My art site of the month is a site devoted to the archiving
of links concerning experimentation with art and the gaming industry.
I bet on my readers' enthousiasm while they peruse the wonderful Avant Gaming
website.
I realize my aim with these monthly selections is to point
toward sites that offer hints, clues, proofs, that they are new
paths, avenues and directions happening within the arts at a
time when we feel they are not much interesting possibilities left.
Therefore I am not so interested in linking art projects themselves
(unless they are particularly eloquent), than pointing at the emergence
of perticular "scenes", and the people able to circumscribe and categorize
these "new agendas" for art (be them mediatic or theoretical).
But....for those who don't have the time to browse the site above
in its full glory for the time being, let me spot you two fave links of
mine that represents well the sort of materiel that is categorized and written
about on Avant-Gaming.
I feel like presenting them the same way Jennifer McMackon would on her
Simpleposie.
Have you ever played Pac-Man with a Mondrian painting ?
Pac-Mondrian
Have you ever played Asteroids with a sexy poem?
Arteroids
Cheers,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Howdy!
ReplyDeleteHave you ever read any New Games Journalism?
If no, try this, and then this.
If yes, whaddya think?
I had heard about the term but your article led me to a "manifesto" site of sort that I found very interesting.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/ngj.html
In 1995 I wrote an article for school covering the ISEA Montreal and the panoply of cd-rom art that was presented there, comparing some of them to then emerging cd-rom games.
I was argumenting about developing
a critical format that could serve critics in their evaluation of these medias as a form of art.
Basically I was suggesting that any thorough game evaluation should come with a diagram of their major links, and then following from this sort of "genetic tree", the rules of cinema studies, very much addressed about narrative, could be applied.
The major shift is replacing focus on montage with witha focus on hyperlink, since if you're in a game and decide to go one way instead of the other, there is no montage involve but quite a shift in "links" (possibilities), sometimes quite invisible.
Then you go back to cinema theory and decide if this or that link enhanced the main narrative, bore it, developped it or extended it to unnescessary ends, etc...
Ms. Pac-Man was better than Pacman for involving shifts in levels, that sort of stuff.
Since then I have seen great articles in Leonardo that surely precedes any attempt at a "New Game Journalism".
I definitely think that a consensual language need be developped for the evaluation of games, or any interactive arts.
Artists often use very alleatory process when dealing with interactions. I think we need to question why things happen at this exact moment and why. We need the diagrams to argument these positions. We need codes that we all agree upon to set an effective criticism.
Cheers,
Cedric Caspesyan