“At particular times, a great deal of stupid people have a great deal of stupid money”.

Some weeks ago, I was invited to take part in a workshop organized by the main sponsor of a big new media art festival. The topic under debate was: what should be the future of the festival? Of course, there were many different positions on the table. Some people said that new media art is dead, others that it’s more alive than ever; some said that the festival should avoid any compromise and be radical, others that it should gain the respect of the contemporary art world in order to survive and be successful. I was among them, of course.

At one point, a girl jumped up and said, in a polemic tone, something like this: “Hey guys, do we REALLY want to be taken seriously by the contemporary art world? Do we REALLY want to collaborate with it, to have to obey to the interests of a bunch of galleries and let them decide which artists we can show and which not?” These words were a turning point for the debate. Almost everybody seemed to agree with that girl, and nobody defended the option I humbly proposed: to turn the festival into a specialized event able to attract the same audience that moves restlessly from Documenta to the various Biennales, and not just the community that moves from, let’s say, ISEA to Ars Electronica. At the same time, these words were a revelation for me, because I understood that critics and curators are probably the most conservative part of this community.

At this point, you don’t need to be that clever to understand that I completely disagree with that point of view. I have, I think, a lot of good reasons to think that way. First, because I don’t see new media art as something separated from contemporary art. This “segregation” has historical reasons, and it is going to finish. Second, because I come from Italy. In Italy there is no institutional funding for new media art, and even if there is a bunch of people using this term, this very notion is quite confused. So, if you want to work seriously as an art critic and curator in Italy, you have to address contemporary art magazines and institutions. Third, because I know a lot of people from the contemporary art field, and they don’t look that bad. Some of them are really smart, indeed. Fourth, because the art market field provided me with some good occasions to work. One of them was curating, in February 2009 the Expanded Box at Arco Art Fair in Madrid, that can be described roughly as the “new media art section of the fair”. I was lucky enough to be invited to curate it again for February 2010, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m here. And finally, because one of the few rules I think a curator should respect is: follow the artists. And guess where the artists are going?

The first part of my lecture would be a list. I think numbers mean something, and the number of new media artists working with galleries, and of galleries supporting new media art, is starting to be impressive. So, this is a first, forcefully incomplete list of new media artists working with galleries. In a couple of hours, I found out about one hundred and forty names, but probably you can help me to find out more…

