VIDEO: PIETRO RIGHI RIVA, QUALCOSA DA DIRE (VIDEO)

ORA DISPONIBILE LA versione integrale della presentazione di Pietro Righi Riva, "Qualcosa da dire" che si è tenuta alla IULM di Milano il 13 maggio 2016. 

In questa pungente e stimolante presentazione, Pietro Righi Riva illustra una serie di tecniche tutt'altro che convenzionali per la creazione di video game. Secondo Riva, oggi i videogiochi "non funzionano". Cosa possono fare i creatori per reinventare il medium? Quali sono le ispirazioni possibili per cambiare le regole del (video)gioco?

LO SPEAKER

Pietro Righi Riva, classe 1985, dirige lo studio di produzione di videogiochi Santa Ragione. dal 2010 con il quale ha sviluppato giochi sperimentali vincitori di premi internazionali, tra cui il gioco di corse in soggettiva FOTONICA (2011), il gioco di esplorazione astratto MirrorMoon EP (2013) e il gioco di guida narrativo Wheels of Aurelia (2015). Righi Riva ha conseguito un dottorato in Interaction Design al Politecnico di Milano e ha collaborato con l'Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano per la realizzazione di un catalogo di strumenti per il game design accessibile. Dal 2016, coordina l'innovativo Master Universitario GAME/PLAY. Design, Direction & Production alla IULM. Righi Riva vive e lavora a Milano.

INTERVIEW: OSCAR NODAL

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, MEXICAN ARTIST OSCAR NODAL TALKS ABOUT HIS FASCINATION FOR GLITCHES, THE REPETITIVE NATURE OF DIGITAL GAMES, AND DATA CORRUPTION.

Born in Juarez, Mexico in 1986, Oscar Nodal is a visual artist who engages with new media technology, synthetic imagery, and simulated environments. As art critic Emmanuel Villareal writes, “Nodal's work by moments examines video purely as an electronic technology of signal processing and transmission that shares these properties with other electronic media, notably television. But most of all, portrays video as a medium in its own right by articulating specific media language in a step-by-step construction of a videographic-aesthetic vocabulary, at times, successfully establishing an emergent semiotic system by which video becomes a medium that can be truly distinguished from alternative media.”

Oscar Nodal's Sleepy Existence is currently on display in the RECORD level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?

Oscar Nodal: In 2012, I received a BFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in video production at University of Juarez, in Mexico. I’m currently enrolled in a MA in Studies and Creative Process in Art and Design at the same institution. Currently, I am investigating glitches as a narrative agents in machinima.

Oscar Nodal, Puppy Sound John, 2015

"Made using RPG Maker X ACE Visit http://www.oscarnodal.com/#!psj/ca7a for full Puppy Sound John experience Music "Valentine" by The Losers" (Oscar Nodal)

GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?

Oscar Nodal: Initially, popular culture. As I was growing up, books, comic books, and movies always captivated me. I was especially interested in understanding their storytelling techniques. I spent a great part of my childhood writing short stories and drawing comics. The true epiphany was Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in the early Nineties. After watching that movie my whole life changed. I knew I wanted to work with an audiovisual medium. Finally, during my BA studies I encountered the work of such artists as Maya Deren, Matthew Barney, Bill Viola, Stan Brakhage, Ingmar Bergman, and Christoph Schlingensief. They were incredibly influential in my understanding of art, film, and performance.

GVA: When and why did you begin using videogames in your practice?

Oscar Nodal: I first started using video games in 2011 during a hacking workshop in which I circuit bent an NES console, then I mixed real time game play with a remix of user-found glitches in Super Mario Bros 3. Subsequently, I started producing machinima as a way to explore other media beside video, as a way to expand my storytelling skills. I found impossible to ignore the creative possibilities offered by machinima.

Presentation: Oscar Nodal: Glitch as a narrative agent in machinima, May 5 2016, IULM University, Milan.

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a videogame to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

Oscar Nodal: One of the things I found most fascinating is the fact that narrative in games does not exist by itself, but it is intertwined with gameplay. That is, to understanding narrative, we must play. There’s also a cultural aspect that I find terribly exciting. As we interact with games we are aware of their cultural underpinnings. These layers of meaning are often highlighted by machinima because this is a much more contemplative medium, one that encourages reflection and meditation upon gestures, ideas, and goals.

