EVENT: CHRISTIAN WRIGHT (OCTOBER 14-27 2022, ONLINE)
SON
digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom
Created by Christian Wright
October 14 - 27 2022
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
vral.org
Christian Wright reframes painting and cinema through the medium of the video game. Inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and by the extended duration of slow cinema, the artist references historical events and religious themes, but also fictional narratives, sagas and myths of the near future, introducing an expanded narrative that defies easy categorizations. Part of a trilogy, Son investigates the spiritual through the technical, using the notion of ritual as a point of departure. By emphasizing the in-between, the interstitial, and the liminal, the work transforms inactivity into revelation, emptiness into wholeness.
Christian Wright (b. 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne) is a digital media artist working with video games and animated assets to blend cinematic and machinima visual languages. Through this frame, he looks at how the boundaries of normal play are stretched by the performative actions of players themselves. Whether it be the intimate physical interactions of online multiplayer, the choreographed quest for perfection of speedrunning, or the mimetic act of digital cosplay within character creators, Christian places community driven gestures at the forefront.
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EVENT: ELISA SANCHEZ (MAY 27 - MAY 9 2022, ONLINE)
AU-DELÀ DU DÉSERT FLOU, PLUS AUCUNE SAUVEGARDE N’EST POSSIBLE
Digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound 43’, 2021, France
Created by Elisa Sanchez
“I’m tired of playing cowboy” says Elisa Sanchez, referring to her experience with Red Dead Redemption 2. To spice up things, she uses cheat modes and modifies the original game. Such intervention allows her to discover weird architectures, bizarre landscapes, and bottomless rivers, among other things. So she begins a metaphysical journey into the Wilder West to escape her concrete “house arrests” due to the Pandemic lockdown. The result is a slow, contemplative, meditative machinima situated at the intersection of video art, video essay, and video diary. A warning: if you cross the blurred desert, you won’t be able to save your progress.
Born in Toulouse, France in 1997, Elisa Sanchez is likely France’s most well known artiste-astronaute and a recent graduate of the Haute école des arts du Rhin Mulhouse, Strasbourg. In 2021, she completed her thesis project, Le Cowboy et Le Astronaut under the supervision of Anne Foret. Her first machinima, Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible, was screened at the international film festival Cinéma du Réel in March 2022.
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Brent Watanabe, San Andreas Deer Cam, Streaming video, 2016, still from installation
THE AESTHETICS OF SLOW MACHINIMA (3 OF 4)
IN A NEW INSTALLMENT OF OUR ONGOING SERIES ON SLOW MACHINIMA, WE DISCUSS THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF "MEANINGFUL BOREDOM".
“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.” (John Cage)
“I like boring things.” (Andy Warhol)
In my last two posts, I wrote about the aesthetics of slow machinima, that is a certain formal trend in contemporary machinima can be seen as an act of cultural resistance to speed and acceleration. In the last few years, several authors have challenged the frantic pace of modern video games - and visual culture in general - by creating machinima that are spectacularly uneventful, often lengthy and glacially paced. I argued that slow machinima is the videogame equivalent of slow cinema, an expression indicating modern feature-length films that carry on the legacy of arthouse auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni and Chantal Akerman by offering minimal action, narrative development, and movement, often borrowing the aesthetics of photography and painting. If “static films offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion”, writes Justin Remes, static machinima are even more radical. If motion is essential to cinema in the same way that interactivity is crucial to the medium of video games, removing both interactivity and motion from a video game creates a visual artifact twice as removed from its “source”.
Interestingly, most static machinima are not completely static. Even in the case of Philip Solomon’s EMPIRE - in which a fixed shot of the Rotterdam Tower (a replica of the Empire State Building) in a virtual city reminiscent of New York dominates the frame for more than forty eight minutes - and much longer in other cases (1) - things do happen, constantly. In other words, although stasis is foregrounded, the scene does change in the background. Although motion and movement are toned down, they are not completely eradicated from the frame. Nonetheless, slow & static machinima blur the line between the visual arts and gaming, film and video art. It could be argued that Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho is to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho what slow/static machinima (Solomon's EMPIRE) is to the original video game (Grand Theft Auto IV).
