The Videogame Art Show That Wasn't Amusing
Tomorrow is the last day for the New Museum's videogame art show "Killer Instinct", not that it's recommended. I missed the Joe McKay/Kristin Lucas gaming show in the same location in 2001 (the museum's hard-to-hang-out-in Media Z Lounge) but I know some of the work (e.g., McKay's Audio Pong) and it's way more fun, and way less pretentious, than this. You are greeted at the entrance of "Killer Instinct" with a selection of Brody Condon's "fake screenshots," which are lackluster collages mounted on foamcor or sintra board1: I'm revealing my own ignorance/apathy that I don't know if it's the games or the shots that are "fake." Next you encounter a sub-Kenny Scharf, faux ultraviolet installation by Condon & Shih Chieh Huang consisting of agglomerations of plastic toys and containers of water (connected by myriad tubes) with some SEGA type game imagery not doing much on a screen. This looked like bad outsider art. Anne-Marie Schleiner's piece was frozen, the video in Eddo Stern's sculpture was barely moving, and in another Stern piece, the sound only worked in one earpiece in each of the two sets of headphones hanging from a duct-taped rack2 (different ears malfunctioned in each). The Cory Arcangel/Paul B. Davis hacked Nintendo cartridge piece was nice, but shoved over in a dark corner discouraging lingering. Tom Betts's big screen installation work of fragmented, negatively-inverted game elements was hyperactive and psychedelic, but didn't live up to the curators' hype: [The work] explores how artists translate the aesthetics and tactics of gaming culture into real space and real time--and how this new kind of fluid cinematic "gaming space" affects participants' behavior and experience.
Mostly you stood there and worked three buttons until you figured out what formal elements were being manipulated by which buttons, and then you watched the light show. As far as "gaming space," as a friend pointed out, the console was set ridiculously far back from the screen so you never got the full-on immersive experience. Maybe that was the point, but it made it less entertaining. As for the ymRockers game music compilation, that would probably be more effective as a download or CD than a non-interactive art piece that you sit and listen to sequentially through headphones. I know I left out a few things but I wanted to get out of that show pronto so I didn't take notes. This was a perfect example of the type of hybrid exhibit with no appeal to either constituency it supposedly represents (too formally sloppy for the art world, too "deconstructed"--and not fun enough--for gamers). Way to go.
1. The board looked denser than foamcor but lighter than sintra, with some kind of metallic color around the edges(?) Just trying to be accurate in this on-the-fly reporting. 2. Again, it wasn't exactly duct tape, it just gave the same slapdash impression. Where the headphone wires entered the rack somebody had done a bad splice job with white electrician's tape. There's good nerdy and bad nerdy but this was the latter.
I had similar complaints about Marco Brambilla's Halflife, at the Zenith Media Lounge in October last year. The show consisted of big projections of kids faces (absorbed) while they are playing CounterStrike on a network, and also some video capture from the game itself. The point seemed to be something like, "these kids playing Halflife are only living a half-life." Which, if that's the case, is an example of the worst kind of patronising art-world snobbery. Maybe there are people out there who still need to reel with the simulacra of it all, but geez -louise this computer game fad has been around a little while, folks! I think maybe we can take as 'read' that lots of people spend lots of time absorbed in digital environments. Not only that, but games of all sorts, including whist and backgammon, are designed specifically to be immersive, social, and engaging. Art offers a lot, but it rarely offers such direct, cathartic interaction as a good game.
About the Edo Stern headphones not working.
The Z-Lounge holds a strange status at the New Museum. They spent a lot of money on our show, building and helping installing. Then once it was up they pretty much ignored it. It was hard for us to even get them to have a guard pass through there every so often - there just wasn't any money allocated for it. The space is free, and next to the bathroom and gets a lot of people wandering through that might not be going into the museum proper. Then they fill this space with interactive and often very expensive art, and leave it up to human nature. Kristin and I were constantly repairing vandalized and stolen elements of our show (which ironically the museum was very willing to pay for). Edo, I'm sure, isn't dropping into the museum every other day (he lives in Cali), so he probably doesn't even know about the headphones.
[BTW, Thanks for the props Tom]
Ironically, there was a guard present the entire time we were there, but her job consisted of saying things like "That's not working right now" and "No, that's not supposed to be interactive." Partly it's just the nature of tech art to be glitch prone. Years ago I knew an artist whose kinetic sculptures always broke down the day after the opening and sat unrepaired for the duration of the exhibit. The headphones were a minor problem. More problematic was the Eddo Stern piece previously shown at Postmasters: the Castle. The robot fingers were typing away on the keyboard but the Army training game was moving sluggishly--a few frames a minute, it looked like. No one but the artist is really qualified to fix that. Unless he can find a surrogate in the city where it's showing to check on it and reboot it periodically.
