Flock is a work by digital artists KMA (Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler) and choreographer Tom Sapsford. Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and specially commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Flock premiered in Trafalgar Square in February 2007. Watch in HD.

KMA’s mission is to apply leading digital innovation to large-scale live environments in order to expand the audiences’ experience of theatrical work beyond the physical environment in which it is presented. Within the last few years KMA has become a leading and prolific innovator across stage, film and public environments, expanding expectations of how technology can interface with these fields and how audiences ultimately experience the work.

KMA’s interactive work stems from their joint areas of interest in patterns of social behavior and digital technology as a vehicle for public theatre.

KMA’s most recent large-scale interactive installation projects (Flock, Trafalgar Square, 2007; The Hive, Grand Canal Square, Dublin, 2008) have expanded the horizons for how technology can interface with theatrical activity in an emotional and playful way. These pieces are set out of doors, in large urban spaces, without prepared actors or formal participants. The scale of the work creates a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which these works reside, drawing audiences to it, quite often by chance as people go about their daily lives, curiosity draws people in but it is the intelligence of the language structures which layer within these installations which holds the public attention and engages them in problem solving, play and social engagement. By arresting time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between performer and audience, KMA’s work is opening up new and vast environments in which art and audiences meet, equally on each other’s terms.

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. In this article I want to draw upon a different stream of thought from the mid twentieth century, also informed by Huizinga but not exclusively, that of the Paris Situationist artists and architects, including Guy Debord and Gilles Ivian (also known as [Ivan Chtcheglov). A number of important engagements with play and games by the Situationists are newly relevant today. Rather than offer a historical assessment of Situationism’s theories, I will take cues from their writings to reconsider the potential of games in art. I find useful their critique of play within but nevertheless resistant to capitalism (and by extension imperialism and militarism), their architectural proposals for “player” navigation and transformation of urban “psychogeographic” zones (what we might call “ludic architecture”), their analysis of leisure and non-leisure activities, and their repurposing of Dadaist negativity. These proposals all have direct relevance to what MacKenzie Wark calls our contemporary condition of “Gamespace.” (MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007)

Lesson 1: Freeing play

A promising tactic for the early Situationists was the unpredictable yet forceful potential of play — what anthropologist Victor Turner termed the “liminoid,” or the freeing and transformational, moments of play when the normal roles and rules of a community or society are relaxed (via Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures, Open University Press, 2006). After these temporary (TAZ like) situations “players” settle once more into fixed roles. The Situationists proposed to adopt this liminoid “subjunctive mood”, when anything can happen, the carnival, Anarchy Online the RPG, the Society of Creative Anachronisms, into a more general approach, a way of doing and being in the everyday, in order to transform material life with ludic actions.

“We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it. Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type.” Guy Debord, (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Situationist games do not respect the boundary between play and work, leisure and non-leisure, between “real life” and Huizinga’s “magic circle”, the separation from “normal space” that facilitates immersion in games and play (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play). Situationist games are not sports and are not relegated to sports stadiums, arcades, or Playstation home entertainment set-ups. Situationist games bleed into the city, the workplace, the buyplace, the personal computer, the mobile phone, public and private transportation and communication, and into and inside escapist rule-based game environments themselves. In transgressing the “magic circle,” a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to “normal” life.

Lesson 2: Wretched winnings, or challenging competition

“The feeling of the importance of winning in the game, that it is about concrete satisfactions — or, more often than not, illusions — is the wretched product of a wretched society.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

The Situationists were critical of the competitive aspects of play, Callois’ “agon”. For them, competition was complicit with capitalism, with the British working class fan’s mindless absorption in football, with the struggle to obtain material goods, investing in lucrative defense stocks, doing whatever it takes to be the last Survivor on the island, playing to get the biggest family home in the Sims neighborhood. The Situationists, like avid gamers, rejected the capitalist derived division between production and consumption, active work vs. passive leisure. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge that an element of competition might be necessary in their games:

“The only success that can be conceived in play is the immediate success of its ambiance, and the constant augmentation of its powers..[ ]..play cannot be completely emancipated from a competitive aspect.“ Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

In our adaptation of Situationist games, perhaps we allow for a degree of competition, among other motivating playful components. Moreover, for the Situationists, ludic actions were also ethical navigations, and therefore the goal of a competition should always be questioned. (Guy Debord, Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

Lesson 3: Virtual game worlds: Toward a ludic architecture

“The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism, October 1953 printed in Internationale Situationniste #1)

Situationist Russian architect Gilles Ivain imagined a “playful-constructive” movement through a city’s “psychogeographic” zones, urban zones defined not only by streets, buildings and businesses but also by how people inhabit the city and the collective psychic ambiances they project. Or as Guy Debord later wrote, while describing the now famous Situationist notion of derive, or drifting through a city: from a derive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. High speed surveillance cameras tracking shopping patterns in stores like the Gap map these hidden currents, a time based techno-capatilist development of the study of psychogeographic zoning the Situationists did not forecast for their fledgling “science.”

