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Auteur Focus
By Edge Staff
August 22, 2008
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“Today, the reference for many people is the videogame, which has opened a new field in art, both traditional and digital”
Art may not be at the forefront of the gaming public’s consciousness, but how artists like Antonin Fourneau are manipulating videogame technology isn’t just of interest to the beard and beret brigade.
Whatever the high-minded intentions, Fourneau’s latest project, a music game-cum-editor called Oterp for the PSP, has exposed the potential of gaming devices in ways that the industry itself has yet to approach.
Small wonder the art world is finding the medium increasingly attractive: by combining technologies like GPS, wifi and touch-sensitivity and making them affordable, videogame consoles offer an unmatched opportunity to experiment with forms of expression.
Oterp combines the PSP’s use as a multimedia player, game console and GPS to create music out of movement.
“My current version of Oterp operates on a small scale: only a town, so it’s good for a demonstration in a festival,” explains Fourneau, a graduate of Paris’ Atelier de Recherches Interactives, a teacher of electronics and programming, a graphic designer and organiser of the France-wide multimedia festival Eniarof.
“Sounds are played depending on your GPS co-ordinates. You navigate through a sort of field of giant buttons that you activate one after another in various combinations. I’ve recently tried some experiments with the movement and acceleration, but I have not yet found a good balance.”
Walking from one grid-reference to another, Oterp combines the music loops that are keyed to that location, unlocking new sounds as you find your way around town. Fourneau has ambitions to expand Oterp into something more comprehensive, and, ideally, available to the public at large.
“For the moment I’m only at ten percent of the project. I have some ideas to transform Oterp into a videogame, totally inspired by Jet Set Radio and other games like SoundVoyager.
“For the generation before, the reference was the cinema,” he continues. “Today, the reference for many people is the videogame, which has opened a new field in art, both traditional and digital. Some artists, like Aram Bartholl, play on the adaptation of videogames’ rules in our world. And people like FUR with their Painstation and Niklas Roy with PongMechanik mix the principles of games with other technologies.”
Fourneau’s own projects often key into our nostalgia for gaming classics, lifting those experiences and dropping them into the context of other technologies and unusual settings, such as his Patch & KO collaborative project – a game of Street Fighter operated by the bouncing of a ball through the pins of a pachinko board.
While only the more functional of Fourneau’s works are likely to be embraced as something more than an amusing oddity, artists like him are pushing the medium’s technological interconnectivity in interesting directions. Pachinko boards may not replace Hori sticks any time soon, but the videogame industry would still do well to keep an eye on the wilder uses of its tech.
Eh.
I feel the vast majority of artists who combine art and games lack a handle of the brief yet intense history of video games while utilizing only superficial examples of gaming vocabulary. If they have studied gaming history and interactive theory, very few (if any) artists in the spotlight exhibit it. Creating a new input for an existing game could be considered art, but it usually doesn't address the medium of the game on the screen or the space between the player and the virtual world.
For example, Patch&Ko is pretty cool at linking Panchinko with Street Fighter 2; an interesting, if loose, connection between income generation for game manufacturers, how players pay in, and a reconnection to what could arguable be the first interactive input device for electronic entertainment. But this is all stuff that occurs OUTSIDE the game that's being used with no real connection to what's happening INSIDE the game.
Where Patch&Ko stops being interesting is when someone realizes, "Hey, I've played SF2 before. With a joystick. That was fun. This isn't as much fun. Why? Because this is basically pachinko with a slightly interactive display. Queue nolstalgia and historical commentary. Artistic mystery solved." Why not just attach an LCD to a blender that displays a Quake Rally car doing donuts in a parking lot? The two examples exhibit the same amount of control and celebration of games and art. As a commentary on games and their effect on people it's about as valid of a submission as the Sega Genesis Activator Ring or the Nintendo Power Glove.
There is a tendency for these artists to destroy the source material (or at least the craft aspect of them) that they seek so hard to derive meaning from. I wouldn't be commenting on this, if it wasn't the fact that these artists try to build an artificial connection between modernism and video games and calling it something new when it's MODERNISM. GPS, unique inputs, bringing games into the real-world, etc. come off as gimmicks considering that it's all been done and done successfully (see PAC MANHATTAN done by the Tisch School of the Arts @ NYU).
The idea is to get BEYOND the, "THIS IS A GAME ATTACHED TO A BROOM! WOW! IT'S SO COOL!" reaction, and to get people to address the surreality and reality of games and their effect on players. I can certainly respect artists who are using games as elements of modernism but not when it's being passed off as a new medium or movement. The use of pixels and meepy floop music combined with ideas of modernism does not really qualify a work of art as something that addresses what happens with games inside and outside the virtual world.
Only when we start seeing examples of artist trying to truly merge the two (art and games as one) will we really start seeing a new medium on the rise. There needs to be modifications to the games themselves, and they need to be compelling, successful examples of interaction in order for a viewer or player to participate long enough to reach a meaning (instead of just being annoyed or gimmicked by crazy input devices). The biggest obstacle with that, is that the true pioneers in video games, those who understand how to pique interests in their audience and to create successful examples of controlled player interaction, are currently focused on making video games and taking the medium as a form of entertainment to the next level. This whole movement will not work until artists start collaboarting with the craftsmen who make games what they are.