1. AIDS 3D

2. ALAN RATH

3. ALEXEI SHULGIN /ELECTROBOUTIQUE

4. ALISON MEALEY

5. ALTERAZIONI VIDEO

6. ANNETT ZINSMEISTER

7. ANTOINE SCHMITT

8. ARCANGEL CONSTANTINI

9. BEN RUBIN

10. BERNARD MICHEL

11. BJÖRN SCHÜLKE

12. BOREDOMRESEARCH

13. BRODY CONDON

14. C.E.B. REAS

15. CAO FEI

16. CARSTEN NICOLAI

17. CHARLES SANDISON

18. CHRISTOPHE LUXEREAU

19. CLARA BOJ & DIEGO DIAZ

20. CLAUDE CLOSKY

21. CLAUDIA HART

22. COLLECTIVE MUSIC2EYE

23. CORY ARCANGEL

24. DAMON ZUCCONI

25. DANIEL CANOGAR

26. DANIEL ROZIN

27. DRAGAN ESPENSHIED

28. DU ZHENJUN

29. EDDO STERN

30. EDMOND COUCHOT ET MICHEL BRET

31. EDUARDO KAC

32. EDUARDO KAC

33. EELCO BRAND

34. ELECTRONIC SHADOW

35. ESTHER MANAS & ARASH MOORI

36. ETOY.CORPORATION

37. EVA AND FRANCO MATTES AKA 0100101110101101.ORG

38. FABIEN GIRAUD

39. FENG MENGBO

40. FRANCIS HUNGER

41. FRED NAUCZYCIEL

42. GAZIRA BABELI

43. GEBHARD SENGMULLER

44. GERHARD MANTZ

45. GERO GRIES

46. GILLES CONAN

47. GINT GABRANS

48. GOLAN LEVIN

49. GRANULAR SYNTHESIS

50. GRÉGORY CHATONSKY

51. GUTHRIE LONERGAN

52. HERBERT W. FRANKE

53. HOLGER LIPPMANN

54. JAKUB NEPRAS

55. JAMES FAURE WALKER

56. JAMES PATERSON

57. JAVIER MORALES

58. JEAN-PIERRE HÉBERT

59. JENNIFER AND KEVIN MCCOY

60. JENNY MARKETOU

61. JILLIAN MCDONALD

62. JIM CAMPBELL

63. JOAN LEANDRE

64. JODI

65. JOHN F. SIMON JR.

66. JOHN GERRARD

67. JOHN KLIMA

68. JOHN-MICHAEL BOLING

69. JULIUS POPP

70. JULIUS VON BISMARK

71. KENNETH TIN-KIN HUNG

72. LAB[AU]

73. LARS ARRHENIUS

74. LAWRENCE MALSTAF

75. LEO VILLAREAL

76. LINCOLN SCHATZ

77. LISA JEVBRATT

78. LUC COURCHESNE

79. LYNN HERSHMAN

80. MACIEJ WISNIEWSKI

81. MANFRED MOHR

82. MANFRED MOHR

83. MARCIN RAMOCKI

84. MARGRET EICHER

85. MARINA ZURKOW

86. MARIUS WATZ

87. MARK NAPIER

88. MARK WILSON

89. MARKO PELJHAN

90. MATHIEU KAVYRCHINE

91. MATTHEW MCCASLIN

92. MICHAEL BELL-SMITH

93. MICHAEL JOAQUIN GREY

94. MICHAEL NAJJAR

95. MIGUEL CHEVALIER

96. MIHAI GRECU

97. MONICA BRAVO

98. NANNA HANNINEN

99. NATALIE JEREMIJENKO

100. NICOLE NICKEL

101. OLAFUR ELIASSON

102. OLIA LIALINA

103. OLIVER LARIC

104. PALLE TORSSON

105. PASCUAL SISTO

106. PAUL B. DAVIS

107. PAUL DE MARINIS

108. PAUL SLOCUM

109. PAULO NENFLIDIO

110. PERRY HOBERMAN

111. PETER VOGEL

112. PETRA CORTRIGHT

113. PORS & RAO

114. PSJM

115. QUIDO SEN

116. R. LUKE DUBOIS

117. RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER

118. RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

119. REYNALD DROUHIN

120. ROMAN VEROSTKO

121. ROSEMARIE FIORE

122. SAMUEL BIANCHINI

123. SHANE HOPE

124. SHILPA GUPTA

125. SON:DA

126. THOMAS LANNES

127. THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD

128. TOBIAS BERNSTRUP

129. U-RAM CHOE

130. UBERMORGEN.COM

131. VERA MOLNAR

132. VUK COSIC

133. WOLFGANG STAEHLE

134. YAEL KANAREK

135. YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

136. YVES NETZHAMMER

And this is a list of galleries dealing with new media art:

1. A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro (BR)

2. ADN Galeria, Madrid (SP)

3. Alma Gallery, Riga (LV)

4. AND / OR Gallery, Dallas (US)

5. Anita Beckers, Frankfurt (DE)

6. ARC Projects, Sofia (BU)

7. Art Claims Impulse, Berlin (DE)

8. Arthobler, Porto (PT)

9. ArtMovingProjects, New York (US)

10. Bitforms Gallery, New York (US)

11. Black Box Gallery, Copenhagen (DK)

12. Bodhi Art, Mumbay (India)

13. Bryce Wolkovitz Gallery, New York (US)

14. Conner Contemporary Art, Washington DC (US)

15. DAM Gallery, Berlin (DE)

16. DNA Gallery, Berlin (DE)

17. Dogenhaus Gallery, Leipzig (DE)

18. Espacio Liquido, Gijon (SP)

19. Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Brescia (IT)

20. Fortlaan 17, Gent (BE)

21. Foxy Productions, New York (US)

22. Galeria MS, Madrid (SP)

23. Galeria Valle Orti, Valencia (SP)

24. Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris (FR)