“With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental derives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive, Les Levres Nues #9, November 1956, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958)

Beyond the remapping of existing cities as psychogeographic zones, new city forms were imagined. In “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, from the first edition of Situationist, Gilles Ivain describes a futuristic situationist city’s quarters, and public and private architecture that would be in continuous flux and modifiable according to the whims of the inhabitants, including zones such as a Bizarre Quarter — a Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — and a Sinister Zone. It is this last example that games have provided countless imaginings, and Ivain described the Sinister Quarter in a way that predicts the contours of many video game worlds:

“The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those hellholes, those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters, that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov, (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

In contrast to a current rule-based “algorithmic” emphasis in academic ludology publications, some game researchers such as Chaim Gingold and Henry Jenkins have made convincing arguments for the importance of spatial poetics in structuring game play. (Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons, Master’s thesis at Georgia Tech, 2003, and Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture in the anthology First Person, MIT Press, 2002) This latter approach can be informed by the psychogeographic characterization of the city provided by the Situationists. Rather than seeing games as solely algorithmic rule machines, there is a significant attraction in players’ exploration of virtual game spaces provided by games like Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and the classic exploratory Myst.

Activities within these games incorporate spatial puzzles and goals tied to specific psychogeographic locations within the virtual game environment or city. For level design of more action based shooter games like Halo and Quake, ludic architectural design of multiplayer fighting terrains, (for hiding, for sniping, for jumping, for flying), and the placement of enemies and obstacles are a significant portion of game level design. The avid gamer’s extensive time involvement in level modification, as was once common with PC games like Doom, Quake and Unreal, is motivated by a desire to focus on and transform not the telic aims of the game but the paratelic space of the game world itself, invoking the Situationist’s call for modifiable, changeable architecture.

“Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

Lesson 4: Situationist games beyond the virtual: intervening in real cities

Situationist games are not necessarily confined to virtual digital game space. Guy Debord describes the original Situationists playful exploits into Parisian cityspace:

“Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the derive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive)

This description, like much of the Situationists’ practice, anticipates the emergence of new forms of game play as art practice today, most clearly in the example of the London-based artist collective Blast Theory. Blast Theory projects Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You reinscribe urban space with the rules and scenarios of their games. Can You See Me Now? players carry GPS modified devices which contain a simple graphical Pacman style game interface displaying the location of other players in the city. Running panicked through the city streets of Rotterdam in the first performance of Can You See Me Now?, players tried to escape these non-corporeal pursuers who were less restricted by the actual geographic and urban obstacles such as traffic and traffic lights, pedestrians and hills. Similarly, Uncle Roy All Around You repurposed existing city infrastructure like pay phones and car rides to play a mysterious detective style game on the streets of London. Clues and game play advance through text instructions to players’ mobile computers and planted “actors” (who seem like artificial intelligence players in a computer game played by humans). Blast Theory explained:

“The city is an arena where the unfamiliar flourishes, where the disjointed and the disrupted are constantly threatening to overwhelm us. It is also a zone of possibility; new encounters.” Blast Theory

Converging ludic activities and “real” cityspace are not the exclusive domain of Situationist inspired artists. The Situationists did not foresee that mega-players within the “superstructures” would also engage in playing their games. For instance, during the annual E3 game industry conference in 2003 in Los Angeles, the United States Army staged a “playful” publicity stunt for their free recruitment shooter game America’s Army. They catapulted soldiers from a helicopter into downtown Hollywood. Passersby on the street were confused and frightened, and civilian city space became militarized through an intervention blurring the distinction between a soldier’s job and playing soldier in a game. The use of game tactics and play to equivocate and familiarize urban warfare has become increasingly common. In one of the most extreme examples of the post-9/11 military shooter games, KumaWar presented gaming as analogous to soldiering.

This episodic game enterprise released shooter game missions based on current American military events in Iraq. In KumaWar, whose designers regularly solicit advise from a retired United States general, the player always is an American soldier battling “insurgents” in Iraqi cities. Distinguishing civilians from insurgents becomes an important skill for success in the “game”. Again city space (civilian space), military space and game space are conflated.

