both of videogames and animated film. But at the same time, it left me wondering why the distance between the two was as great as it seems to be.
I might be wrong about this, but from what I have seen, videogames appear to privilege a handful of ideas, mostly inherited from the Renaissance, about how we experience space — mathematical perspective, using the way light reflects off different sorts of surfaces to indicate recession and so on — at the expense of other ways of seeing, such as those familiar from, for instance, Persian miniatures, medieval manuscripts, Assyrian friezes, Central African sculpture, the art of China and Japan and Cambodia. Yet there is no very good reason why something potentially so liberating ought to be so mired in one set of inherited conventions. Obviously — as much, I suppose, in deference to technical constraints as anything else — some of the earliest videogames were endearingly abstract, even minimal, and of course the related genre of comic-book art has quietly been achieving feats of graphic daring of the sort that a certain sort of art critic believes no longer take place. So perhaps I am wrong about this. But it seemed odd that at a visual level, at least and to a self-confessed neophyte when it comes to the world of videogaming, ‘Primal’ was by far the least interesting thing on show.
KQ: Fine game ‘Primal’ may be (or maybe not, I couldn’t figure out the control system either), but fine videogame art experience probably not. There’s certainly plenty of games, even absolutely mainstream ones, pushing visual boundaries in a more interesting way. Perhaps videogames will replicate the transition of visual art away from the simply naturalistic. Once you can do ‘realism’ — perspective, lighting effects, real 3-D people that look like people, textures of flesh, fur and shiny armour (all of which 'Primal' does really rather well, but so do many other first person adventure games), it’s time to try other ways of looking at and intepreting the world. Jetset Radio’s cel-shading (not exactly avant garde, it comes free with the Xbox) makes a stronger visual (and conceptual) statement than another Tomb Raider / Quake lookalike.
BS: Or am I being unfair? Perhaps, having come to the show as an art critic and not as an habitué of the videogaming world, I simply saw what I was already prepared to see and blithely missed everything else. Or maybe that was the point, or at least one possible point? Who knows? In any event, I both enjoyed the films and enjoyed the opportunity to ponder their connectedness or otherwise with other aspects of popular and unpopular culture in such convivial surroundings. Yes, I’m glad I went.
KQ: Me too.
Portrait of the Artist as a Video Gamer will take place at the ICA from 6th – 9th April 2003. The event includes a series of seminars and an exhibition of the films. More information is available on the ICA’s website. Admission is free with the cost of day membership.
Kevin Quince, May 8, 2003 10:13 AM