Attention and Immersion

Just thought I’d draw your attention to Ben Abraham‘s new video, which I plan to talk about in a bit more detail in the future.

suicide

Just found this website — allmytweets.net — that puts “all” your tweets on one page. My page stopped on Christmas Eve 2011. I saw this thing I wrote about Edouard Levé’s Suicide that I thought was worth re-posting.

• Suicide by Edouard Levé is not as depressing as you might expect Dec 24, 2011
• The blurb calls his style “pointillist”. Essentially this means that the paragraphs don’t necessarily progress through time linearly. Dec 24, 2011
• “A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not intentional. Dec 24, 2011
• “The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear and tear. Dec 24, 2011
• “The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Dec 24, 2011
• “Your ghost remains upright in my memory, while your skeleton is decomposing in the earth.” Dec 24, 2011
• That was a paragraph from Suicide. Dec 24, 2011
• Pointillism seems well-suited to a kind of narcissistic classicism; a classicism of ruins and death, of old Greek statues without the paint Dec 24, 2011
• The paint only visible as molecules. Instead, smooth white marble. Eyes without pupils. Death. Dec 24, 2011
• Pointillism renders this classicism satirically. Atomised, narcissistic, and stuck. Dec 24, 2011
• Question: What makes up your idiosyncrasies? Pointillism answers: Repetitions of coloured dots. The same dots that make up everything else Dec 24, 2011
• The paragraph-moments – the dots – in Suicide are unique, but any life could be made up of them Dec 24, 2011
• “A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, [...] Dec 24, 2011
• “because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived.” Dec 24, 2011

Former twitter fortune cookies

Are blogs too long to read?

Are our eyes too soft and fragile to read off backlit screens?

Remember screensavers? Weren’t they supposed to be important?

Wasn’t the idea that if you left the screen on unsupervised then the light would brand the image of the desktop permanently into the monitor?

Is twitter a screensaver for human eyes?

Are videogames screensavers for human eyes?

If they are, then I prefer the latter. I’m not really that interested in sending messages to people. Not all the time, anyway.

I mainly do two things online these days: a) watch videos b) take notes with my eyes.

The video I made last year was intended to be the first of a series, but I wasn’t satisfied with how it turned out (too derivative; dull voice). That left my ambiguous conclusions (what kind of politics? etc) up in the air. I doubt I’ll ever return to that abandoned series, but I feel like Godard was right about video being a perfect medium for criticism.

Moving images save my eyes from flickering to the next thing. The next thing is in front of my eyes. Screen text is a harsh, blinding desert. Moving image is a lush oasis.

Maybe.

Deng Lijun

A brief squib on The Moon Represents My Heart by Deng Lijun/Teresa Teng over at the 70s blog. You don’t have to read it, just listen to the song.

The Work of Art in the Age of Software

The hoary old discussion of artistic merit in videogames has always been hampered by a general ignorance of art history on the part of gamers. Too often capital ‘a’ Art is treated like some fatherly authority figure: it is good because it is and always has been. On the contrary, the hierarchical and quasi-religious concept of Art is only around 300 years old and came out of the transition from the pre-history to the bourgeois era of capitalism.

Take this video from The Game Overthinker. In it Bob Chipman talks about how the lack of a single, original and finished work of art causes videogames to fall short of Great Art (as illustrated by the Mona Lisa). I always enjoy Bob’s broad looks at the state of videogames, but I think he misses a crucial point about what Art (in the context of capitalism) really is. In the pre-industrial age, an art object would have value for many reasons, often for its use in rituals. The best example in Medieval Europe would be the icon. An icon was usually a painting of a religious figure or scene that would be housed in a holy place. Pilgrims would travel great distances to visit icons. It was believed that touching the icon would cure them of illnesses, or that icons of religious figures like the Virgin Mary would act as a portal to the real immaterial being in heaven. Icons were treated like relics: they were holy embodiments of Jesus, Mary or the saints. In this context it is easy to see why the single, original painting is considered to be the only authentic one, but the value of such objects also comes from the labour and materials required to produce them.

This all changed with industrial production. Now a secular icon like the Mona Lisa can be reproduced countless times. There is no need to visit the Louvre to gawp at the ‘real’ thing. There is nothing materially different about the original painting that gives it value – with one exception: its age. But the Mona Lisa is not priceless because it is old; it is priceless because it was touched by the artist. This is exactly the same process whereby relics gain value. Another way to look at it is to see priceless Works of Art like religious icons: the original and singular painting enables the pilgrim to venerate before the dead and holy Artist, the difference being that before it was the subject of the icon that was venerated and now it is the maker. In secular Art, the Artist has taken the place of God.

This is all old news, of course. The religious and contradictory nature of bourgeois Art was thoroughly exploited and undermined by 20^th century modernism. For those of you who scratch your heads at modern art, this is why calling an urinal, a soup can or a pile of bricks Works of Art was such a big deal: because it exposed and undermined the quasi-religious origin of the authority of the Artist and the supposed value of the original Work of Art. The idea of videogames-as-art not only has to deal with the concept of Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but also in the age of software. Bob is right to say that there can be no single original videogame Work of Art, but – as his example of Star Wars shows – there can be no single original anything in the age of software. This has caused artists to go to ever more ludicrous lengths to justify the inflated price tags of their Works of Art. Take for example Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull (given the hollow-joke title For the Love of God), a work designed both to be sold for millions and to cynically dismiss artistic worth simultaneously. With For the Love of God, the reporting of the price becomes the artistic justification of the naked greed behind making the object. The critique of the Artist and the Work of Art has gone from undermining the gallery system and the quasi-religious veneration of the object (Duchamp) to become the necessary cynical gesture that allows the whole process to continue (Hirst).

I have in the past said that trying to take videogames down this moribund path will only result in artistic suicide. Videogames do offer a challenge to traditional ideas of the value of Art and of the Work of Art, but this is only because the foundations of those concepts are so flimsy that they are challenged by their own shadow. For a while now it’s been understood that trying to make videogames conform to our understanding of other media – film especially – is foolhardy. Instead of trying to paste past aesthetic models onto videogames we should try to understand videogames as a separate medium. That means coming to terms with videogames as mutable software to be played and modified by the multitude, not as oil on canvas catalogued in a museum. As Duchamp put it, museums are the cemetery of visual artefacts. RIP.

A French Jesuit on the Chinese language

I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou signifies a book: so that I thought whenever the word chou was pronounced, a book was the subject. Not at all! Chou, the next time I heard it, I found signified a tree. Now I was to recollect, chou was a book, or a tree. But this amounted to nothing; chou, I found, expressed also great heats; chou is to relate; chou is the Aurora; chou means to be accustomed; chou expresses the loss of a wager, &c. I should not finish, were I to attempt to give you all its significations.

– P. Bourgeois in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires jésuites (1702–1776)

Bitchy

I don’t normally respond to flash-in-the-pan videogame controversies for the same reason that I have no desire to become a primary school teacher, but I thought I’d add my tuppenceworth on the accusations of sexism in Batman: Arkham City.

Glib summary of the charge: female characters in the game are routinely referred to as ‘bitch’ in a way that makes the game – rather than the characters – sexist.

So, to get the stuff that’s already been dealt with by others out of the way first, I’ll say I generally agree with Jim Sterling that the use of the word is partly supported by character and context and is partly there because of bad writing and lazy attempts at grimdark-ness. Also, Bob Chipman’s disgust at the knee-jerk, ill-informed and predictable whining by gamers at the accusation is totally justified in my mind. Lastly, while I take The Hulk’s point about the tone of the game not being nuanced enough to justify the use of misogynistic language, I think his points were better made in the second post rather than the first.

But pretty much everyone has said that the problem is emphatically not Catwoman’s revealing one-piece. Catwoman is sexual. It’s a big part of her character. She behaves as if everything turns her on, but strangely, her upfront sexuality doesn’t ever seem to imply that she’s actively looking for a fuck. It’s all about desire rather than pleasure with Catwoman, so it makes sense that she would wear revealing outfits, because she is one of the few female characters whose sexuality could conceivably be a weapon*, if only a defensive one.

But, unfortunately, she’s also rather boring. Her double entendres in Arkham City, rather than letting the air out of Batman’s humourless angst, just seem sad. Rather than being titillated by her, we feel a bit sorry for her. The truth about Catwoman is that she talks about sex like a virgin, which is why it makes little sense to display her arse like it was the star of a porn film.

Then again, Catwoman, as the personification of unfulfilled lust, can be portrayed in a sexy way without it being out of character. This is why most analyses of Arkham City’s depiction of women let character design somewhat off the hook. This is a mistake, in my opinion, as all the other female characters are portrayed in exactly the same way, regardless of character.

Every woman in the game has the same walk, trailing the same up-the-arse camera angle behind her. If the game is not sexist, then why do the character models of the woman all look like they were designed as masturbation fodder for teenage boys? There is a difference between sexually attractive women and sex objects and that difference is the male gaze; there is no denying that the female characters of Arkham City were designed solely for the latter. It doesn’t matter that Talia al Ghul is a martial artist and member of an eternal life cult or that Poison Ivy is essentially a plant. No, what matters is ass n titties. To reel in horny gamers, T&A will take top priority – even if it makes Talia look less like a ninja assassin and more like a silicone bimbo or forces me to imagine a plant’s taint.

But the real political problem with the game is not necessarily just the tedious and lazy misogyny, but also the incessant ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Riddle me this: if Batman is the world’s greatest detective, then why doesn’t he know that torture is an extremely ineffective way to extract information from suspects? Batman shakes up badguys for a few seconds and the truth drops out of them like loose change. Now, as pointed out by many, Batman is emphatically not a realistic character and Arkham City, despite all the wrinkles and pock-marks, is not realism by any stretch of the imagination. But while the gadgets and the (nonsensical) asylum city plot are essentially harmless, the torture trope is not. That few people commented on this just goes to show how desensitised we’ve become to this nonsense. At least, even if it doesn’t go away, the sexism feels wrong.

* I know nothing of comics, but if this post by Laura Hudson is anything to go by, then I might not make this statement if I did.

Paper Roses

Like everyone else I’ve written about Murdoch. Click here for the post over at Up Close and Personal.

Witch house 2

Now that witch house acts have moved from singles to albums – from 10 to 100 MB folders – it’s time to see how the mysticism is holding up. When caught by the light, dust motes can be beautiful for a brief moment. But the grey powder lying on furniture and neglected books is dull, everyday dust and nothing more.

As I wrote last year, the obfuscations – the tactics of illegibility and name/facelessness – of witch house was somewhat radical in the context of the facebook-dominated web. The common complaint from older generations has been that, in the past, you had to hunt for music in out-of-the-way record shops, you never knew very much about bands and things were mysterious, intriguing – whereas now all information is as far away as the next mouse click. By making themselves difficult to google, witch house acts were trying to fuck with this instant knowledge.

But as they get better known, little details, names and photos start to leak out. The withheld information that made them interesting can’t be kept secret forever and if nothing else of interest is given to take its place, then we’re left with the sense that “[t]hese hidden secrets are a sleight of hand, because there is no solid meaning, only mysticism.”

Another way that these acts have tried to take control of their sonic fiction away from the greedy guts of the internet memory hole is by rationing their output. Young groups now tend to release something new every couple of months, filling up zip files with rough mixes, putting out anything and everything constantly. Witch house acts tend to at most release a handful of singles, maybe an album and some mixes. They’re not exactly digital ascetics, but most of them are careful about what gets released into cyberspace. As Masha Tupitsyn writes in the introduction to her book LACONIA,

“While the Internet gives all of us the opportunity to communicate and create, to comment and respond, it’s also obscured a more important criterion: What is it that we need to say and what is it that we don’t? What helps us with our work and our life and what distracts from it? What is necessary and what simply clutters up the world? In other words, how much “art” do we really need?”

A criticism to be levelled at witch house is that the music has no greater substance than a tumblog – a vague collection of images to be scrolled down then forgotten – or internet aural wallpaper. One gets the feeling that witchausers make music not for ecstatic transformation, but just as something to listen to while reading hipster runoff. But I’m a) not sure that this is true and b) not sure that the musical equivalent of a tumblog is a priori a bad thing. Witch house is undoubtedly music for the internet, but unlike listening to classic rock (or whatever) while aimlessly skim-reading, witch house is designed to make things strange, to make staring at a glowing box all night a little bit creepy.

One aspect of the whole thing that reminds me of tumblogs is the ventriloquizing of surface identities. Witchausers – who tend to be male – use femininity and blackness like a blog of photos. Blackness in witch house is pure surface, a grotesqued sample (to the extent that some WH acts have been accused of minstrelry). Femininity is more embodied through group membership and/or voice – you don’t hear a lot of young white male voices from these acts populated with young white males… This sort of ventriloquizing has a long history, one not confined to sampling. On the role(s) of the female Surrealists, Kate Zambreno has written that they were “[d]efined by spoken utterances” and that “the Surrealist aesthetic of automatic writing seems to suggest that the woman’s radical spoken utterances are not art or writing in and of themselves, but that an author is needed to edit and repeat, to shape and discipline.” (my italics)

To find out if witch house is “necessary” (Tupitsyn) we have to ask: What kind of mysticism are we dealing with? Is it the glittery mysticism of PR hype or is it a deeper kind of mysticism, one of ritual experience? A quick answer would be that it’s both – that it’s still in flux, unfinished. The question is complicated by another one: Are there internet ritual experiences?

▲

For all their occultation of personal info, witchausers aren’t particularly magical. They don’t ever seem to go that far – there’s a reaching towards belief that they can’t quite grasp, they can’t quite break away from the safety of irony. You’re never sure if witch house isn’t on the level of a fashion magazine tableaux; models dressed up in occult-looking garb all the while thinking about nothing but cocaine and themselves. It’s not that the witchery of witch house has to be ‘real’; it’s that irony allows the participants a get-out clause. When witch house becomes uncool, they can shrug their shoulders and laugh, “It was just a joke, man”.

If witch house became about fervent, fanatical belief then it might really scare the shit out of everyone.

Unspoken strangenesses

A room in the centre of a black void. Walls that can only be seen from one angle, that are only solid from one direction.

Worlds that look like reality, but all it takes is a simple error and people float, their faces disappear, they walk through walls – nothing is real.

Workers forging immaterial warriors, training them up to sell to people halfway round the world, people they will never meet and who despise them. Powerful weapons made of nothing traded through the air to be used in epic battles that exist only on microchips and in the minds of those involved.

In a world of incorporeal beings a fictional contagious disease spreads through the population.

A collective fiction that changes lives, that lulls the agitated, that wrenches dull pebbles from the mud in war-torn Africa, that lives in boxes made of metals from all over the globe – boxes that were constructed by near-slaves.

Forget consumer electronics and sugary nostalgia for a moment and think about how strange videogames are. These elaborate digital puppet shows that are not merely about showing, but also performing. The illusion of movement, invisible movement, created by playing and felt by the player. The method of loci drawn outside the mind and onto the screen. Not so much virtual reality than fictional reality.

It’s these two illusions – the visual illusion of a solid world and the (imaginary) tactile illusion of movement – that make videogames what they are… what makes them strange. They both require and are reinforced by the much-trumpeted interactivity (or user input) but interactivity isn’t games raison d’etre. The illusion of movement created via the controller is very powerful. Think about the motion sickness experienced by some players of first-person shooters. The body thinks the illusion that the player is participating in is a poison-induced hallucination, so it takes evasive action and tries to expel the poison by puking. This power is able to exist via interactivity, but interactivity merely intensifies an engagement with the illusion for the player (and de-intensifies the illusion for mere viewers).

But instead of going through the standard game crit routine of sweeping positives glossed with light science, let’s think about how videogames actually feel. Because they are a feeling – a new feeling.

The identification of the player with the player character (and the feeling of movement this creates) is not entirely unique to videogames, but the particular flavour of movement is. Example: horror works through identification. This happens naturally in real life – we fear for someone if it looks like they are about to be run over by a bus. (Horror is complex and can’t be shoved into a paragraph, so I’ll not offer definitions) Horror exists in films, music, books, websites and in videogames. It manifests itself differently in different media, but it’s there in every one. The connection to fear is felt as an emotion.

Every new medium gets possessed and condemned sooner or later and it is through feeling – both physical and emotional – that videogames become vulnerable to infection by spectres. After a new medium is praised as the exciting new pinnacle of human achievement it is quickly decried by moral crusaders. The new medium is at once both a glimpse of the future and a connection to the past; the dead past of spirits and memories. Videogames are essentially no different, except it’s happened to them in a different way. Games aren’t a recording medium – you can’t put a laptop with Game Maker installed on it in front of a person and expect it to record any trace of her. Games are more like Wagner’s view of opera, a Gesamtkunstwerk of digital media.

The feeling of movement creates an imaginary space in the player’s mind and, as any dreamer knows, imaginary spaces can become haunted – like when you lie awake at night trying to make sense of a strange noise, when you can feel the shape of the room only through memory. The survival horror boom gave us the best examples of this; the grief-stricken Silent Hill, the labyrinthine Resident Evil, the vulnerability of Fatal Frame. That so many of these games deal with memory and recording technology speaks volumes.

The layer of deterioration in recording technologies can be a rich source for memory horror, but it’s not something videogames suffer from. Instead, being software, videogames are at risk from being frozen behind obsolescence; imprisoned behind software upgrades and hardware generations, sealed within an unplayable disc, lost in the digital Dark Age. And it’s this and other strangenesses that videogames are comfortable ignoring; the strangeness of CGI faces; the strangeness of immaterial surfaces that can flicker and disappear; a form of animation that is also a performance; a colonising metamedium eating film, music, acting, drawing, writing… what will be left after videogames succeed in taking over all art and after the doors of one digital era seals shut forever?

Videogames are the future at the same time that they eat the past… the spectres of memory are whispering in the blank voids that contain game landscapes. And they’ll get louder.