A Situationist-style game more covertly complicit with militarization of civilian space through ludological means was the innovative I love Bees designed by Jane McGonigal. Microsoft hired McGonigal, then a doctoral candidate in ludology at the University of California at Berkeley, to design a viral marketing campaign and Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for their upcoming X-box release of Halo2. In public places like pay phones, players of I love Bees retrieved information and advances in the game story (a sci-fi “War of the Worlds”-like scenario leading into the storyline of Halo2). When they received game information players would make an ironic military salute (echoing the gestures of futuristic American style soldiers in Halo) and were thus able to identify other I love Bees players in public places like concerts and streets. ILB players posted many photos of this military salute on the web. Overall, the civic space of the city became militarized — even if for a fictional conflict.

Lesson 5: A dash of Dadaist negativity: illegality as play

“The dadaist spirit has nevertheless influenced all the movements that have come after it; and any future constructive position must include a dadaist-type negative aspect, as long as the social conditions that impose the repetition of rotten superstructures [..] have not been wiped out by force.” Guy Debord (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Debord, after describing the role of Dadaism in combating “stale bourgeois culture” and fascism in post-WWI Europe, postulated that a dadaist-type negative aspect would be a necessary component of Situationism as long as undesired social structures were still in existence. These conditions continue today — rapidly globalizing capitalism, imperialist exploitation and increasing militarization, border closures and increasingly hedged in civil liberties in the post-9/11 War on Terror are some powerful present day “rotten superstructures”. Beyond the apolitical or complicit works described above, Situationist tactics have also been adopted as tools in activism.

One artist group who have been playing some urban interventionist, Situationist-like games with a dose of Dadaist negativity is Yo Mango, an Italian/Spanish art collective based in Barcelona. Yo Mango, slang in Spain for “I steal”, regularly stage playful actions such as potlucks where every dish must contain an element of stolen food, Tango dancing in a chain supermarket while stealing, and distributing stylish Yo Mango patches to cover the holes left in stolen clothes by cutting out the plastic security clip. (They recommend stealing only top designer brand name fashions.) Some members of Yo Mango are also loosely connected with the European Squatter Movement, an organized youth movement in opposition to private property who also participate in other activist activities like protesting against gentrification.

Mexican Artist Rene Hiyashi is another artist creating ludic interventions in public space. In India and Argentina he has realized playful architectural structures for street children. In 2006, in collaboration with Mexico City based artist Eder Castillo, Rene Hiyashi created Guatamex, an imaginatively constructed island with computers with Internet access for illegal immigrants, floating on the river dividing Mexico from Guatemala. (His own laptop keyboard was water-damaged during this project.) Like the anti-corporate antics and publicity stunts of the Yes Men and Rtmark, the older public interventions of Critical Art Ensemble, and many of the political art actions that took place during the 2004 New York Republican National Convention, Yo Mango’s and Rene Hiyashi’s artwork can be described as ludic activism in which societal rules (the laws) are willfully broken. Within activist culture itself, maybe since the anti WTO demonstrations in Seattle of 1999, Dadaist humor and ludic activities are more prevalent. (Brian Holmes, The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance, Nettime 2003)<

Lesson 6: Games inside games: Interventionist tactics in virtual spaces

In their handbook for game designers, Salen and Zimmerman repeatedly emphasize the importance of the “magic circle” and the investment of the player in a separate, pretend space of play (whether abstract or photorealistic, virtual or non-digital). They stress the pleasure in following the rules of games within the clear-cut boundaries of this magic circle. Situationist gamers, however, are more akin to the creative cheater, the game “griefer” or the hacker. They blur the peripheries of the magic circle, taking pleasure in changing the rules of the existing gamespace, which they see as problematic in a fixed state. Situationist mods and hacks intervening inside preexisting games can be more entertaining than the original game.

For instance, the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Second Life has been playfully manipulated by the avatar Gazira Babeli, one of the members of the Second Front collective of Second Life artistic hackers. Her Gray Goo hack was an infestation of Second Life space with out-of-control repetitive self-replicating objects, inspired by nanotechnological disaster scenarios. Grey Goo took various forms, from endless Mario character replications to rampant Velvet Underground bananas. It was so effective it slowed down Linden Lab’s game servers, interfering with game play system-wide.

Babeli’s COME.TO.HEAVEN similarly exploited a loophole in Second Life which allows players to create gigantic avatars in proportion to the Second Life world, resulting in unexpected interesting glitches. While the identity (identities) behind the Babeli avatar are kept secret, the code for her Second Life interventions are always made public by posting it online so others can learn from it and reuse it.

A similar, Situationist-themed interventionist game strategy is offered by Pierre Rahola, a French gamer and DJ. During the early phase of the US war on Iraq, Rahola and his collaborators would spray anti-war graffiti inside online shooter games. When I interviewed him in Paris in 2005, he admitted that “intervening in games is more fun than playing the game.” Around the same time Pierre and his friends were playing online shooter games with an activist edge I began a body of work I would describe as situationist gaming. In collaboration with the artists Brody Condon and Joan Leandre, we initiated Velvet-Strike, tagging the then-popular online soldier shooter game Counter-Strike with anti-war graffiti. Velvet-Strike was not only visual modification but also included “recipes” for disruptive actions designed to interfere with regular Counter-Strike gameplay, like one for making friends with your enemy. Recipe for Friendship:

1. Find a Counter-Strike server with 0 or 1 other player on line. (If you go to an empty one most likely someone will show up to see who you are.)
2. Shoot a few times at your enemy.
3. Tell them you are newbie and ask them to show you how to plant the bomb.
4. Ask them which country they are from.
5. Ask them all about themselves.
6. Arrange to meet another time.

Operation Urban Terrain (OUT) was another project I initiated to warp an existing gamespace — the free US army propaganda game America’s Army. With OUT, I wanted to counter the convergence of military and civilian space with a kind of activism that merged virtual urban game space wirelessly with cityspace. I invited many people whom I had met online through Velvet-Strike to participate, including Chris Birke, one of the original Counter-Strike game texturers, Mexico City architect Luis Hernandez and Pierre Rahola. We projected our live performances onto the walls and surfaces of Manhattan and Brooklyn, connected wirelessly to five players around the world during the NYC Republican National Convention of 2004. I matched virtual locations within the America’s Army game servers with physical New York City sites, projecting a live performance of a virtual sit-in inside a tunnel with yellow taxis onto a building in midtown Manhattan, where there were many yellow taxis, and pairing a red brick warehouse in the game with a brick building in Harlem. For the last location I merged a live soldier dancing performance in the popular America’s Army map “Bridge” with projection onto the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

Riot Gear for Rollartista, another game inside a game, was a series of machinima performances calling attention to European and British police abuse of Islamic and African immigrants, with players wearing padded “riot gear” costumes designed in collaboration with artist Talice Lee. In the first performance of the project, two player/performers roller-skated around the small Spanish city of Castellon projecting the Playstation2 games Narc and Mechwarrior from an ultra light projector attached to one of the player’s helmets, (technology had developed since the heavy battery and projector of OUT). At each projection location in the city, one player “roller-danced” and handed out flyers with stories of immigrant abuse to interested passers-by while the second player performed with a portable Playstation, controlling a dancing policeman character who violently beats up on civilian city dwellers.

Conclusion

The Situationists predicted an age of expanded ludic possibilities for artists and for anyone. Paraphrasing and remixing both gamer Rebecca Cannon and Situationist architect Gilles Ivain, we are bored with shooter games. We are bored with the suburbs, the stale imperialist sexist engineering biased corporate game industry, and with new academic ludology that reifies existing superstructures. We are ready to play reality TV off camera. We are frustrated with our governments and the military superstructures that control gamespace. We don’t want to play by rules we never agreed upon in the first place. Anyways, even if we had fun playing those games to begin with, it is now more entertaining to mess them up, or to invent new unsanctioned games inside gamespace. If big players are intervening in gamespace, then it is time for Situationist gaming.

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming will be resented next week at Homo Ludens Ludens in Gijon, Spain. [via nettime]

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates.

In between the record sets are the most interesting possibilities for new services, new ways of experiencing the physical world and new kinds of adventures. What I’m thinking about are ways to creatively explore within a fully instrumented, surveilled and mapped world, with counter intuitive uses of this data. There are some excellent examples within the art-technology and design-technology communities, such as GPS Drawing, as shown above. This practice is intriguing because it couples measurement with expression and finds an alternative use for the devices involved — a GPS and a mapping application like GoogleEarth.

Surveillance Camera Players using CCTV cameras as a site for performance opportunities

Younghee wonders, in this context, what are the ways of minimizing “digital traces” — those indications of where you are, and where you have been, in a surveillance world. She says,

That leaves another interesting question: How would people drop out of, or at least minimize their digital traces and minimize contributing to create others’? We are probably not expecting stickers and badges showing “this person does NOT have cameras” or “this person will NOT use cameras”. One of the memorable Ubicomp conference talks was on the interesting concept of creating capture-resistant environment, preventing camera phones to take photos by overexposing photos attempted in the region covered by this technology. While I am sure there are certain types of places this technology would be very useful, I do have my doubts if there would ever be any technology successfully controlling people’s digital behaviors.

