Game History: rebecca.cannon

Like the erotic airbrushed art found under fibreglass skateboards of decades gone by, the humble computer game is finally getting the cultural recognition it deserves. Indeed as we roll into an increasingly mediatised world, Rebecca Cannon from Some Underground Machine in Melbourne, plans to fill a gallery with art inspired by the games people play on those plastic box calculating devices. (mo-info? rebecca.cannon@antimedia.net )

What attracted you to curate an art exhibition inspired by computer games?
I’m very interested in the evolution of culture, and in particular the way creativity responds to advances in tech. In the late 70’s to mid-80’s, we witnessed a technological revolution which allowed interactive game technologies to enter the home on a mass scale, and with it’s limitations came a whole new visual language, heavy in semiotics. This mode of entertainment, and the visual language which came with it – like all cultural phenonmena- had an immense impact on the creative development of a generation. I’m curating this exhibition to survey and document that impact. Twenty years after games entered the home, what have they done to the visual and conceptual styles of artists?

What works have X-cited u most?
WATAG by Rachel tempest and Julian Oliver. People in Western Australia get to upload their graffitti and attack a virtual representation of the Richmond train station. Victorian taggers have to sit back and watch while interstate crews take over their turf. “What remains of territory when it is carried over into the digital?”

Space Invader is a French Installation artist who has launched a global invasion. He sticks space-invaders on public walls in various cities. The space-invaders are permanently attached, and he doesn’t get anyone’s permission to do it. I admire the literal way he has followed through with the ideas fed to him in that early game. Space-Invaders themselves just keep on coming. Occasionally Invader, (the moniker he has taken) gets in trouble with the police. In a sense they are the game players; they get to shoot back.

Spookyville is a game which some Brisbane kids are building. They have put a lot of effort into the visual style, making it a freaky gothic house of horrors. They are experimenting with gameplay itself, avoiding violence as a motive for interaction. The luscious sound design instigates the play, as one must make environmental recordings to gain points. The final challenge is to mix the sounds down into a track inside the mad professor’s laboratory.

The challenges of electronic arts curation?
The easiest part is tracking down the work. Most people working with electronic media make sure they’re represented on the web. The problems arise when you want to start showing the work to the public. Computers, projectors etc are really expensive for short-term hire, and in a gallery context you end up needing a few of them. We’re fortunate to live in a country where the government values cultural output and does offer some grants for artists and exhibitions, but writing proposals can be a very bewildering and stressful process.

Your first computer game memory?
We had a commodore 64 when I was a kid, back before (really) floppy discs. So to load games, you had to do it by cassette tape. I remember playing a really simple game called TRAX, which was even simpler than PACMAN. It took an hour to load! Somehow the excitement of controlling the action on the screen made it worth it.

First photoshopped dream?
A collage of my friend Marnie looking femininely tough, with the top of an armaguard van ( those spunky numbers for helicopter-view ) running through her brain.

What X-cites about the potential for game-building today?
I think they can be put to really good educational use. Imagine studying chemical engineering or medicine by using a game where you were rewarded for the knowledge which you fed into it. You could use what you had learnt to prevent nuclear meltdowns caused by terrrorist aliens, or plaques caused by genetic mutations. It’d be more fun than rote-learning.

I’m also keen to see more feminine interpretations of gameplay. I have heard about some interesting and commercially viable alternatives to kill-thrill games. In Japan (of course) there is a big market for girls games, some of which involve social skills like conversing with game characters to gain points. These alternative styles of games lead me to another area I’m xcited about – the increasing application of narrative to games, where games can replace the mythological hunger we currently satiate with films.

What game inspired art are u working on?
NONE. please dont remind me!

What’s the motivation behind your lesbian vampire film?
Repressed desires.

Opinions on the X-Box?
I could rant but then I could just shout: Beware, corporations are smart. All submissions to the X-Box game art competition will be owned by microsoft – it’s in the fineprint somewhere.

Fave games at the mo?
Kill Osama Bin Laden, pacman, Oni and Half-life.

Sidebarz:

Rebecca’s fave gamey urls….
selectparks.net/watag.htm
www.space-invaders.com/
www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pyang/base/allyourbase.swf
www.newgrounds.com/portal/uploads/32000/32077_Kill_Bin_Laden.swf
www.netspace.net.au/~van/game.html
www.microslut.f2s.com
www.cinemarcade.com
spookyville.n3.net

by Sean Healy, April 14, 2002 0 comments

Future Farmers Interview

On the seventh day God created e-commerce and you could smell the artists wince, peeling the scabs off old heartwounds, to try and do it again. Would art and money ever be happy? Designers – if you’ve ever felt confused waking hungover beside ethical responsibility, after a particularly good product launch, then jump into bed with Jean Poole and Josh from futurefarmers.com/theyrule.net for their breakfast discussion.

