October 2007 Archives

At the end of module 2 I would like to return to the beginning on Module 1 and think more about art. I started my introduction with the statement that art does not make a difference and at the end of Module 2 I feel that a correction is needed, the realization of my own generalization and lack of precision being a testimony to the value of the material. It made me re-consider my stances. I am still ready to argue that much of the art produced in the 20^th century, while predominantly critical and oppositionist in its nature, was lacking in capacity to bring about change. I am equally inclined to think that it is precisely its oppositionist character that made it unable to produce a real effect. Much of the avant-garde art which I referenced in the introduction modeled its character upon the character of something/something else, employing the ancient Greek mode of self-definition "We are what we are not". Yet among the numerous works commenting on previous artistic traditions a new type of performance emerged whose aim was to explore and challenge perceptions, to reveal relationships, to rouse the senses, to produce awareness- the performance pieces of Gina Pane, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden. The digital art works that we examined in this module appear to provide the continuation of the same project- they do change something in the way we perceive the world. They make us re-consider the fixed notions we handle in thinking about it; they have a strong revelatory power. More about digital art and interactive installations you can find in my essay on Bubbles (Bubbles.doc). My personal position, however, is that by adopting the mode of interaction they significantly diverge in purpose and effect from much of the art of the 20^th century.

-So far I have been engaged in the examination of video as a time-based media. I have examined its capacity to produce meaning by handling time as an artistic material. Now I would be interested to focus on the various means it employes in commenting on the notion of space (the way the interactive installation "Bubbles" comment on real and virtual spaces).

Some of the things that I would like to go back in future are:

1. A contradiction that I found in the text "Online Games Grab Grim Reality" by Matthew Mirapaul. The 3 co-authors of the "9-11 Survivor" game stated that their goal in creating the game was to "re-interpret a historical moment". They "hoped an immersive, interactive version would restore an immediacy to the day's horrors". Yet, despite the serious intentions of the work ,the tremendous outcry with which it was greeted indicated that the audience could not disregard the very format in which the authors chose to realize their task. One can easily see how the very play element in itself could be considered disturbing. As comments indicate, for the majority of people it is clearly unthinkable to associate tragedy with play. What particularly interested me, however, is the juxtaposition provided in Mirapaul's text of this with another stance. Scott Leonard, the founder of the Dteam 3D Design Team comments on the game "Doom for Columbine": "we`re just trying to make a statement. We're trying to say, it's just a game." A question I would like to consider is "What counts as a pure game and what counts as an art project?" and "How do we distinguish between them?'. Does it matter if we are aware or not of the purposes of the author? The medium of game appears to reach a stage in which it parallels a tendency in conceptual art which invites us to read the label first in order to be instructed on how to approach the artwork. What are the consequences of this?The three students hoped to restore the "immediacy to the day's horrors": Why want to restore immediacy to this tragedy and how does one benefit from this? In what ways does putting ourselves in the shoes of the 9/11 victims run contra to sympathy?

2. I would also be interested to examine the impact of violence in games on users and would like to consider whether the ubiquitous representations of violence in various media do have their reflection on society as it has often been stated. 

3. I would like to examine in more detail Huizinga's theory on play. I have partly commented on it in my art review on "Bubbles".

4. I would like to consider the question: "To what extent can we approach games as an art form?"

MATERIALS:

 Yves Klein, Leap Into the Void, 1960

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*To be examined with reference to digital photography and its potential to manipulate content.

                                                                                * To be examined in the context of "reality".

                                                                                * The "unreality" of the Klein's photograph constitutes a significant part of its meaning and message.

Yesterday, at the start of the "Real Virtualities" module we discussed the impact which media coverage of events of world-wide significance, such as the terrorist attacks from September 11, have on our perceptions of what is real. An interesting tendency that the text from Assignment 1 specifically refers to is the "habituation to images" which accompanies the process of dynamic circulation and rapid change of visual material in the coverage of important news. Initial shock and subsequent habituation are seen as the polar ends of the emotional gamut within which our responses to the television coverage of tragic events take place. In unison with this note acknowledging the lack of a single and universal reaction to images, and favouring instead a model of gradual transformation of attitudes, Patricia Mallencamp claims that while initially producing anxiety "television coverage of catastrophe also has a therapeutic effect"(quoted in King,2005).

 Another aspect of media coverage that the text focuses on, and that I would find interesting to examine in future research, is the gradual transformation of the image into a symbol; the point where an image begins to encompass much more than what it visually represents. Only two years after the terrorist attacks in the United States, to give just one example and one not necessarily linked to the imagery-theme, 9/11 entered as an official term the Longman Disctionary of Contemporary English. This rapid transformation of a whole event into a byword provides the clearest illustration of the act of symbolization that the text refers to. The notion of the symbol considered in this context is interesting. While on the one hand, the symbol (or the sign, as it is traditionally defined by semiotics) suggests an expanded vision of the fragment of reality provided by the visual representation of an event, on the other hand, it refers to the flattening of the image: a single shot encapsulates a whole tragic event. In the course of time, we remember the images from an event and we are able to instantaneously recognize an event from its visual representations, but the real-life experience (even our own) of how it all happened and how it all felt fades away. By becoming accustomed to the images that media provides us with we become less sensitive to the pain, to the tragedy, to the real-life aspects and implications that we found so striking when first experiencing the event. Without elaborating too much on this question in my blog I would just like to consider whether the "deadening of the initial impact" necessarily has to do with the repetitiveness of images and media or is rather a naturally occurring stage of reconciliation with the facts as they are. Then, as a counterexample, the 9/11 Survivor game (www.selectparks.net/911survivor) pops into my mind: it turns into a game what only recently it was too hard to even talk about.

During our first class of this module we also considered important to examine the means by which media determines the proximity between news consumer and news material: how it influences our definition of ourselves as either participants or spectators in respect to the material we observe. I would be more interested to examine a different position and a different stage of the event: I would like to consider the very moment of action and the ones involved in it. This, I believe, is the moment most revealing of the scale and nature of the impact which media has on us. What is it that makes us think about media in moments of shock and of danger? What is it that makes us want to film (to document) an event while our life or the lives of those around us are endangered? Both in the attacks from 9/11 and in the bombings in the London Tube, people involved in the event either directly or as witnesses filmed it with their mobile phones. Only minutes after escaping death by miracle and witnessing the death of tens of others, survivors in the London underground filmed the scene of the tragedy while making their way out through the tunnel.  It is in these moments that our involvement with media becomes most apparent. Media makes us think about media.

Of course there are important ethical and moral dimensions that can be considered here but it is the very impulse to film in moments of shock and of danger that, I think, deserve our attention. In it interesting in this context to note how the very notion of "being informed" expands with the development of media and its attempts to achieve immediacy in which it increasingly relies on eye-witnessed accounts and encourages amateur journalism. To what extent and how exactly does the filming of death ( and very often the individualized death of recognizable people such as those jumping from the burning towers and those dieing helplessly in the underground) enhances our knowledge of a given event? How is it useful as information? Is there an ethical and respectful distance to death which should be kept in providing visual representations of tragic events? I feel that through the popularization of "subjective" material as valued information disseminated along with the materials of traditional press death often becomes a curiosity.