Similarly, in a reverse mode, Life: A User’s Manual by Michelle Teran captures the signals leaked into public space by RF-based video cameras and reveals intimate spaces in a very DIY and performative fashion.

Minimzing traces is one possible perspective. I think, perhaps in this era where digital kids do not reflect so much on how much of a trace they leave behind, and indeed have entirely different perspectives on the meaning of surveillance and its implications. How many digital kids (the next “us”) have read “1984″ for example?

In contrast to the Surveillance Camera Players and their performances — where they are maximizing their impact and traces for counter-intuitive purposes, and counter-systemic purposes — groups like the Institute for Applied Autonomy have constructed — years ago, pre-Google Maps — a digital map system called iSee of surveillance cameras that would allow one to plot a course that does precisely what Younghee wonders about — minimizing one’s impact. In other words, the mapping system plots routes that avoids surveillance cameras.

It may be that the question is no to much avoiding “capture” but how to turn that space into something where your voice can be heard. I’m not convinced, but it seems that we (a bit older people) think of surveillance in one way that digital kids (the next “us”) will see as an opportunity for a new form of living.

Beyond this, I am interested in a kind of Personal Positioning System that points out the absences in my experiences in the world. For example, showing me where I have not been rather than showing the entire world from above, as if its fully prepared for my exploration. I’m interested in finding things like longer route between two points, rather than the minimal route. Or routes that are deliberately constructed based on streets or regions I have not been. Purely as a form of creative, digital-era perambulation or motoring. Exploration in a world that is pretty much completely mapped, indexed, databased and optimized. What is exploration in an optimized, instrumented world? [posted by Julian Bleecker on Near Future Laboratory]

Homo Ludens Ludens is an international exhibition and symposium exploring games as a critical element in our daily lives and a speculation on the emergence of the “Homo Ludens Ludens”: the contemporary playing man. What does it mean “to play” and to be “a player”? The goal of this Symposium, organised jointly with The Planetary Collegium, is to provide the framework for contemporary play, to highlight its interdisciplinary nature, and to show the multifaceted reality of our present-day entertainment society.

ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN THE EXHIBITION: John Paul Bichard, France Cadet, Derivart, Devart, Hannah Perner-Wilson & Mika Satomi, Ge Jin, Vladan Joler, Radwan Kasmiya, John Klima, La Fiambrera Obrera & Mar de Niebla, Danny Ledonne, Valeriano López, Ludic Society, Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand, Martin Pichlmair & Fares Kayali, Brian Mackern, Larry Miller, MIT Lab - Drew Harry & Dietmar Offenhuber & Orkan Telhan, Molleindustria, Julian Oliver, Orna Portugaly & Daphna Talithman & Sharon Younger, Personal Cinema & the Erasers, Rolando Sánchez, Alex Sanjurjo, Gordan Savicic, Axel Stockburger, Silver & True, Román Torre, David Valentine/MediaShed (ft. Methods of Movement), Volker Morawe & Tilman Reiff, William Wegman.

SYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS: Roy Ascott, Laura Baigorri, Laura Beloff, Erich Berger, José Luis de Vincente, Julian Dibbell, Daphne Dragona, Wolfgang Fiel, Gonzalo Frasca, Luis Miguel Girão, Margarete Jahrmann, David McConville, Guto Nóbrega, Julian Oliver, Paolo Pedercini, Mike Phillips, Martin Pichlmair, Michael Punt, Nicolas Reeves, Natacha Roussel, Semi Ryu, Anne Marie Schleiner, Natasha Vita-More, McKenzie Wark, Monika Weiss.

CURATORS:
Erich Berger, Chief Curator, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón
Laura Baigorri, New Media Arts Curator, Barcelona
Daphne Dragona, New Media Arts Curator, Athens

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial is a space for artistic exchange. It is set up with the purpose of establishing an effective alliance between art, design, culture, industry and economic progress and the goal of becoming a space for interaction and dialogue between art, new technologies and industrial creation. It throws a special spotlight on production, creation and research into art concepts still being defined.

One of the authors participating in this monograph is Pau Waelder, independent art critic and curator, who looks at Pain Games and describes various works of digital art which use pain as a form of interaction in the context of a two-player game.

Other articles include Playing Research: Methodological approaches to game analysis, by Espen Aarseth, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. The author explains how the study of game aesthetics is a very recent practice, spanning less than two decades. Unlike game studies in mathematics or the social sciences, which are much older, games became subject to humanistic study only after computer and video games became popular.

Digital Allegories (on The Sims), by McKenzie Wark, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Eugene Lang College and Sociology at the New School for Social Research, talks about how we are all now players. “You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in this gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but never leave it. No wonder digital games are the emergent cultural form of the times.”

Alexander R. Galloway, author and programmer who gives classes at New York University, has written the article entitled Gamic Action, Four Moments. This essay proposes a new hermeneutic for understanding the formal qualities of video games given the action-based nature of the medium and the interplay between diegetic and nondiegetic space.

Finally, Erkki Huhtamo, Associate Professor at UCLA, has written an article entitled Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble. This article is a contribution to the cultural and historical mapping of electronic gaming. Its basic premise is at least seemingly simple: electronic games did not appear out of nowhere; they have a cultural background that needs to be excavated.

As well as the monograph, Artnodes 7 also includes, in the Miscellany section, an article on graffiti: The Screen on the Street: Convergence and Agonic Coincidences between Graffiti and New Media Objects. The author is Noelia Quintero, filmmaker, researcher and professor in the Faculty of Social Communication at the University of Puerto Rico.

Truncated, repetitive, coin-operated nihilism. To a point. The ‘insufferable philosophy of our time’ is not a single object or symbol, but the array of signs and symbols placed at odds with each other, made to wage a type of war we aren’t told how to engage with. We were told that play would desensitise, depoliticise and disconnect us, and now games are presented by the museum as the latest historical and contemporary cultural artefacts.

Whether we play or not, whether we live in the moneyed west or not, games occur. Using the rubric of ‘game off’, our stellar guests will tease out intertwining threads of play culture, game art, game theory in multi-streamed dialogues moderated by Christian McCrea and Melinda Rackham – interrogating the frictions and fissions of experiential pleasure, avatar uprisings, the game engine medium, collection and archiving, futility and joy.

Please welcome the players who will appear throughout the month:

Marguerite Charmante is a tagged game figure. She reflects ludically on futility as resistance, toys and game fashion. 2005 she and MosMaxHax co-founded the international association LUDIC SOCIETY to provoke a new discipline on play and cultures. The affiliations club-magazine appears regularly in print.

Daphne Dragona is a new media arts curator and organiser based in Athens. Recently she has been focusing on game arts and currently she is a co – curator of Homo Ludens Ludens, an exhibition opening in April 08 in Laboral Centro de Arte y Industrial, Gjion Spain.

Margarete Jahrmann is professor at the Game Design Department of the University of Arts and Design Zurich and a Ph.D. student of Caiia, School of Computer Sciences and Communications, University of Plymouth. 2003 Jahrmann / Moswitzer received an award of distinction at Prix Ars Electronica and in 2004 at transmediale Berlin.

Christian McCrea is a writer and theorist from Melbourne, Australia. His work describes the non-virtual aspects of games under the rubric of materialism, namely nostalgia, euphoria, the proscenium of gaming actions and explosive body aesthetics. He works as Lecturer in Games and Interactivity at Swinburne University of Technology.

Max Moswitzer specializes in 3D simulations and artistic server design, Dozent at the Game Design Department of the University of Arts and Design Zurich and the University for Applied Arts in Vienna. Moswitzer co-founded Konsum.net in 1995 and regularly produces interactive applications, online installations, videos and telematic performances.

Julian Oliver is a New Zealand born artist, free-software developer, teacher and writer based in Madrid, Spain. Julian has given numerous workshops, exhibitions and papers worldwide. In 1998 he established the artistic game-development collective, Select Parks.

Melinda Rackham is Director of ANAT, Australia’s leading cultural organisation generating new creativities which bridge science, research, art, industry and culture. She dabbled extensively in multi-user online environments and has an abiding interest in playfulness.

Melanie Swalwell is currently developing a suite of projects on the history of digital games in New Zealand, with essays published in the Journal of Visual Culture and Vectors, and forthcoming in Ludologica Retro and Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader.

David Surman is Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the Newport School of Art, Media and Design in the green hills of Wales. He blogs about technology, sexuality, gaming and popular culture at http://www.gaygamer.net.

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Mary Flanagan Interview: Social Change, Video Games and the Visual Arts by Eduardo Navas: Mary Flanagan is an artist and media theorist invested in developing games for social change and performance/action installations. Based on her interests Flanagan produced [giantJoystick] in 2006, and gallery@calit2 is proud to present this working large-scale game-interface from February 4 to March 17 of 2008. [giantJoystick] brings together Flanagan’s diverse interests as a cultural producer.The oversize custom-made playstation is evidence that Flanagan’s production borrows not only from the visual arts and video games culture, but also popular culture. [giantJoystick] is the result of a new form of critical practice which does not fit neatly into previous models. For this reason, gallery@calit2 is excited to present the following interview with Mary Flanagan in which she shares her experiences as a young girl who played video games, and as an artist invested in social change. gallery@calit2 publishes it with the aim to shed light on the creative process of the artist.

The following interview is an important source for the above text. gallery@calit2 publishes it with the aim to shed light on the creative process of the artist.

Eduardo Navas: You use the term Social Sculpture to describe [giantJoystick]. Could you elaborate how you see your work in relation to Joseph Beuys’ aesthetic and political views?

Mary Flanagan: I use the term Social Sculpture to suggest the alignment of [giantJoystick] (which we will refer to as [gJ] from here on) not only to my other projects (particularly my social activist research lab) but also to the larger idea of creativity being applied to all human endeavors. Play, to me, can be instrumental in realizing some of the goals of both Beuys and Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), whose Anthroposophical Society advocated holistic medicine and even organic farming in addition to pursuing social ideas in human freedom, democracy, and sustainable economic forms. I use the concept of social sculpture to consider how an object or artifact can work to structure, on the small scale, interesting and progressive social interaction, and on the large scale, contribute to the reshaping of larger social and political organizations — literally shaping and molding the world we live in. Beuys’ project was ultimately very political, and so is mine.

In contemporary US culture, there is little dialogue about serious issues: class differences between rich and poor are the highest since the troubled Gilded Age of the 1920s, with increased, dire ecological consequences. Corporate culture has continued to conquer global production, consumption, and consciousness, disempowering citizens, and unhinging much of the social fabric and traditional means of living. Then we have corporate driven violence and war.

The response to make a play object in the fact of such a grim framework may appear frivolous. But note that games are popular right now for a reason — they present fun, but of course, escapist scenarios in which we are faced with quantifiable enemies and concrete goals. We might be onto something if we can use this model for real social change. And, if people are meeting physically with this joystick, breaking down communication barriers and playing together, this may be the start of an interactive dialog which might be transformative, even healing.

EN: Based on your answer you do see [gJ], contributing in some way to a model of real social change; would you then consider your critical investment linked to activism? I think of the great interest in the work of Guy Debord and other Situationists, which now is being revisited to talk about play as a form of critical intervention in the real world. Do you see [gJ] or other projects you have developed contributing to this dialogue?

MF: I do see many of my play-related projects linked to political and social activism. That said, I don’t think just because something is playful it is automatically subversive or progressive. Not everyone has the same permission to play. For example, a group of primarily white college students playing a mobile media game in a cemetery or on the streets of New York would be read very differently than, say, a group of non-English speaking Latino players or young African Americans congregating en masse to play a game. So this must pervade a designers consciousness: how can we expand the permission set of who is allowed to play? This is also the same cautionary approach I have with the current revival in Situationist thinking… who is allowed to drift? Under what conditions would it be possible to propose larger, universal play paradigms? What would have to change?

And of course these questions lead to one doing design work that calls into question and reformulates, for example, the role of technologist (who is the maker, and how can more people be in this position?), and the role of spectator (who is the artist, and how can more people be in this position?).

EN: How do you contextualize [gJ] in your critical interest of play and locative media? Are there any links, or do you see it as a completely separate research endeavor?

MF: I have multiple tracks in my research project, and this work and locative media have in common my interest in participatory culture. [gJ] does not claim to represent the space in which it is housed, and is a rather obvious intervention, so its quite the opposite of most locative media projects. This work falls more in line with inquiries into collaborative play and alternate reward systems in game design research. Sometimes, my research erupts as artwork; at other times, it finds its home in collaboratively produced research projects at my laboratory.

EN: [gJ] can be read as a subversive work of art. By this I mean that it puts in question some general assumptions about sculpture. For instance, it demands to be not only touched but also played; it’s designed to withstand heavy physical abuse. Do you see [gianJoystick] in line with the work of Felix Gonzalez Torres, for example, who often created, shall we say, interactive artworks that demanded certain actions and destruction of the work from the viewer? I think of his candy installation “Untitled, Public Opinion,” (1991) which was completed when the museum visitor took away a piece of candy. Or other artists from his generation, who were definitely influenced by conceptual art, but were also heavily invested in making objects that somehow questioned themselves.

MF: Both my work and the work of Gonzalez Torres move the attention from the object to the object’s relationship. As Nicholas Bourriaud wrote, “the aura of artworks has shifted to their public” (Relational Aesthetics (1998) 2002, 58). This also is, for me, informed by software art and the lack of “true object” so highly prevalent in art history. Dialog with software art, however, stops at the form: the form of the joystick itself functions as a fetish or totem as well, constantly referring to game culture. [gJ] formulates an interaction by posing questions about play, touch, embodiment. It does so primarily through its scale: after all, if the work were smaller, one player can play on his or her own, and the sense of participatory play and collaboration would be lost.

EN: The fact that [gJ] demands that gallery visitors become heavily invested in the work with their bodies and actually sweat after playing for a few minutes may open a door for critics skeptical of New Media and art games to claim that the usual critical distance necessary for a work of art to be reflexive about its context may be lost. How do you respond to such criticism, which in part has separated New Media art from the work of art usually found in more commercial art galleries?

MF: I think the disquiet that commercial art galleries display towards new media art is not about critical distance but about the financial conservatism they carry forward (or imagine) from their audience, collectors. We are in a cycle of quite conservative investment practices in the arts. In addition, many new media artists have not wished to sell their work in more traditional ways, because it may be against the ideas the work is investigating.

EN: [giantJoystick] is a phallus. It should be safe to say that many gallery visitors give it such reading, yes? If so, how do you see your work in line with feminism: the fact that you, a woman, has created a sculpture, which you also explain could be seen as nostalgic, making reference to a gaming past ruled by mainly boys? You also explained in one of your videos that you were the only kid in your neighborhood who played video games, how does this relate to the stereotypes that have defined video games?

MF: I’ve discovered at openings and public events that many visitors new to the work initially assume that it is created by a male artist! Which is very fun for me, because I have been significantly involved with feminist art — this poses a challenge that involves gender assumptions in popular gaming culture, and in art practice as well. [gJ] is definitely nostalgic for a significant number of players / viewers, and this can be useful of course, because ultimately, nostalgia may end up being a great tool if used for particular ends… The fact is, male gaming culture is appropriated through this work for play, yes, but also for a kind of reconfiguration of who can play and how we play.

I had a rather lengthy, extended childhood where I played and read far longer than most children I encountered, male or female. This involved computer play, but also dollplay and building fantasy structures. I also busied myself with Rube Goldberg style contraptions, telepathy, elaborate costumes, etc.

EN: You consider [gJ] to be in a “public space.” But how public is this space really? Is the art gallery really a public space? Do you see your gaming installation opening the door to a new type of audience, perhaps? If so what kind?

MF: This work has not only functioned within a gallery space. It was in residence at the London Games Festival and seems to go to venues with a lot of unusual ‘gallery’ traffic, such as the Beall Center and Laboral in Spain. Ideally, it would be housed in a space where a wide range of players and viewers could encounter the work. The initial plan was for a public artwork, linking several joysticks in various global cities, so collaborations could take place between a group in, say, Berlin, and a group in Taipei. This is still on the burner.

That said, this work does attract groups to art spaces that might not normally visit them. This too is a wonderful opportunity to bridge those interested in the art scene with, well, everyone else. By the way, I didn’t enter a formal Western art gallery or museum until I was of college age. So, I’m interested in those kinds of radical transformations we can imagine which cross cultural, economic, and linguistic barriers.

EN: [gJ] is definitely about the aesthetics of video games. But how do you see your intervention of the Atari 2600 when considering the concept of play, or gameplay? The often cited “magic circle” comes to mind. How do you see [giantJoystick] relating to the concept of the magic circle and playing by the rules? Are there any similarities between the rules of play that make the magic circle special, and the gallery space?

MF: Huizinga be praised! The sheer absurd scale of [gJ] creates a kind of magic circle all on its own, whether it is set within a gallery or not. Actually, I would say the gallery atmosphere tends to have its own, competing magic circle, where, as you have noted in your questions, the rules are “don’t touch,” or “behave quietly.” Involving the body is a risky proposition, reminiscent of happenings and other participatory events. By using games that many people might be familiar with (or that are simple enough to parse on one’s own due to common game conventions), participants seem more willing to take on play in this embodied way. Sometimes groups get to shouting and yelling as well.

gallery@calit2 would like to thank Center for Research and Computing in the Arts for their support in the realization of this exhibition.

A projected tree, with a purpose to retrieve vital information, matures organically in response to a metaphorical fertilizer – insert a leaf and observe immediate evolution, an engrossing possibility for eco-systems of the world in need of nurturing. A temporary bastion for positive change, treasure your Natural Capital.

ENESS’s Skipping Digital was a digital carpet that took over QV Square in Melbourne after dark and compelled interactive connectivity between friends and strangers. Abstract messages and images that overlay the surface responded to activity and the public was responsible for designing the space with colourful particles of light as they play through the square.

Attractive apparitions fed public curiosity and compelled dancing, strolling, rolling and skipping. The square was charged with beaming energy and paths materialised as quickly as they disappeared. [via]