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The Videogame Art Show That Wasn't Amusing
Tomorrow is the last day for the New Museum's videogame art show "Killer Instinct", not that it's recommended. I missed the Joe McKay/Kristin Lucas gaming show in the same location in 2001 (the museum's hard-to-hang-out-in Media Z Lounge) but I know some of the work (e.g., McKay's Audio Pong) and it's way more fun, and way less pretentious, than this. You are greeted at the entrance of "Killer Instinct" with a selection of Brody Condon's "fake screenshots," which are lackluster collages mounted on foamcor or sintra board1: I'm revealing my own ignorance/apathy that I don't know if it's the games or the shots that are "fake." Next you encounter a sub-Kenny Scharf, faux ultraviolet installation by Condon & Shih Chieh Huang consisting of agglomerations of plastic toys and containers of water (connected by myriad tubes) with some SEGA type game imagery not doing much on a screen. This looked like bad outsider art. Anne-Marie Schleiner's piece was frozen, the video in Eddo Stern's sculpture was barely moving, and in another Stern piece, the sound only worked in one earpiece in each of the two sets of headphones hanging from a duct-taped rack2 (different ears malfunctioned in each). The Cory Arcangel/Paul B. Davis hacked Nintendo cartridge piece was nice, but shoved over in a dark corner discouraging lingering. Tom Betts's big screen installation work of fragmented, negatively-inverted game elements was hyperactive and psychedelic, but didn't live up to the curators' hype:
Mostly you stood there and worked three buttons until you figured out what formal elements were being manipulated by which buttons, and then you watched the light show. As far as "gaming space," as a friend pointed out, the console was set ridiculously far back from the screen so you never got the full-on immersive experience. Maybe that was the point, but it made it less entertaining. As for the ymRockers game music compilation, that would probably be more effective as a download or CD than a non-interactive art piece that you sit and listen to sequentially through headphones. I know I left out a few things but I wanted to get out of that show pronto so I didn't take notes. This was a perfect example of the type of hybrid exhibit with no appeal to either constituency it supposedly represents (too formally sloppy for the art world, too "deconstructed"--and not fun enough--for gamers). Way to go.1. The board looked denser than foamcor but lighter than sintra, with some kind of metallic color around the edges(?) Just trying to be accurate in this on-the-fly reporting.
2. Again, it wasn't exactly duct tape, it just gave the same slapdash impression. Where the headphone wires entered the rack somebody had done a bad splice job with white electrician's tape. There's good nerdy and bad nerdy but this was the latter.
- tom moody 2-15-2004 12:16 am
I had similar complaints about Marco Brambilla's Halflife, at the Zenith Media Lounge in October last year. The show consisted of big projections of kids faces (absorbed) while they are playing CounterStrike on a network, and also some video capture from the game itself. The point seemed to be something like, "these kids playing Halflife are only living a half-life." Which, if that's the case, is an example of the worst kind of patronising art-world snobbery. Maybe there are people out there who still need to reel with the simulacra of it all, but geez -louise this computer game fad has been around a little while, folks! I think maybe we can take as 'read' that lots of people spend lots of time absorbed in digital environments. Not only that, but games of all sorts, including whist and backgammon, are designed specifically to be immersive, social, and engaging. Art offers a lot, but it rarely offers such direct, cathartic interaction as a good game.
- sally mckay 2-15-2004 9:09 am
About the Edo Stern headphones not working.
The Z-Lounge holds a strange status at the New Museum. They spent a lot of money on our show, building and helping installing. Then once it was up they pretty much ignored it. It was hard for us to even get them to have a guard pass through there every so often - there just wasn't any money allocated for it. The space is free, and next to the bathroom and gets a lot of people wandering through that might not be going into the museum proper. Then they fill this space with interactive and often very expensive art, and leave it up to human nature. Kristin and I were constantly repairing vandalized and stolen elements of our show (which ironically the museum was very willing to pay for). Edo, I'm sure, isn't dropping into the museum every other day (he lives in Cali), so he probably doesn't even know about the headphones.
[BTW, Thanks for the props Tom]
- joester 2-16-2004 8:53 pm
Ironically, there was a guard present the entire time we were there, but her job consisted of saying things like "That's not working right now" and "No, that's not supposed to be interactive." Partly it's just the nature of tech art to be glitch prone. Years ago I knew an artist whose kinetic sculptures always broke down the day after the opening and sat unrepaired for the duration of the exhibit. The headphones were a minor problem. More problematic was the Eddo Stern piece previously shown at Postmasters: the Castle. The robot fingers were typing away on the keyboard but the Army training game was moving sluggishly--a few frames a minute, it looked like. No one but the artist is really qualified to fix that. Unless he can find a surrogate in the city where it's showing to check on it and reboot it periodically.
- tom moody 2-16-2004 9:14 pm