After briefly sketching the aesthetics of slow machinima in my previous posts, I now wish to discuss a few phenomenological aspects. I am especially interested in the forms of spectatorship of these kinds of productions. Every time I screen slow/static machinima, I notice two kinds of reaction from the audience. One faction finds the images absorbing, mesmerizing, even hypnotic. A second group rejects them as boring, tedious, even excruciating. In the former, watching often leads to an epiphany: after a few minutes of confusion, bedazzlement, and surprise, the spectator develops a peculiar fascination for the work on display. This viewing position is akin to a religious experience, one in which the aura of the work of art manifests itself in its formal majesty. This aura, as Remes suggests, is often nothing else than the witnessing of time itself, an overpowering perception of what it is normally ignored, repressed, or distanced, i.e. consciousness itself.
A more common reaction consists in frustration, rejection, and stubborn resistance. The average spectator who equates video games to an interactive equivalent of what film critic Tom Gunning (2000) (via Sergei Eisenstein, 1998) has called “the cinema of attractions” is at loss when confronted with a video that looks like a game, but behaves like something else, a bizarre hybrid of a painting, photograph, and video installation. Slow/static machinima is usually dismissed as an experiment in boredom, or, worse, as a prank inflicted upon unsuspecting viewers.
I believe there is a third way between veneration and rejection. Remes’ definition of “furniture films” aptly describes a mode of consumption situated halfway between the two dominant viewing positions. If veneration presupposes a deep attention and rejection implies complete distraction, one can imagine the cinematic equivalent of what Linda Stone (1998) called “continuous partial attention” (CPA), i.e. the process of paying simultaneous attention to a number of sources of incoming information, but at a superficial level. According to Stone, this fragmentary viewing experience is now prevalent in our culture. Similarly, Katherine Hayles (2007) distinguishes between “deep attention” and “hyper attention”. She writes:
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.
Remes calls Andy Warhol’s Empire the quintessential “furniture film”, that is, a cinematic work specifically designed to be viewed partially, distractedly. He writes:
By repudiating movement, Warhol creates films that do not demand close attention, so these works can be enjoyed in conjunction with other activities, such as conversing, eating, drinking, and dancing.
...Or texting, skimming photos and posts on a smartphone etc.
Remes suggests that Warhol's cinematic production can be compared to Erik Satie's musical inventions. Among other things, Satie invented the genre of furniture music (musique d’ameublement), i.e. music that does not require full attention, but becomes a kind of a spatial soundtrack, an aural background. A perfect example is his composition Vexations (1893).
Vexations consists of a short theme in the bass whose four presentations are heard alternatingly unaccompanied and played with chords above. According to Satie, "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities". Vexations introduced a radical new way of listening to music. Likewise, Remes writes that films like Empire and Sleep “open up new ways of thinking about cinematic reception by inviting a series of distracted glances rather than a focused and comprehensive gaze.”
In a work like Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Deer Cam (2016), an AI controlled deer wanders through the city, causing havoc. Its actions are streamed live, 24/7, on an internet website set up by Watanabe himself. There are not narrative imperatives: the continuous, real-time streaming of random situations can hardly be called a “story”, therefore an inattentive viewer could not possibly miss a turning point, a significant twist, a resolution or a cliffhanger because these narrative techniques are completely absent. San Andreas Deer Cam is an example of furniture machinima not because it is slow, boring, and/or uneventful per se, but because the events, situations, and accidents it depicts do not create an intelligible, self-contained, and ultimately coherent narrative. When something exceeds the viewing resources of a spectator - both in on temporal and cognitive levels - it becomes pure noise. It becomes a piece of furniture. In this case, a piece of generative furniture, one that favors randomness to repetition. How can a work like San Andreas Deer Cam be approached? Describing Sleep in a 1963 interview, Warhol said “It’s a movie where you can come in at any time. And you can walk around and dance and sing…. It just starts, you know, like when people call up and say ‘What time does the movie start?’ you can just say ‘Any time.’ (quoted in Remes). The same applies to a machinima that can be looked at but not fully seen. Watanabe provides the viewer with an open window on an urban environment where a computer-controlled animal runs free. When it comes to watching San Andreas Deer Cam, there are no expectations, requirements or demands. The ideal set up of Watanabe's work would be a gallery space or a projection room where visitors come and go, constantly. San Andreas Deer Cam cannot be watched, but only experienced.