25. Galerie Metro, Berlin (DE)

26. Galleria Continua, San Gimignano (IT)

27. Gallery Specta, Copenhagen (DK)

28. Gering & López Gallery, New York (US)

29. Gigantic Artspace, New York (US)

30. Guy Bartschi Gallery, Geneve (CH)

31. Haunch of Venison, London (UK)

32. Hilger Contemporary, Vienna (AT)

33. Lia Rumma, Milan / Naples (IT)

34. Lombard Freid Gallery, New York (US)

35. Max Estrella, Madrid (SP)

36. Max Wigram Gallery, London (UK)

37. Nature Morte, New Dehli (IN)

38. Numeriscausa, Paris (FR)

39. Pace Wilderstein, New York (US)

40. Pierre Francois Ouellette, Montreal (CA)

41. Postmasters Gallery, New York (US)

42. Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York (US)

43. Project Gentili, Prato (IT)

44. Seventeen Gallery, London (UK)

45. Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai (China)

46. Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana (SI)

47. Team Gallery, New York (US)

48. Vadehra Art Gallery, New Dehli (India)

49. Virgil de Voldere, New York (US)

50. Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou (China)

51. XL Gallery, Moscow (RU)

In the second half of my talk I’d like to argue why, in my opinion, the art market is (still) important for New Media Art. Of course, one can suggest that an old economic model based on the selling of a unique, or at least, rare object may not fit to an art form which is, for its very nature, replicable, variable, etc.; and that New Media Art, for its connections with technology, misses the auratic aspect that is needed in order to invest a lot of money in a work of art. He can go on saying that New Media Art may deserve a new model of distribution and circulation, and that the New Media themselves show the way: the Internet, p2p networks, software distribution and so on.

Of course, this is all true. I don’t want to say that the art market should become THE economic model for New Media Art, but just that it can be one of them. The problem is: why? Why, for instance, Granular Synthesis should go on collaborating with Lia Rumma if selling prints produces a very little part of their revenue? If it produces so little satisfaction if compared with a direct exchange with a real audience? If it has proven to be such a weak economic model, unable to pay the bills to the vast majority of contemporary artists?

There are a number of answers to this question. These are mine ones:

1. The art market has an important rule in the contemporary art world. In most of the cases, private galleries discover new artists, bring them all around the world, introduce them to art critics, curators and collectors, pay their installations in museums and biennial, and sometimes pay their bills. The relationship gallery – artist is not easy, of course; and the other side of the coin can be really sad. But, when an artwork enters an important, private or public, collection, part of the fault goes probably to the artist’s gallery. The same can be said when it is featured into an art history book. One can say that museums’ storages are full of artworks and artists nobody remembers about, and the same can be said for art books. He can also say that he doesn’t give a fuck about museums and art books. Of course, in that case he doesn’t need the art market.

2. But if you think that art books can give a future audience to your work, and that museums can care about it, you may want to enter them. The art market may help you doing that, not only promoting your work, but also financing and producing it. The Expanded Box at Arco is a good example of this.

3. Producing an artwork with a gallery is different than producing an artwork for, let’s say, ISEA. If you show an artwork in ISEA, it has to be challenging, interesting, meaningful. If you show an artwork with a gallery, it has also to be desirable and salable. You may say this is a compromise. For me, it’s just another challenge, the attempt to address another audience.

© Paul Sullivan

Domenico Quaranta, “Non è solo un gioco: creare mondi è quasi un’opera d’arte”, in L’Unità, June 2, 2009, pp. 40 – 41.

Esiste un settore della cultura contemporanea che meriterebbe più attenzione di quanta siamo generalmente disposti a concedergliene. Il suo indotto ha superato da anni quello del cinema, ma continuiamo a considerarlo un mercato di nicchia. Ha conquistato persone di tutte le età, ma continuiamo a pensarlo come intrattenimento per ragazzini. Richiede investimenti copiosi, il contributo creativo di intere squadre di professionisti e anni di lavoro, eppure non lo prendiamo troppo sul serio. I suoi prodotti li chiamiamo “videogiochi” e pensiamo che questo ci autorizzi a dimenticarci che hanno, spesso, l’articolazione narrativa di un romanzo, la ricchezza visiva di un quadro rinascimentale, la capacità di coinvolgimento di un film, scenari e colonna sonora degni di un blockbuster hollywoodiano.