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Oscar Nodal: To create my machinima, I used Sleeping Dogs, an open world action game developed by Sega. The game is set in a very lively and dynamic urban environment. Things happens, characters come and go all the time. The protagonist can wander through the streets and explore the city. He is a proxy of my own experience in the digital sphere, where I can be an actor, but also a director and editor at the same time. These affordances are unknown to other media, such as cinema or photography.

Oscar Nodal, The Battle for the Wastelands, 2016

"A glitchy machinima made using a modified Sega Genesis and "Victorian"." (Oscar Nodal)

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?

Oscar Nodal: In many ways, yes. Machinima offers a cheaper solution than producing a short film for many creators that want to tell a story. At the same time, I think machinima is a medium that differs profoundly from cinema or television. There are certain stories that could be told effectively only through machinima.

GVA: How do videogame aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?

Oscar Nodal: When it comes to machinima, the medium always comes first. There are several things I must consider before imagining a story. The game genre, for instance, is a significant constraint as it limits my choices and possibilities. I am talking about things like camera controls, physics, character movements, types of environments and interactions with non-playable characters... All these factors shape, and in some cases determine, the aesthetics of the resulting work.

Oscar Nodal, Glitch Upon a Time in The West, 2016

"A glitchy machinima made using Red Dead Redemption by Rockstar Games. Song "Far Away" by Jose Gonzalez"

GVA: In your machinima Sleepy Existence how and why do you use this particular game, Sega's Sleeping Dogs?

Oscar Nodal: I used Sleeping Dogs because its environments are pulsating with (artificial) life. This game provides an author with almost endless possibilities to create stories. In a sense, open world games are narrative engines. I was very familiar with Sleeping Dogs because I had played obsessively, so using it as a storytelling platform came natural to me. I was able to exploits its potential as well as its limitations. Above all, I loved the fact that although Sleeping Dogs is an action game, it emulates several mundane tasks, e.g. going to the restroom, buying groceries, being stuck in traffic and so on. These “interstitial” actions became the central focus of my story.

GVA: In Sleepy Existence, the main character lives in a cruel and illegal world, without taking part in it but simply dealing with daily ordinary problems. Does the repetition of the key player’s actions enforce this idea or does it have an aesthetic function only?

Oscar Nodal: This repetition was meant to communicate the idea that the character is simply drifting through life. Stuck in a daily routine, the protagonist seems to operate in auto-pilot. However, the glitches he gradually experiences disrupt this apparent order, so he starts questioning the logic of his own surroundings, and ultimately, the true nature of his own self.

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INTERVIEW: WAI-KEUNG HUI

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, WAI KEUNG-HUI DISCUSSES HIS PASSION FOR PHILOSOPHY, THE EXPRESSIVE VIOLENCE OF VIDEO GAMES, AND WHAT COMES AFTER SIMULATION.

Hong Kong-based artist Hui Wai-Keung (許維強) received his MFA from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong and a BFA in Sculpture from the Hong Kong Art School. Exhibiting internationally including throughout Asia and Europe, his interdisciplinary practice encompasses residencies abroad alongside curatorial work examining intersections of melancholy, myth and innovation in contemporary art. Currently focused on digital media and connecting art with the natural world, Hui believes in creativity's power to manifest alternative existential possibilities. Drawn to irrational terrains of dreams and pseudoscience, he mines the resonant space between the rational and mystical. Hui feels this liminal zone makes ripe terrain for reformulating the sublime uniquely suited to our technological moment. His exhibitions invite transcendental contemplation of simulated environments and virtual frontiers, new cosmologies coded into being.

Hui Wai-Keung’s RE-DÜRER: ARTIST, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL is featured in the GLITCH level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

This interview was produced by the students of the M.A. Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM University in Milan.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education as an artist and curator?

Wai Keung-Hui: I was educated in both traditional and new media art schools. However, rather than hone craftsmanship in materials, my professors encouraged broadening conceptual knowledge. I spent days immersed in philosophers like Kant, Lacan and Heidegger — at times feeling enrolled in a philosophy program. Consequently, although still self-critical regarding technical facility, I'm grateful for increased cognitive agility developed through expansive interrogation of ideas themselves.

GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones — that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?

Wai Keung-Hui: Beyond philosophical frameworks, mythologies, pseudoscience, ghost tales, gnostic thought, Buddhism, Haruki Murakami novels and sci-fi narratives across media (comics, film — especially The Matrix) also inspire my practice. Indeed I contend we already inhabit a matrix, our perceived reality more virtual than concrete. Lacking shamanic insight, art provides my sole portal to access these occluded realms, substantiating speculative truths through creative intercession.

Wai-Keung Hui, No Play Today, 2013

"It is project of performance art, which was run on the platform of multiplayer online game, “Anarchy Online”, in October 2005. The name of performer is “Alenila” – my avatar. The online game world is a public space. This is a public performance.

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) is an environment in which players are used to fight, aim at equipping the most powerful weapons and armors, and become as stronger and richer as possible. Players somehow earn their social states during the time. In October 2005, Alenila on and on kept dancing in the Temple of the Three Winds dungeon in Anarchy Online. There is the most crowded battlefield where players are fighting fiercely. Dancing is definitely not supposed to be a normal behavior there. During the time of performance, I always received other players' queries. For example, someone asked me, “ehm, alenila what are you doing in totw? except for dancing i mean.”I also encountered another interesting response. A player came to dance with me.

This performance questioned the essence of “play” in the modern game. I wonder “play” might have the power to bring people to extraordinary. However, “play” in MMORPG at most time duplicates the ordinary social conventions and requests players to fit in. It just reinforces the framing of ordinary life. “Play” might lost its mysterious and precious characters nowadays." (Wai-Keung Hui)

GVA: When did you begin using video games in your practice? Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality? Would you consider yourself a “gamer” as well?

Wai Keung-Hui: I was once an avid gamer, playing extensively as an adolescent — especially immersive MMORPGs. Back then I also believed virtual spaces like Second Life presaged humanity’s eventual migration online, our consciousness transcending physical limits through networked community. Keen to precipitate this new mode of being, I turned to art as transcendental conduit. Early internet artists like Eva and Franco Mattes provided initial inspiration for works seeking philosophical insight within natively digital media, though my Second Life performances lacked their mastery. Still committed to mining the ontology of virtuality, I danced endlessly amidst combat in Anarchy Online — pacifist foil to surrounding bloodlust.

In time my faith in online utopias faded, drawing me to other genres. Yet fascination with gaming and digital spaces has reignited from an analytic perspective. Rather than manifesting imaginative futures, I now anatomize video games scientifically and archeologically, reverse-engineering their construction through studying computer graphics — vertexes, polygons etc — then investigating attached logics and constraints. Still early in the learning process, I let the medium guide me, marveling at each layer revealed through meticulous dissection.

GVA: When/where did you first encounter machinima? What did/do you find interesting/fascinating about this artform? What is, in your opinion, the most significant machinima of all time, and why?

Wai Keung-Hui: Unfortunately I have limited exposure to machinima, so cannot adequately assess the form.

Wai Keung-Hui, Re-Dürer: Saint Artist in his Study (10 minutes excerpt), 2016

"This is a rework of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Saint Jerome in his Study (1514). I am convinced that the ancient definitions of inspired melancholy from Pseudo-Aristotle was inscribed on Dürer’s three well-known engravings. Our melancholy, as well as our lives, are classified into three types (or stages): imagination, reason, and intellect. I rework the concepts based on my own interpretation and emotion. Instead of engraving, I hack a popular video game to generate graphics, and present them in three-channels video installation (or three separated video works). This one is belong to the third stage of inspired melancholy. It is about intellect, divine, religion, theology, and contemplation. I wish I could believe, but cannot help recognizing the virtuality and plasticity of the world. My ascetic dog of the senses never sleep peacefully." (Wai Keung-Hui)

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Wai Keung-Hui: Video games do not simulate reality — even when developers intend experiential verisimilitude, invented realms emerge. I view these not as lesser representations but discrete realities obeying unique in-game physics. Our perceived reality also lacks concrete authority, merely comprising one conceptual dimension among many: new spaces perpetually unfold. “Simulation” remains an illusion — perhaps the constraints and mechanisms of game construction spawn the most compelling departures from daily life. A Grand Theft Auto pistol feels wholly alien to its real-world counterpart. And virtually passing through Eva and Franco Mattes' nude forms in Second Life resonates differently than encountering the physical bodies of Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s. Yet provocative echoes between domains also inspire audiences. I believe artists can either amplify or rupture the membrane between real and virtual through subtractive interventions. In my video installation Re-Dürer, I heighten permitted violence in games alongside avatars’ endless cycles of death and rebirth - highlighting symbolic departures from mortal existence. When considering liminal spaces gaming opens, I immediately recall Harun Farocki’s Parallel series contrasting early virtual environments with heightened photorealism in later platforms. The exponential technical evolution distills gaming’s power to access alternative existential possibilities.

GVA: What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of machinima, a form greatly constrained by commercial copyright despite using commercial platforms as raw material?

Wai Keung-Hui: Contrasted with the creative freedom of video games, mundane real-world legal structures seem nonsensical constraints divorced from artistic goals or values — copyright regimen being one glaring example.

Wai Keung-Hui, Re-Dürer: Melencolia I (outdated modern version), 2016

"This is a rework of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I (1514). I am convinced that the ancient definitions of inspired melancholy from Pseudo-Aristotle was inscribed on Dürer’s three well-known engravings. Our melancholy, as well as our lives, are classified into three types (or stages): imagination, reason, and intellect. I rework the concepts based on my own interpretation and emotion. Instead of engraving, I hack a popular video game to generate graphics, and present them in three-channels video installation (or three separated video works). This one is belong to the first stage of inspired melancholy. It is about imagination, art, craft, and creativity. Geometry played crucial and mysterious part in Dürer’s engraving. It enclosed some transcendental truth. I extend it into the version in modern era, try to ascend myself into the fourth dimension." (Wai Keung-Hui)

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered barriers for aspiring video artists?

Wai Keung-Hui: Having researched neither form extensively, I hesitate to situate machinima subordinate to video art - they strike me as wholly discrete media generating distinct creative realities, each with unique contours and constraints. After Duchamp, should artistic barriers still concern us?

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, concept or medium?

Wai Keung-Hui: As a newcomer still probing this space, medium precedes message thus far - I manipulate algorithms and marvel at unpredictable visual responses. Hoping to impose conceptual frameworks, I instead discover the platform’s native effects wield their own persuasive power. When tweaking polygon coordinates expecting anthropomorphic distortions, sudden chromatic transformations proved more startling. I let gaming systems guide my work until their capabilities and proclivities come into focus.   

Wai Keung-Hui, Transcendence, 2016

“This series of works tries to transcend an ordinary three-dimensional model to the four-dimension mathematically, and projects back to a three-dimensional appearance. There are many possible solutions of projection, at the same time; there are also many possible four-dimensional models which can project the same appearance. Thus, I wonder, our living world is just one of the many possible appearances, projected from many possible hyperspaces. This idea is inspired by Professor Linda Henderson’s research on fourth dimension geometry on modern art, and I would like to imitate and continue the works of those masters such as Duchamp, Metzinger, and Malevich.” (Wai Keung-Hui)

GVA: What inspired your video installation RE-DÜRER: ARTIST, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL reinventing Albrecht Dürer prints in gaming environments?

Wai Keung-Hui: Originally I sought not to remixed Dürer but replays Joseph Beuys’ dialogues via Grand Theft Auto V, donning his mask to import durational performance art into violent gamespaces. My avatar evoked his ideals of creative revolution and social sculpture amidst regulated chaos. But communally-minded actions met predictable apathy and hostility. Disheartened, game violence mirrored real-world defeats. Yet studying Dürer’s iconic Knight, Death and the Devil engraving, I grasped its emblematic portrayal of fortitude and determined vision flourishing despite existential threats — inspirational mirror for a struggling artist. Soon my reactive homage to Beuys transformed into proactive translation of Dürer's triumphal humanist spirit into digital domains. Through transhistorical conversation, I honored inherits while evolving enduring symbols with postmodern tools. Chapman Brothers also remix classical works, but pursue deconstructive ends insubordination to earlier eras. I instead seek timeless values’ resurrection — especially around morality — by fully adopting gaming's visual language, not imposing external critique. Ultimately I create self-portraiture, cataloging an artist’s journey across epochs.    

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INTERVIEW: IP YUK-YIU

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, IP YUK-YUI DISCUSSES HIS FASCINATION FOR CALL OF DUTY, HIS ADMIRATION FOR PHILIP SOLOMON, AND THE CREATION OF HIS STUNNING HONG KONG TRILOGY.

IP Yuk-Yiu is an experimental filmmaker, media artist, art educator, and independent curator. His works have been showcased extensively at international festivals including the European Media Art Festival, New York Film Festival in the “Views From the Avant-garde” program), Image Festival, FILE Festival, VideoBrasil, Transmediale, ISEA and more. He is the founder of the art.ware project, an independent curatorial initiative focusing on the promotion of new media art in Hong Kong. Yuk-Yiu has also lectured extensively on film, video and media art and has taught at Emerson College, Massachusetts College of Art and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Currently he is Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His recent works explore emergent and hybrid forms of cinema. Yuk-Yiu lives and works in Hong Kong.

IP Yuk-Yiu's Hong Kong trilogy is currently on display in the ASSEMBLAGE level of GAME VIDEO ART. A SURVEY.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?

My education background is in philosophy and cinema. I completed my graduate study in film production, focusing on experimental filmmaking.

Ip Yuk-Yui, The Griffith Cycle, 2002

"video / b&w / sound / 4 min. / 2002 Recycling a scene from a D.W. Griffith short, THE GRIFFITH CIRCLE explores the enigma of the cinematic space that dominated classical film practices for over a century. It turns a simple and often neglected act of screen direction into a playful meditation on spatial construction and a symbolic game of cinematic “hide and seek”."

GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?

To cite influences, artistic or otherwise, will be an endless task that results with a long list. But I will still try to name two. First I am always drawn to and inspired by popular media such as films and video games. Popular media are interesting prisms that refract our collective desires, fantasy, anxiety, fear, moral codes and more, which I find amazing. Second, for the recent machinima series, I think I am indebted to Phil Solomon. Phil Solomon is an artist whom I have admired since I was in college. His hand-processed films are some of the most poetic and beautiful personal works that I have ever seen. However I was quite puzzled and disappointed when he first released his machinima works (Crossroad, Rehearsals for Retirement), a series that he made with and for the late Mark LaPore (whom is also a great influence on me as my mentor) I just didn’t like them at the time. However, to cut a long story short, I think Phil is really ahead of the game. It really took me some time to see the true significance and beauty of the works. His use of video games is extremely personal, poetic and ingenious.  Something I do not see often in other machinima works.

IP Yuk-Yui, PSYCHO(S), 2011

"computational cinema / 2006 / co-artist: CHOI Sai-Ho PSYCHO(S) is a live remix of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and Gus Van Sant’s remake in 1998. Running on custom software that edits the films in real-time, PSYCHO(S) juxtaposes and condenses the two films that were made almost 40 years apart into a hypnotic stream of mirror images. The images and sounds, drifting in and out of sync, create a perpetual state of cinematic déjà vu that haunts and confuses both the original and its double. PSYCHO(S) recycles the original narratives, forming new poetic associations in an endless cycle of parallel edits." (IP Yuk-Yui)

GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?

I am always interested in video games. But I didn’t explicitly incorporate video games as elements in my works until 2011. The reason for using video games in my works is simple: I am an avid gamer that perhaps spends a little bit too much time on playing video games. In other words, games play a significant part in my world and everyday life. Naturally they are obvious choices for me as artistic materials.

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

I use the Call of Duty games because they are the games that I play almost on a daily basis. I am fascinated by the landscapes inside the games. These virtual landscapes are things that one usually misses when one is engaged with the super fast-paced gameplay. However, if you pause the shooting for a while and focus on the landscapes behind, you will realize these landscapes are amazing tableaux that one can stare at for hours. For me, these landscapes entail a quality that I found more deadly than the first-person shootings as in the original games.

IP Yuk-Yiu, The Plastic Garden, 2013

"HD / color / stereo / 11 min. / 16:9 / 2013 Evoking imagery and memories of the atomic age, THE PLASTIC GARDEN summons the ghost of a forgotten future, the grim fatality of a total nuclear war that held the world hostage half a century ago. Hacking and appropriating the popular video game CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS (2010), THE PLASTIC GARDEN revisited the dark vision and symbolism of the nuclear drama that seems on the one hand remotely archaic, but hauntingly close and familiar on the other. The restaged scenes, devoid of bloody shootouts, are equally if not more lethal and violent than in the original game. THE PLASTIC GARDEN unravels a forgotten future that felt like an endless nightmare spinning loose, or else a collective death wish that comes to define the tragic essence of modern socio-political reality." (IP Yuk-Yiu)

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Video games are often viewed as simulation of reality. But sometimes I would rather see them as a kind of extended reality. Like other things or objects in the world, video games are artifacts that help to form and define what we may call reality. On this note, I think video games can be conceived less as a kind of symbolic parallel, but rather a direct extension of our everyday reality that warrants exploration and manipulation.

GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this artform?

I think the issue is not new and somewhat similar to the problems faced by other strands of appropriation art. In a world that is governed by big bucks and big corporations, artists sometimes have to take risks in their creative practices, which is not easy sometimes. Copyright is just one issue among many.

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?

It really depends on what do we mean by “democratization” and “machinima”. Personally I tend to be suspicious and skeptical. I don’t believe in any technological determinist arguments that see socio-cultural effects as direct outcomes of certain technology or technological process.

IP Yuk-Yiu, Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, 2012

"HD / color / stereo / 15 min. 30 sec or loop / 16:9 / 2012 ANOTHER DAY OF DEPRESSION IN KOWLOON (九龍百哀圖) is a virtual study and a digital portrait of Hong Kong as seen through the lens of contemporary popular culture incarnated in the forms of video game and screen media. Using the map “KOWLOON” from the popular video game CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS (2010) as a field of study, the filmmaker conducted a yearlong virtual fieldwork: playing, observing and documenting “Hong Kong” as simulated in the video game world. ANOTHER turns the violent first-person shooter into a series of vacant, uncanny and yet meditative tableaux, unearthing a formal poetry that is often overlooked during the original gameplay. It combines methodologies from both the observational and assemblage film traditions in raising questions about cultural representations in contemporary popular media, while at the same time creating evocative metaphors for a post-colonial Hong Kong through the reworking of media materials. ANOTHER is a “found” landscape film, a ballad for a post-colonial Hong Kong seemingly trapped in endless downpours of murky political dismal." (IP Yuk-Yiu)

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?

I am not sure how video game aesthetics affect the impact of my work. For me video games are an integrated part of my everyday life that I usually don’t think of them separately as “concept” and “medium”. They are part of my world that seeks for my attention, observation and reflection.

GVA: How and why did you use Call of Duty to create Clouds Fall?

Like the previous two chapters in the trilogy: Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012) and The Plastic Garden (2013), Clouds Fall (2014) uses Call of Duty as its base materials. Clouds Fall is the most ambitious attempt in the trilogy since it incorporates and works with elements from almost the entire Call of Duty series (instead of focusing on just a single map which I did in the first two.) As I mentioned above, I use Call of Duty partly because it is a series that I am most familiar with and knowledgeable of. At the same time, I am interested in the cultural logic behind/beyond the obvious bloodsheds and gunfights of the games in the series.

GVA: What links the different parts of your trilogy? What do all these scenarios have in common?

The most obvious link is, of course, the video game series Call of Duty, which forms the base materials for the trilogy. But I think there is something more subtle and important that connects the three works together beyond this obvious fact, which has something to do more with my thinking and approach in treating the games in my works. Many people might consider the trilogy as a series of found media or appropriation work that deals critically with cultural representations of popular media via video games, which of course it is. For instance, in Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, I am interested in exploring how popular media represents Hong Kong; while in The Plastic Garden, I want to restage the dark symbolism of the atomic age that got imprinted in our public imaginary via popular culture. However, beyond all these interesting and complex issues that have to do with our signifying and representational systems, I am equally interested in staring at the blanks of the virtual skies and its surrounding landscapes inside the games, and derive pleasures and inspirations from them. Therefore I also consider the trilogy as a sort of observational work.  When I made this series of works, I often considered myself as a flâneur and a filmmaker navigating and shooting in a (virtual) world. Just like when I made my camera films or photographic-based works, I am confronting and observing an environment and its unfolding. In this sense, I feel this series of work is as much about observation and documentation as it is about cultural representation via media appropriation. I think this is what united the three works together in the series for me.

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INTERVIEW: PALLE TORSSON

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, SWEDISH ARTIST PALLE TORSSON TALKS ABOUT DOOM, THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, AND THE INEVITABLE FALL OF HUMANKIND.

Palle Torsson's Free Fall is curently on display in the GLITCH level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?

Palle Torsson: I received a Master of Visual Arts in 1998 from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. As part of my education, I interned at White Columns Gallery in New York in 1996 and I was an exchange student at Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin in 1995. Prior to Graduate school, I studied the History of Ideas, Aesthetics, and Philosophy at Uppsala University. Several years later, I pursued a higher vocational track in Agile Web Development and Programming.

GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?

Palle Torsson: Concretism, Surrealism, Dadaism, The Situationists, The Spectacle, Tactical Media, Guerrilla Girls, Kraftwerk, Public Enemy, Twin Peaks, The Internet, www, IRC, The demo scene, Richard Stallman, The Piracy Bureau, Hacker ethics, Occupy, Donna Haraway, Alan Turing, Python, Raspberry Pi, and Mika Rottenberg.

Palle Torsson, Museum Meltdown, 1999, game modification Half-Life

GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?

Palle Torsson: That would be 1995. Doom started it all. This game allowed artists to create expressive works by using an alternative set of tools and a different iconography. It basically spawned an autonomous sphere of action within - or outside - the established art world.  

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

Palle Torsson: Video games have the potential to operate as an autonomous playground and a space to address such questions as the logic of systems, the matrix, network boundaries, functional objects, algorithmical worlds, and the tension between user immersiveness and control. I think their aesthetic possibilities point to an agency of interaction that has a certain theatrical potential, that is, a narrative-performative potential. This means that video games could, potentially, revolutionize society. Alas, in most cases, they simply promote dull, commercial stereotypes. This failure is related to market-driven imperatives that favor quantity over quality, crass profit over ideas. Something that cast a shadow of the real nature of things. That being said, what is done in the commercial context is often fantastic, open to interpretation, and can always be hacked and transformed into alternative forms of expression. The interstices between exploration and mutation are my true passion. This grey area is where I conduct my key investigations and experimentations.

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Palle Torsson: The user can take control over the possibilities of reality. To think about reality as a simulation and vice versa can become a powerful tool to change the ontology of things and/or activate all its hermeneutic possibilities. My work is situated on the edge between reality and simulation and it addresses the elliptical nature of seeing.

Palle Torsson, Evil Interiors, 2003

GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this art form?

Palle Torsson: I think fair use should be expanded beyond copyright because it is more compatible with the  logical digital networked: let’s face it, we live in a modification culture in flux. Thus, remixing art should not be simply a way to create additional layers of property. The paradox is nothing more than the side effect of intellectual property’s abstract nature. To make the ecology of mutations possible, the commons must be expanded to include a space of difference. In short, the opposite of stereotypes.

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?

Palle Torsson: I think machinima exemplify how digital tools in general have democratized the art making process but how they also created new situations of stalling that must be overcome. For current generations, machinima has become an important expressive tool that is close at hand, connected to identity-making processes, and parody.

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?

Palle Torsson: The medium is the message in many respects. I like the specific qualities of video games and how the medium shines through between 2D and 3D graphics, for instance in texture mapping. I guess the medium comes first, in most cases, and becomes a starting point to be actualized. Wherever there is a Pong, whenever a certain affordance of creativity occurs, a vision becomes clear.  

GVA:  In your artwork Free Fall how and why do you use this particular video game?

Palle Torsson: I have been working with several different game engines through the years. The reason why I choose the game editor to Half-Life 2 is purely technical: I needed a game editor with a large height axis, z-axis, to produce an extended falling of the bodies. To prolong the falling I used a “teleporter” in the middle of the game sequence. The first-person view is needed to move to another section and the fall is prolonged.

GVA:  In your opinion, is Free Fall a metaphorical reflection about the condition of a directionless society?

Palle Torsson: I think it can be seen as a metaphor of many things. For instance, of the perpetual free fall of our societies, stock markets, and the specific ecology that we inhabit. Moreover, this work alludes to the super structures which we may ascertain and recognize, but act like black boxes upon which we have little or no agency. When the act of seeing becomes a game, a destructive entertainment activity slowly drains the world. The rabbit hole ends in a flat line.

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