Ashley Blackman, Freedom, HD Video, sound, color, 2016, 4' 48"
Ashley Blackman - a second year student at Falmouth University in the United Kingdom - turns his camera to the sky to film the glacial movement of clouds for almost ten minutes. The fact that this visual record is produced within the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout 4 makes this gesture of radical simplicity even more interesting. Blackman’s Clouds (2016) is significant not only because it perfectly exemplifies the contemplative, ruminative approach of slow machinima, but also because it engages in a conversation with several other video works, from Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) to Harun Farocki’s Parallel I (2012), not to mention conceptual pieces by the likes of Sol LeWitt.
Harun Farocki, Parallel I, 2012
The same could be said of another recent piece by Blackman, Freedom (2016), which is, simultaneously, a machinimic depiction of an American flag shot by a fixed camera and a homage to Jasper John’s seminal painting, produced between 1954 and 1955. The strength of Blackman's machinima lies in its stark simplicity and minimalism. Similarly to Watanabe’s San Andreas Deer Cam, Freedom can be accessed and abandoned at will. There is no clear beginning or definite end. Just flux. The viewing experience can coincide to the full duration of the work or be limited to a few minutes, even seconds. It can be devotional or partial, deep or hyper. One may wonder if such definitions as furniture machinima and its antithesis (immersive, video art) rely on intrinsic features of the work or rather on the specific attitude of the viewer. A viewer might find Clouds or Flag overwhelming in their utter banality while another could appreciate its bold originality and/or the artist's unconventional gesture. As Remes notes in discussing the possible reception of a slow, static film,
The goal is not to prescribe a certain mode of spectatorship but merely to draw attention to a dimension of static films (and of cinema more broadly) that is often overlooked: the way viewers can derive pleasure from components of a cinematic experience that have little to do with the film itself.
If we substitute the term “film” with “machinima”, the meaning of this statement does not change. As Remes concludes, “Warhol’s static films are interesting precisely because they are boring. Or, to put it another way, the content of Warhol’s films is often boring, but this is what makes the experience of watching them so potentially interesting.” Discussing the aesthetics of Tree Movie by Marc Low, June Nam Paik used the expression “meaningful boredom” (quoted in Friedman, 2009). Slow machinima, a hybrid form intersecting both experimental film, avant-garde practices, and video art, is deeply meaningful because it is often deliberately boring.
Matteo Bittanti
NOTES
(1) In 2008, Solomon's EMPIRE has been screened for 127 hours consecutively at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
REFERENCES
Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Montage of Attractions” and “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell, London: British Film Institute, 1998, pp. 29–34, 35–52.
Friedman, Ken . “Events and the Exquisite Corpse,” in The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game, ed. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 229–35.
Hayles, Katherine N. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”. Profession 2007, pp. 187–199 (13).
Remes, Justin. Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Stone, Linda. “Constant Partial Attention”, Linda Stone Website, 1998. URL: https://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention/
OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES
The Aesthetics of Slow Machinima 1
The Aesthetics of Slow Machinima 2
Cory Arcangel, Super Slow Tetris, 2004, Modded Tetris game cartridge, dimensions variable
THE AESTHETICS OF SLOW MACHINIMA (1 of 4)
FROM SLOW CINEMA TO SLOW MACHINIMA
“I’ve always liked to watch people play video games. Or to watch video games as cinema. So when you start watching video games as cinema and you start considering them cinema… It becomes so unlike anything you’ve seen in cinema that it’s kinda interesting.”
(Cory Arcangel, 2011)
In his “State of Cinema” address at the 46th San Francisco Film Festival, French critic Michel Ciment (2003) described the emergence of a new cinematic style, “a cinema of slowness, of contemplation”. One year later, British critic Jonathan Romney coined the now popular expression “Slow Cinema” in a review to indicate those films that deliberately reject the narrative and aesthetic conventions of mainstream productions (1). Practitioners of slow cinema prefer a more contemplative, reflective, ruminative, and meditative approach to filmmaking to the frantic action, sensorial over stimulation, and asinine narratives of most Hollywood productions.
Slow cinema emphasizes long takes and extended durations. Observational in nature, it uses subdued visual techniques and minimal narrative strategies. As Ira Jaffe (2014) writes in Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action, “The plot and dialogue in slow movies often gravitate towards stillness and death, and tend, in any case, to be minimal, indeterminate and unresolved” (p. 23). According to David Campany (2007) slow films began as an avant-garde practice (consider, for instance, the Situationists) and represented a counterpoint to the “mass distraction” of advertising, television, and popular culture. Today, slow cinema is an umbrella term under which one can find contemporary arthouse and experimental film directors such as Lav Diaz, Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Ben Rivers, Carlos Reygadas, Bela Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, Kelly Reichardt and many more.
