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Video Games and the NY Video Festival
Incognitius writes "The NYT (free reg. req.) has an article on the New York Video Festival's presentation of video games as an outpost of abstraction, eccentricity and avant-gardism. Various artists have used video games to make elaborate dramatic movies. In 'My Trip to Liberty City,' for example, Jim Munroe turns 'Grand Theft Auto III' into a comic travel diary, in which he chooses the 'skin' of a Canadian tourist and blithely ignores the criminal inducements that are the whole point of the game. Cartridge hacking, 'Halo,' and other elements of the gaming world are also mentioned, illustrating the amazing range of video games today."
No more damned NYT links!
May we never see th
No-reg link.
By A. O. SCOTT
The New York Video Festival, presented every July by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is an outpost of abstraction, eccentricity and avant-gardism planted in the middle of the blockbuster-dominated summer movie landscape. At the festival, which opens tonight and runs through Sunday at the Walter Reade Theater, artists use the medium as a tool of personal exploration, social critique and visual experimentation. But like the purveyors of big-money Hollywood action and sci-fi epics, they also occasionally use the rapidly evolving technologies of video animation to create strange and elaborate fantasy worlds.
Some of these worlds will turn out to be curiously familiar. This year the festival, while as committed as ever to the difficult and the esoteric, devotes its opening program to one of the most popular (and profitable) applications of video technology, namely video games, which have recently superseded movies as the culture industry's biggest money machine.
If you have ever played one of Nintendo's venerable "Super Mario" games, you may recognize the serene, fluffy clouds that greet you at the start of the opening night program, a lecture and "live video" presentation called "Game Engine." Organized by Graham Leggat and Katie Salen, "Game Engine" reveals that video games, the obsession of millions of teenagers and the guilty pleasure of at least as many adults, have also emerged as a vibrant collaborative art form.
Those clouds are the work of Cory Arcangel, an artist who is also to give a PowerPoint presentation on how to hack into a Nintendo game cartridge.
Other pieces show how players and designers adapt the environments and characters of various games to their own purposes, generating narrative and satire even as they show off their strategic mastery and manual dexterity. In "My Trip to Liberty City," for example, Jim Munroe turns "Grand Theft Auto III," a notoriously violent, seamy first-person game, into a comic travel diary, in which he chooses the "skin" of a Canadian tourist and blithely ignores the criminal inducements that are the whole point of the game.
In "Warthog Jump" Randall Glass similarly takes the military game "Halo" on a wild tangent, turning what in ordinary play would be a terrible mistake (i.e., blowing up the guys on your own side) into a special effects extravaganza.
Video art, like video gaming, is ruled by conventions: blurry images, affectless voice-over, electronic music, scrambled chronology and confessional self-consciousness pop up again and again. There are some influential artists -- like George Kuchar, Donigan Cumming and Robert Frank, who are on the "Me and My Camera" bill this Saturday -- who helped to set these rules and whose work therefore transcends them. But as usual, much of the work in the festival seems content to remain within established parameters, in a kind of safe, academic experimentalism.
How many times can you watch images recorded from the window of a moving vehicle, however much they have been speeded up, slowed down, or otherwise enhanced? (Quite a few, apparently.)
Happily, though, the ingenuity of the video gamer and developers is shared by some of the artists working in more traditional genres and with relatively low-tech tool. Shelly Silver, in her 65-minute "Suicide," subverts the norms of both travelogue and video diary, recording the bustle and tedium of airports and city streets as her narrator contemplates ending her life.
The Brothers Quay, masters of the stop-motion uncanny, contribute a creepy wonder-cabinet excursion called "The Phantom Museum" to "Life Is a Dream," an otherwise uneven program that will be shown on Sunday.
Anthony Goicolea, Shannon Plumb and Chris Larson, whose work is brought together in "Mirror Conspiracies" (tomorrow and Saturday), also bring a handmade surrealist aesthetic to the festival. Ms. Plumb, in a series of short, mostly black-and-white clips preceded by hand-letter
I thought it was a Michael Moore documentary of the pre-Giuliani Manhattan.
I just saw some sad news on the Internet today--legendary comedian Bob Hope was found dead in his California home this morning. Even if you don't personal enjoy his work, there's no denying the impact he had on American culture, so so long, Bob, and thanks for the memories.
...how can you mention game engine videos and leave out Red vs Blue and the Blood Gulch Chronicles.
Don't get me wrong. Randy Glass is the godfather of Halo movies, but Red vs Blue took it to an entirely new level. Heck, those guys were even invited to go to the conference and made a special video for it. This is just blasphemous.
Am I bored, or was Jim Munroe's GTA-movie really boring? Not worth the pain-in-the-ass slow download.
Paul Marino of the Ill Clan also wrote a piece on this program, which you can find here.
There's a little stuff on RvB there, as well as details on the Ill Clan's Machinima ballet (!) piece.