Explain the Future Farmers to your grandkids in 2050?
Futurefarmers is a small design company started by Amy Franceschini in 1995, oscillating around a small collective of people who work with her on various web, print and art projects.

Your party blurb for explaining what u do within that?
I do a lot of the programming on the flash side of things and help with 3D animation, although most design is done by Amy.

What won you a residency with the farmers, and any tips for budding Australian design prodigy wannabe farm-hands?
Send us your URLs. If we’re excited by somebodies work and we have time we usually start emailing the person. If we have the resources then we can offer them an internship.

What do you think about the increasing shift to software based artistry?
Yay, more media to scribble on! I think it’s great, and there is unique potential for new artistic investigations. As we become more familiar with the technology both the potentials and limitations of the media will be found, although the limitations of capitalism will be discovered more quickly than the limitations of this medium. Napster being an obvious example.

What media do you enjoy using? What software is interesting to you?
I like open source software. Though not everything that I want to do is easy to accomplish through what is available now. I enjoy using flash and ph because together they provide a powerful set of tools for making interactive information visualizations.

As the creator of ‘They Rule’, how do you reconcile Futurefarmers working with the likes of Levi’s, Nike, NEC and MSNBC?
They Rule is an interesting project, but the real task is helping to build a movement that has the confidence, size and will to end the madness of this profit driven system for good. I am involved in a socialist organization and spend much of my time helping out in this process.

For me the question is what can we do build a world in which decisions about what gets produced and how it is produced are decisions made by everyone democratically? At the moment these decisions are made by the market. Proponents of capitalism like to say that the market is driven by an invisible hand, well now that hand is so stained by blood it should be visible to everyone. It’s going to take more than a few clever websites to bring this beast down.

Futurefarmers is some of the least alienating work I could find. I hope that we’d draw the line at greenwashing, or nuclear power companies etc. On the whole I can have a more effective political voice through the united actions of a party than the singular withdrawal of my labour from the work on the website of a multi-national.

Web design seems to mesh the artistic and commercial spheres like never before. Is it eating or feeding the avant garde?
Nothing escapes the alienating force of commodification. We can make art that is reflexive about this, and we can make art which is didactic, but can we can’t make art which escapes this condition.

Net nostalgia laments the shoppingmallisation of cyberspace – what’s keepin’ it real 4u?
The real potential of the web, the ability to search all the text in the world for a certain string of text, to locate any piece of music, are hampered by private interests. The sites that I enjoy are those that try and resist this, or comment on it.

How do we avoid a cubicled future? (where we chew nasa vitamin pill hand me downs and data dripfeeds )
I think the we in the statement is the crucial term. The ‘we’ has to be as broad as possible. It can’t be an elite few intellectuals, nor for that matter a few well meaning ‘culture jammers’. The ‘we’ will have to be all those people and their neighbours, their children, their parents and their posties. etc. There is a growing confidence amongst everyday people in society that we can have some sort of say in how the world is run, and that it seems to be about time that we do.

An untouched area of design u’d like to X-plore?
I’d like to continue doing interaction design that involves people communicating with other people rather than them interacting with something I have made – chatroom like spaces that facilitate live communication probably themed around an issue.

A large client requests a 2 line proposal for a FutureFarmers genetic engineered artwork. Your ideas?
I don’t think it would be possible to do gentetically engineered artwork right now. I consider Kac’s rabbit to be a genetically engineered PR stunt. My reply would be:

Make a tree that grows US $100 bills, throw in some genes from some tenacious weeds, make it round-up ready; distribute this through the so called third world and poor areas. Include a terminator gene that kicks in after ten generations so that after the US economy collapses we aren’t swamped with the detritus of its ugly currency.

Josh & Bookmarx
I check www.commondreams.org almost everyday. I read www.socialistworker.org, www.indymedia.org, www.nologo.org, www.corpwatch.org and others for political content. I enjoy flazoom, blogdex, k10k, metafilter, www.ntk.net, www.blackbeltjones.com/work/ for my links…

www.theyrule.net
Exploring the increasingly concentrated and cross-connected ownership of wealth within multinational corporations with a range of interwoven flash pieces.

www.futurefarmers.com
Cute flash & plenny of it. Likely if you’ve read any contemporary design mags, u.v scene soma this work.

Electrofringe (Sep 27 – Oct 1 )
www.electrofringe.org
Open source software, copyright of the image, manipulating the web for fun and controversy, the influence of technological changes over ideas in design, how to break into the gaming industry, free workshops, forums, screenings,turntablism and much udder audiovisual experimentally ill stuff.

by Sean Healy, April 14, 2002 0 comments

Data Sperm: Jon McCormack Interview

Nervously a 3D Woody Allen paces outside a polygon Sperm Bank. Polly is indeed gone, the nurse of his fantasies already gone home with his analyst. Virt.nature would soothe, but is hard to find in Virt.Manhattan. Mr.Allen clicks to Virt.Melb, coincidentally the locale of one Jon McCormack, who since 86 has been creating Electronic Gardens of Artificial Life, Self Generating Ecosystems, and acoustic and virtual environments that respond to weather conditions and audience responses. Jean Poole did the virt.handsake thing, and got this to keep:

How did you get involved with computer animation?
I started out studying mathematics, but I never really liked it until I discovered you could look at all those funny symbols in graphical form. You could actually see abstract symbols and relationships made visible / material through graphics technology. The next year I went to film school at Swinburne where they had computers that made animations. It was a revelation. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do, and since then I’ve been using computers for creative applications to explore the aesthetics of processes.

Where has animation gone since you’ve been playing with it?
It’s become much easier since I started (in the mid 1980’s). A lot of software people had to write in the early days is now incorporated into animation systems, but fundamentally they all work in the same way. However I find most of the modern animation packages very disappointing, because they operate under a very limited aesthetic, essentially trying to mimic reality, rather than looking at an expanded representation of what computers might offer.

What attracts you to artificial life and ecosystems?
I suppose it’s the way they can often have these kind of emergent properties, with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. I like the way they can surprise you and behave in ways that you never planned or expected. I’m also attracted to adopting the “metaphor” of process-based systems, particularly living systems, since they are such a rich source of creativity.

How far has work in this area advanced?
Calling something “artificial life” is easy, but just because you call it life doesn’t mean that its really alive in any sensible sense. Many layers of complexity exist in the natural world that are ignored in a-life simulations, because computers can’t handle all that intricacy. It’s surprised me how few biologists want to get involved in core a-life research. Maybe b-life is already too much of a challenge. We are a long way off from even matching the real complexity of a single cell in any a-life simulations, so there is still a long way to go yet.

What are the major A-Iife debates at the moment?
Could any computer simulation ever genuinely be called “alive” (strong Alife) or only ever be a simulation (weak A-life)? I tend to think the latter. Another major debate (that extends to cognitive science and AI) is the internal representation of concepts and the embodiment of meaning, although not all A-life models specifically reference this problem.

Douglas Adams said we’ll grow artificial intelligence rather than design it – what do you think?
It’s easy to get carried away with the notion of “growing” and “evolving” almost anything, but this approach may only be suitable for a limited set of problems. The problem of “intelligence” is very complex and varied, and a number of milestone results in AI have been achieved without using evolutionary algorithms. Nonetheless, ideas like growing intelligence come from the fact that our own intelligence is in some sense grown; i.e. that we evolved from “less intelligent” species over millions of years and also that our own learning processes have much to do with our physicality in the world (most computers have very little in the way of physical experience).

What’s the relationship between technology and your creative process?
My main interests lie in how interactive, process-based models allow us to interpret and understand the world in new ways. Certainly recent technological advances in, for example, real-time 3D graphics, have advanced the possibilities for investigating these ideas.

What are your favourite pieces of software and why?
I guess with all modesty aside I’d say my own software is what I like using the best. Software is the implementation of ideas in a technology that is “perpendicular” to the brain. The two complement each other very well, if the software is implemented in the right way.

How has using technology shaped your art & thinking (good & bad)?
It has benefits and difficulties. I am very conscious of the “digital aesthetic” that limits most technological works, and that computers aren’t designed as “art machines”, and carry a lot of cultural limitations from the disiplines where they were born (e.g. military/industrial, science, engineering, “American Ideology” and so on).

What will you say to your waking software daughter?
I have enough trouble relating to my human one at the moment.

Sidebars:
Jon’s Life Online:
www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc/main.html
Cheq tha electronic artworks, installations, videos, and wads of reading on generative modelling for electronic media, electronic sound synthesis, and music composition, organic modelling techniques for computer graphics and philosophical and cultural issues concerning Artificial Life and Artificial Nature. Good resource page too, with x-hibition, software, music and other links.

Jon’s Favourite Website:
www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
Jean’s clue: eoti = End of the Internet.

Create your own Herbivore
www.technosphere.org.uk
And then see how it survives this 3d environment, complete with email updates from your creature. My Datasperm, poor child, was killed by the predator ‘Jaws’, after much hunting for food and surviving other attacks.

by Sean Healy, April 14, 2002 0 comments

Mark Pesce : Toys & Us

In the central control tower, they’re beaming out skulls. Have you noticed? From pole posters to surfboard covers, every second fashion boutique window and the walking one shouldered, Oxford st tee-shirt brigade, the skull seeps into our day. Even saw a little boy scrawling a skull onto the side ova stopping bus yesterday, but he didn’t watch the rearview mirror. Or the busdriver putting on his Mexican wrestling mask before stepping outside with his baseball bat to the cheers of the bus-folk.

Why so many skulls? Why do people really want blood so bad? Apocalypse = now? I mean where do you *really* want to go today? Possible paths for this week’s text include: ‘CNN’, ‘fashion’, ‘Hitler’, ‘fighting terror with terror’, ‘skateboarding’, ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind’ and ‘bus-boy narrative’. All this and you choose a combo: ‘skater ollieing the skull of hitler preserved in a jar’. Ok, ok – let’s X-plore the relationship between entertainment technologies and the ways we use them.

Mark Pesce likes toys. Founder of Virtual Reality Mark-Up Language (VRML) which allows you to wander the web in 3D, Mark’s latest book, This Playful World, charted the emerging possibilities and implications of home-grade media technology, particularly gaming tech.

More recently, Mark produced a feature-length film about ‘the Impending End of Everything’, titled ‘Becoming Transhuman’, where appropriated sound and video images are used to create a new work which expresses Mark’s deeply-held beliefs on the future of humanity.

Who are we? Where are we going? What will we become? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they are enthusiastically debated on Mark’s mailing list, nurtured to keep track of cutting-edge trends in the sciences. The sites are well worth a visit, maybe a bit too fractal-techno for some, but with much worth chewin nonetheless. And here’s Mark text-Live:

What was the most useful feedback on your book This Playful World?
A pointer to an inaccuracy I got from the President of Tiger Toys.

What are your current projects / involvements?
Working on a small software application, perhaps will be patented. It’s a utility. (I like to get my hands dirty every once in a while.) Writing a few essays. Have been contemplating another book, but nothing looks very interesting right now.

How has Sep-11 affected your perspective on empowerment through technology?
It’s confirmed my suspicion that the history of the 21st century will be a constant struggle between our incredibly extended abilities and the fact that these abilities are available to an ever-increasing range of people.

What computer games have impressed u lately + why?
“Black & White” is very impressive. We’ll see that kind of tech in a next generation of Furbys, as I predicted in my book. “Majestic” is also incredible, because it confuses the line between reality and fantasy in very promising ways…

What are the interesting issues in VR today?
I don’t think there are any. VR is about as dull & boring as its ever been, and practically no one working in the field has a clue how to make it interesting, relevant, or important.

What do you think of extropians who want to upload their consciousness to a computer?
I think that they’re being overly religous and not particularly rigorous in their scientific thinking.

3 devices the world needs today?
Devices that don’t yet exist? Let me know.

3 urls for a desert island?
classics.mit.edu – Internet Archive of Classical Literature
promo.net/pg/ – Project Gutenberg
www.britannica.com – Encyclopedia Britannica (as long as someone else pays for the subscription!)
(( note from six years later : Reckon Jimmy Wales might’ve sorted that one out. ))

sidebars:
www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce
Outside the Light Cone is Mark’s homepage, or as he describes, his: ‘space within the Noosphere’. Within it you’ll find most of his written works, rituals, lectures, papers, video interviews and links.

www.playfulworld.com
‘This Playful World’ is a “web-enhanced” book, meaning you’ll find a depth of additional resources here, such as research materials, links, articles and additional essays by the author, and a short promotional film which gives some background on The Playful World.

www.zap.to/textaqueen
Want to scrawl a skull on the side of a bus? You’ll need a fat texta, and texta art to guide you: try these portraits of emcees, deejays, performers, girls, ‘&’ texta scribblings by kids….

by Sean Healy, April 7, 2002 0 comments