I would like to argue that slow cinema is not limited to the film medium. There’s a growing category of game-based video productions that consciously or indirectly emulate the aesthetics of slow cinema and, in some cases, of what Justin Remes (2015) has called “cinema of stasis”. Like its cinematic counterpart, “slow machinima” is an international effort, fiercely independent, and deliberately adversarial to the dominant paradigm. Slow machinima productions are generally indifferent or deliberately antagonistic to mainstream game audiences, and perhaps, to mainstream audiences in general. In a sense, this "certain formal trend" in contemporary machinima can be seen as an indictment of video games’ ongoing cretinization of society. In their explicit refusal to adhere to the conventions of popular genres - e.g. comedy, sci-fi, and horror - a handful of directors have chosen to explore alternative visual strategies featuring long takes, sparse narrative, minimal camera movement, editing, and dialogue. These auteurs operate in the interstices separating cinema, animation, gaming, and performance art, contributing in their own way to blur the boundaries of each practice. Their work is situated within a recognized artistic language that transcends the confines of video games and rejects the bombastic visuals, fast rhythms, and frequent allusions to the fiction worlds upon which they are based. In many ways, slow machinima is a gesture of coordinated resistance to contemporary game culture and its testosterone-driven aesthetics, hype cycles, and overt misogyny. It also rejects digital culture’s emphasis on child-like visual titillation, constant distraction, and pervasive narcissism. Additionally, slow machinima often embraces games’ in-built visual obsolescence, rather than adhering to the imperative of photorealism. Above all, slow machinima tests viewers’ patience skills. Its expected - or desired - viewing position presupposes endurance: the pace of many productions can be described as “glacial”, the camera often lingers on “non happening” situations, and the overall visual iconography is generally austere or explicitly devoid of games’ visual clichés.
The expression slow machinima may appear baffling, or even pretentious. In its rejection of gaming instant gratification, slow machinima chronicles the spaces and times of inactivity and “in-betweenness” of mainstream productions, those sparse moments of tranquility of otherwise fast and furious “triple AAA titles” or “franchises”, as the marketing types - and, by osmosis, the average game journalist - call them. If most video games can be situated in the accelerationist paradigm - itself a manifestation of capitalism’ obsession for growth, speed, and grotesque excess - slow machinima invokes a more reflective, attentive, and introspective viewing experience. As Lutz Koepnick (2014) writes in On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary:
Our attention spans shrink toward zero because we have to make too many decisions within ever shorter windows of time. Cell phones, handheld computers, and ubiquitous screening devices urge us to be always on and produce instantaneous responses, yet we no longer take the time to contemplate an image, develop a profound thought, traverse a gorgeous landscape, play a game, or follow the intensity of some emotion. (p. 12)
Slow machinima can be seen as alternative to a constant flow of interruptions, inane updates, and juvenile distractions. In terms of presentation, distribution, and circulation, slow machinima diverge from fandom productions insofar as they are not usually distributed on popular video sharing websites such as YouTube or Vimeo, but in the artworld circuits. Slow machinima prefers projection rooms to smartphone screens, art galleries’ video installation to laptops. As such, the profile of their audience rarely overlap with that of the “gamer”. Although machinima and slow machinima engage with the same material, that is, video games, they rely on radically different contexts and markets.
Over the next few weeks, I will share a few thoughts about the emergence of what I am calling slow machinima and how it has been consciously and/or unconsciously embraced by a variety of practitioners. These posts will focus especially - but not exclusively - on the works on display at GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY and included in the collateral events (screenings).
Matteo Bittanti
READ PART TWO HERE
NOTES
Interestingly, as Romney was conceptualizing slow cinema, media artist Cory Arcangel modified a copy of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System to prolong its duration. In Arcangel’s version, "It takes about 8 hours for the blocks to fall in one complete game. At the same time, it is still possible to move them left and right, it just takes minutes for them to drop one pixel down on the screen. It’s totally maddening!" (Arcangel, 2004). In a sense, Super Slow Tetris (2004) can be considered the videogame equivalent of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho.