When I heard about the Smithsonian’s upcoming video game exhibition, I was filled with a sense of dread upon reading the press release’s bolded title: “Smithsonian American Art Museum Invites Public to Vote on Games to be Featured in “The Art of Video Games” Exhibition”. They tout the voting like it’s something to be proud of, but honestly, I am totally sick of crowd-sourced shows. For how historically unsuccessful they have been, crowd-sourced shows seem to be written up as critical novelties, and then recycled throughout the art and museum world. The novelty is way past over.
Video Games
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This weekend’s Required Reading brings us up to speed on the situation of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, plus catches up on some of the things we missed while breaking the news, from movies demystifying the myth of the artist to video games histories and questions of morality and happiness.
Posted inOpinion
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus Goes 8-Bit
Botticelli’s original “The Birth of Venus” is hanging in a soul-stirring gallery in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, a masterpiece of delicately painted elongated figures and an icon of art history. This 8-bit version of the painting by PixelJam‘s Rich Grilloti is sitting right here on your desktop, and it’s actually also pretty awesome! Click through for some more art as video games and video games as art. [via Killscreen]
Posted inOpinion
Feng Mengbo’s Video Game Epic “Long March”
Ever wanted to be a Chinese red soldier that shoots fireballs instead of spouting slogans, and battles aliens instead of Nationalists? I know, me too. Finally, we all have a chance to play out our CCP fantasies with Feng Mengbo’s epic, historicizing video game “Long March: Restart” (2008), now on view at PS1.
Posted inOpinion
Ian Bogost Casts Video Games as Haiku
Critic, writer and independent game developer Ian Bogost has created a suite of four games entitled “A Slow Year.” Comprised of a set piece about each of the four seasons, Bogost has made video games into meditations, interactive haiku meant to slow down the player instead of them speed up. Kotaku has the details.
Posted inBooks
Reading Kill Screen #2: Back to School
Kill Screen is a highbrow magazine about video games. If this strikes some as a bit of a contradiction, I wouldn’t be surprised, but it certainly makes sense to me. Being a young’en, I didn’t exactly grow up during the heyday of print journalism. There were no magazines or newspapers or any kind of periodical that defined my childhood, that I felt close to. The internet, with its forums and blogs, came to take that place. Then I found Kill Screen, a magazine that, against all my preconceived notions of print, feels like it was edited and written for me alone.
Posted inOpinion
Can Video Games Be “As Glorious as Chartres Cathedral”?
In the Guardian, Sam Leith writes an essay on the online multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, comparing the free experience of wandering through the game’s created universe to “a medieval cathedral, and a magnificent one: it is the Chartres of the video-game world.” Video games are often compared to narrative movies, controlled trips through a written plots. But Leith turns that on its head, suggesting instead that games are better characterized by the slow structural growth of a building.
Posted inArt
The Benefit of Virtual Living? Reality Doesn’t Last
If a meteor destroyed all of Queens, we’d probably be pretty freaked out. But might a virtual dragon destroying a virtual city ultimately upset more people? In an article entitled “Cataclysm Coming…” author Tom Chatfield explores what the update means to the denizens of World of Warcraft (WoW), the popular multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). To the inhabitants of an enormous virtual world, population 11.5 million, the coming update, called Cataclysm, will be a revolution. Sure, the game isn’t actually real, but aren’t there ways in which living virtually surpasses physical reality? To start off with, everything makes sense and nothing dies.
Posted inOpinion
Are Video Games Free Speech?
A November 2, Supreme Court hearing attempted to answer the question of whether or not video games are free speech, reports the New York Times. How do we decide what constitutes violence in a video game, and who has access to it? Contemporary art often has the same problem when interacting with politics.
Posted inArt
Online Social Sculpture: On the Internet, We’re All Artists
One of protean German artist Joseph Beuys’ most famous quotes runs, “Everyone is an artist.” Framed within the artist’s idea of “social sculpture,” a conceptual practice in which our lived world forms a gigantic work of art and individuals become artists in its context, the quote makes sense. The wandering artist spent his time creating sculptures out of society, reshaping thought structures through performances, lectures, and physical objects, working with his fellow human-artists to remake our universe moment to moment. In the present day, I’d rephrase Beuys’ maxim: On the internet, we’re all artists.
One particular online video game, called Minecraft, brings to mind for me the essence of being an artist in the world, presenting a chance for everyone to fulfill Beuys’ definition of Social Sculpture. Where does Social Sculpture meet Social Media?
Posted inArt
Representational Politics, Video Games & War
When it came to light that the newest release in EA’s Medal of Honor video game series contained a mode in which players could choose to fight as a group named the Taliban, and the US Army was understandably not too happy about it. After all, they had previously been cooperating on developing the game, allowing EA access to military equipment for rendering as well as aiding in the recording of sounds for the game. Yet the thinking behind this pressure from the Army and EA’s final decision to remove the game mode is more complicated than it seems.
Posted inArt
Katamari Damacy’s Keita Takahashi Turns From Video Games to Playgrounds
As auteurs of the video game world go, Keita Takahashi is pretty far up there. The biggest game-changer of video games as of late isn’t the advent of 3D or the latest advance in the bloody realism of the latest first-person shooter, rather, a good argument could be made that it’s Takahashi’s Katamari Damacy, a quirky game that became a cult classic. Now, the designer has found himself too constricted by the traditional video game business, and with it, the company that helped bring him to fame. Along with wife, composer Asuka Sakai, Takashi has opened his own creative studio, called Uvula, and launched a blog to go along with it.