In questa situazione, qualsiasi iniziativa che porti il giocatore, ma soprattutto il non giocatore, a riflettere sulla complessità culturale di questo alieno che è piombato sui nostri scaffali, ficcandosi con prepotenza tra Anna Karenina e Il Padrino non può che essere la benvenuta. Ci sta provando, in Italia, The Art of Games. Nuove frontiere tra gioco e bellezza, una mostra periferica per collocazione ma internazionale per vocazione. Prodotta da Fabbica Arte e ospitata dal Centro Saint-Bénin di Aosta sotto la direzione artistica di Mattias Högvall, The Art of Games (dal 22 maggio all’8 novembre 2009) è un grande evento (più di 100 i lavori in mostra) dedicato al tema oscuro e affascinante della concept art. Non lasciamoci intimorire dal termine inglese: i concept artist sono, per lo più, abilissimi disegnatori, il cui lavoro è simile a quello di un illustratore, di un creatore di fumetti o di un autore di storyboard per il cinema, ma con qualche importante variazione. I concept artist, infatti, creano mondi in cui possiamo immergerci, e personaggi che possiamo indossare come un costume; affiancano alle tecniche tradizionali strumenti di disegno avanzatissimi, e lavorano spesso in team, specializzandosi ciascuno in un dettaglio, in un soggetto, in un effetto particolare. Sono i responsabili dell’estetica del gioco e della sua continuità nel tempo, da un episodio all’altro: in altre parole, se continuiamo a riconoscere Super Mario nella sua evoluzione da sagoma bidimensionale e pixellosa a pupazzone in 3D, lo dobbiamo a loro. The Art of Games racconta tutto questo, ma fa anche di più: avvalendosi di un team scientifico di storici dell’arte, analizza le analogie tra questa pratica e le grandi botteghe dei secoli passati e tenta una prima analisi dei diversi stili e linguaggi; inoltre, portando in Italia i concept artist di giochi come Lost, Star Wars, Quake, Mist, Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider e molti altri, li invita a dialogare con il pubblico, a raccontare la propria attività, a confrontarsi con il paesaggio e la tradizione figurativa locale, che in fatto di castelli, vallate brumose, dame, mostri e cavalieri ha parecchio da insegnargli.

Ovviamente, non è detto che tra il preraffaellitismo orientaleggiante di Jason Chan e il virtuosismo sprezzante di Barontieri scopriremo un nuovo Folon, o un giovane Manara. Non è questo, del resto, lo scopo della mostra, che intende piuttosto attirare l’attenzione sui nuovi creatori di immaginario, che condizionano il nostro modo di vedere senza darci il tempo di accorgercene. Contribuendo a creare il personaggio di Lara Croft e gli scenari di Tomb Raider, Paul Sullivan ha dato vita a una nuova icona della bellezza, e a una nuova estetica della paura. Il fantasy deve ormai moltissimo a creatori come Jason Felix, Jim Murray e Stephan Martiniere, e alla loro fantasia visionaria. Forse l’industria videoludica è ancora troppo immatura e guidata dal botteghino per dare vita a qualcosa che possa essere chiamato “arte” senza imbarazzi. Ma se questa situazione è destinata a cambiare, ciò accadrà anche in base al cambiamento dell’atteggiamento, e delle aspettative, del suo pubblico. The Art of Games è una mostra che va visitata con l’apertura e la freschezza che riserviamo alle culture che non siamo ancora in grado di giudicare, ma che esercitano su di noi il loro fascino. E magari con i nostri bambini, che se non sono ormai i soli a giocare, forse possono comunque darci qualche lezione di sguardo.

© Jim Murray 2005

Domenico Quaranta, “Art and Videogames. Enclosures and border crossings”, in Debora Ferrari, Luca Traini, The Art of Games. Nuove frontiere tra gioco e bellezza, exhibition catalogue, Aosta, Centro Saint Bénin, May 28 – November 8, 2009, pp. 99 – 117.

Prologue

1949: Andrew Warhola, the son of a factory worker of Rusyn origin in Pittsburgh, arrives in New York. He had studied art, and his blotted line drawings, which made an uncertain, wavering line on the paper, attracted the attention of the art director of Glamour, who commissioned a series of drawings of shoes for the magazine. In the space of a few years Andrew became “the most sought-after illustrator of women’s accessories in New York”, as Calvin Tomkins wrote¹. He changed his name to Andy Warhol, met Truman Capote, had his nose redone, founded a company and started making a lot of money, yet he was not satisfied. The art world kept him on the margin, despite his various attempts to make inroads. Paradoxically, his refined blotted line drawings of food, shoes and other consumer items looked too personal, too subtle and too nonchalant to carve a niche in the avant-garde art scene of the day –divided as it was between the macho heroism of Abstract Expressionism, and the impersonality of Pop Art.² It was attending Leo Castelli’s gallery, where he saw the work of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, that Andy found the path that would lead him to success: instead of depicting consumer goods, he began serial reproductions, first using a cold, impersonal style of painting, then a mechanical process (silkscreen printing). From elegant shoes decorated with gold-leaf he passed to giant, brutal cans of Campbell’s soup. In 1963 he confessed: “[When I was doing advertising] I’d have to invent and now I don’t; those commercial drawings would have feelings, they would have a style… the attitude had feeling to it.”

What he did from that moment on changed the course of contemporary art. As for the drawings, they remained at the bottom of a drawer for years before being discovered. We now see them as engaging works of art: our idea of art has changed, making room for something that was not admitted in the past.

Enclosures and border crossings

In July 1962 Warhol exhibited his Campbell’s Soup Cans for the first time in Los Angeles. Four months previously, an unknown programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released the first version of Spacewar!, the first videogame in history. Two clusters of white dots move around a dark space shooting at each other. Half a century later not only have we learned to appreciate Warhol’s shoes: the offspring of Spacewar! have become the biggest cultural industry in the world, with revenues overtaking those of the film industry. The white dots have been supplanted by 3D figures, realistic settings, sophisticated storylines, gameplay that often requires weeks of training. Every game is worked on by teams of experts in graphics, writing, programming and interaction – who work on the same project for months, often even years. Several generations have grown up with them, and characters like Super Mario and Lara Croft are an indelible part of our cultural baggage, alongside The Catcher in the Rye and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Pondering the relationships between art and videogames means opening a vast Pandora’s box that lets loose a flood of responses, often unpredictable. In the first part of this essay I will present some of them, hopefully without boring you. In the second part I will try to explain what Warhol’s example has to teach the artists featured in The Art of Games, and its spellbound spectators.

Even just the phrase “art and videogames” is somewhat ambiguous, with that ‘and’ presuming some kind of relationship – but what kind? I imagine there are at least three different possible interpretations:

1. that videogames are art;

2. that videogames are inspired by art;

3. that art is inspired by videogames.

The first of the three might make many gamers – for whom videogames are decidedly better than art – jump out of their chairs, as well as art lovers, who regard videogames as vulgar form of entertainment, but this type of resistance highlights only a few aspects of a complex question. First and foremost, the time is ripe for videogames to be recognised as an “art form” in their own right, just as happened with photography and film. Some games, like Rez (Dreamcast 2001) and Spore (Electronic Arts 2008), are already held by some to be works of art. This does not mean that all videogames can be considered works of art, merely a number of them which satisfy certain criteria³. The example of film and photography is instructive. Diane Arbus is an artist, but most fashion photographers are not. An Alfred Hitchcock film is a work of art, but most thrillers are, at best, good examples of the genre.

Secondly, for a number of years now some visual artists have taken to developing videogames that see themselves as works of art – “art games” – appropriating the videogame medium just as Man Ray did with photography in his day, Salvador Dalì did with cinema, and Nam June Paik did with video. Their works belong both to the history of “videogames as an art form” and “videogames as a language of contemporary art”. They are borderline works capable of appealing to both gaming fanatics and compulsive gallery-goers.

The second interpretation is the one that creates the fewest problems. Like all forms of cultural entertainment, videogames tap into our cultural traditions, often manipulating the most tried and tested strategies for their own ends. Renaissance perspective, Romantic landscapes, film noir lighting, the topos of science fiction, characters from the epic genre, fairytale narrative mechanisms… All of this and much more besides goes into the blender, material for the construction of a good game. Remediations⁴ of forms and aesthetics from other media, postmodern citationism, etc., are all familiar ploys for the creators of videogames, as they are for all good professionals of the culture industry.

The third interpretation, on the other hand, is so complex that even the formula I have used to convey it, (“art is inspired by videogames”), appears on closer inspection to be ineffective and incomplete. The ambiguity, first and foremost, lies in the subject. Just what do we mean by the term “art”? In the first place it can be useful to distinguish by genre. By now there are at least as many films inspired by videogames as there are videogames inspired by films, but it is even more interesting to explore the traces that videogames leave in the construction of a film, independently of any direct inspiration. A similar argument could be made for fiction, which has produced various novels inspired by the world of videogames, some of which are high quality works: take Skill (2004), by Alessandra C, and A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (2001), by Christopher Brookmyre. Then there are the visual arts, a context that introduces a new distinction, this time to do with level. In the first place there is a grassroots level, belonging to pop culture, which includes fan art and all the subcultures linked to the world of videogames. Fan art, according to Wikipedia, “is artwork that is based on a character, costume, item, or story that was created by someone other than the artist. The term, while it can apply to art done by fans of characters from books, is usually used to refer to art derived from visual media such as comics, movies or video games. Usually, it refers to artworks by amateur artists, or artists who are unpaid for their fan creations.”⁵ Fan art, which until recently was a low-profile niche phenomenon, has literally exploded with the advent of social network sites and Web 2.0 applications like flickr and Youtube. But videogames have done more than just construct a paratextual aura of pencil drawings, photoshopped images, oil paintings, little sculptures and so on. Cosplaying and role-playing, for example, are performance phenomena that bring storylines and characters from videogames alive. Moreover, the evolution of videogames into productive platforms that not only allow users to play but also elicit creative contributions from them has paved the way for an infinite series of practices. In the early 90s the introduction of level editors “normalised” and legitimised a series of intrusive practices (game hacking) already in use in the previous decade, enabling users to adapt games to suit their needs. In a similar process, the trend for gamers to film themselves in action has evolved into a genuine cinematographic sub-genre (known as machinima), with the introduction into videogames of integrated directing tools. Lastly, the birth of virtual worlds like Second Life, in which the game-playing component gives way to user creativity (without which the virtual world would not be much to write home about), has given rise to genuine creative communities that operate within the 3D scenarios of a game.

In most cases these practices are not qualified, and have no desire to qualify themselves, as art. They are creative practices which take place within a community, and which often follow rules that have nothing to do with those of the world of “high” art, which they generally disparage. Yet in the last decade each of these practices has been adopted by artists and introduced into the high circuits of contemporary art and New Media Art. This phenomenon, usually dubbed “Game Art”, has been explored in a countless number of exhibitions and publications⁶, which is why here I will merely offer an overview of it – enough to see that art does much more than just take “inspiration” from videogames. Art takes up the storylines, characters, imagery and aesthetics of videogames: see Miltos Manetas’ paintings, Eva and Franco Mattes’ prints, and many of the works of Eddo Stern and Brody Condon. It penetrates, subverts and modifies the videogame and its technology, turning it into something else: Jodi, Joan Leandre and Cory Arcangel are some of the most prominent examples of this. It appropriates the form of the videogame and gameplay for artistic purposes (giving rise to the aforementioned art games, but also gaming installations such as those of Julian Oliver and Eddo Stern). It mixes the language of role-playing with that of performance (Brody Condon once more), or uses videogames themselves as a performance platform (Joseph Delappe, Gazira Babeli). It creates machinima that are art videos (Eddo Stern once more) or explores videogame culture in documentary fashion. All of these names are well worth exploring.

Among all these practices and levels, the barriers constructed by those who engage in them, by the nascent field of videogame criticism, and the worlds of sociology and art criticism might seem insurmountable. In a way, it is a good thing that these barriers exist: ever since the human race began applying reasoning to its world, it has needed to create groups, subgroups and taxonomies in order to comprehend a given phenomenon. At the same time, however, the dynamism, potential for evolution and future survival of a practice all lie in border-crossing, hybridisation, cross-breeds. Which is why these barriers should always be erected with the greatest respect for what is on the other side, and openings should always be left. The art of the future springs from things which are not considered art today, or that correspond to different ideas of art. flOw (2006)⁷, for example, is an “art game” that circulated on the web and featured in various exhibitions before being developed for the Playstation platform and forging a keen following among traditional players too. Its serene, anti-competitive, contemplative gameplay not only represents a development in the world of videogames, but also extends our idea of art. Cory Arcangel, who recently (March 2009) made it onto the cover of Artforum, is an artist who has managed to earn the respect of the art world, the hacking community and the fans of the old 8bit games. In an era in which art is seen by most as self-referencing and elite, this is undoubtedly an achievement.

Concept Art, and Beyond

But the question is far from resolved. The attentive reader will have realised that we have not yet identified a category for the works in this catalogue. Never fear: this is not an oversight. The fact is that a videogame, like a film, is the result of the convergence of various different activities, creative and not. “Concept art” is one of these. As Wikipedia explains: “Concept art is a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in movies, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design.”⁸ Concept art is a very important part of the life of a videogame. It is not just about studying the look of the characters or creating the settings they operate in; and it is not just something that goes on behind the scenes, something that the public never sees. Concept art “opens” the life of a videogame, announcing it in trade magazines and on websites, generating expectations and introducing the story and characters; it accompanies the game in books and manuals, and it guarantees continuity between different versions of a game, which can often be rather dissimilar, due to various technological limits being overcome between versions.

Lara Croft’s look has changed considerably since her first appearance in 1996, but concept art offers an imprinting that guarantees the continuity of the character. When videogames were anything but photorealistic, concept art gave the gamer’s imagination the input to fill in the missing links in the technology. In a “holographic approach” to videogames (Laurie Taylor)⁹, concept art plays a role that is anything but secondary, and lastly, it is an indispensable basis for fan art, with which it often forges a dialectical relationship.

All the artists in this book work as “concept artists” for companies that produce videogames. Concept art is both a “service” art and a paratext. As a service art it contributes to the development of a series of tools of mass entertainment that will probably be recognised, in a not too distant future, as “art forms”. It plays the same function that storyboards and sets play in the film world, and it is based on internal criteria and value judgements. As a paratext it is related to the illustrations that enrich popular fiction, from fantasy to sci-fi, and to the art of the film poster and the imagery developed for role-playing games, which are a direct forerunner of many videogames. And, like all these pop iconography phenomena, it is capable of eliciting a following, a field of criticism, and the interest of collectors.

It is not only the fact that concept art is art “with a function” that keeps it locked out of contemporary art. Many of these artists occasionally produce works for their own sake, not connected to any videogame in particular. By way of example, on Jason Felix’s website¹⁰, alongside the channel “concept art” there is a channel he calls “fine art”. The problem (if we want to call it a problem) is that the works in that section are based on the same value criteria and judgements as concept art: criteria – beauty as a measure of judgement, technical ability as a value, the virtuoso use of a certain tool – that have little in common with those we use to define a work of contemporary art as “art”. In other words, even the so-called “fine art” of the concept artists remains bound to a vernacular level, as “popular culture”, rather than making the grade as contemporary art. It remains on the level of “craft”, rather than high brow art.

With this statement I am diligently performing my role of “gatekeeper”, policing the border between high and low art. At the same time, however, it is important to leave an opening: in the first place because this “service” art is often capable of generating unpredictable brushstrokes, where this distinction does not apply: consider two outstanding examples like Saul Bass and Milton Glaser; and secondly, because the fusions between high and low, as the example of so-called “Game Art” shows, are infinitely more complex than traditional criticism enables us to see. And lastly, because art critics should never forget the example of the young Andrew Warhola, an adman who wanted to be an artist and who only posthumously gained recognition for the extraordinary value of the work he produced for the world of advertising.

These reflections are what lead me to attribute great importance to a project like The Art of Games, the first high profile exhibition to explore the as yet mysterious terrain of concept art. For keen gamers and fans, the exhibition will be a kind of seventh heaven, a chance to linger over their objects of desire and gain insight into the techniques of their idols. For those interested in the impact of digital culture on the contemporary horizon, The Art of Games will be a great eye-opener. As for gallery goers, I would recommend they look with interest, restraining the urge to scoff if they feel that the term “art” is being used irrelevantly. For all three groups, the exhibition will be a great opportunity to interface and interact. And a much needed opportunity to cross cultural and social borders.

Footnotes:

“What do you think of media art in 2009?

In 2009, Where media art is placed and headed for?

Media Art has shown the different direction of art of this age as the emerging art with new forms and approaches. However, now, the authenticity and identity of media art is newly asked. This question is raised apparently different circumstances and phenomena from the early age of media art. Not only in Korea but also overseas media art scene, media art could be seen in the kind of chaos in transit age. About this situation, aliceon is trying to analyze the problem of media art facing today and try to find the directions of media art should move forwards, through the different perspective and directions embed in different media art projects to be made media art curators actively working on now in Korean and overseas.

Q 1. what is the media art in 2009?

DQ. In recent years, media art has experienced a serious crisis. This crisis is, on one side, a growth crisis: the events related to media art spread all around the world, the community grew more and more and in the end stopped thinking about itself in terms of community. On the other side, and more importantly, this crisis is an identity crisis: since all art is now related, in some way or another, with the digital medium, it’s increasingly difficult for media art to identify its own specificity; what’ s clear is that this identity has little to do with the medium. Finally, both the media art scene and the media art label are acting like birdcages for our pretty canaries (I mean, the artists) looking for freedom and for a wider platform where to perform. They are tired to study in separated departments in the university, to be featured in separated columns in magazines, in separated areas in the museums, in separated bookshelves in libraries.

So, what about 2009? 2009 is the year in which Cory Arcangel got the cover of Artforum, showing that media art can easily reach the top if it acts out of the ghetto. Of course, this is a provocative answer, since I talk about positioning, strategy, context, instead of talking about artistic research. Probably I should talk about vernacular aesthetics, biotechnologies, virtual worlds. But personally I’m tired to see my favorite things disappearing into the noise of the media. There is a time for research and a time of strategy, and 2009 belongs to the latter.

Q 2. What was the core of media art projects you (or your institute) have (has) done so far?

DQ. As an independent curator, I’m particularly interested in projects based on a strong content than on a particular approach to the medium. I’m quite tired of all that low-brow, hi-tech media art that fills up most festivals. I like art that comments upon the techno-social environment we live in, that embodies and questions digital culture adopting both “new” and “traditional” media and addressing different communities: the art audience, the web surfers, the people walking in the streets and not interested in art. While curating the Expanded Box for ARCO 2009 in Madrid I kept the spectrum as open as possible, in the exhibitions I curated in the last months I tried to make this approach visible. For God’s Sake!, the exhibition I organized for the Pixxelpoint festival in Nova Gorica (Slovenia) in December 2008, was an exploration of the relationship that technology and media in general can have with our spiritual life, whatever we mean with this world. Hyperlucid, a little project I’m going to curate for the Prague Biennal in May 2009, is a selection of image based works – digital prints, paintings, embroidery – dealing with the “mediated reality” we experience in our daily life through videogames, TV, the Web and other interfaces. In both the cases, I focus on digital culture rather than on media art.

Q 3. In 2009, at this moment, what do you think of the present of media art? And what is the next phase of media art in near future you are expecting? (Where media art should be moved forward?)

DQ. As I tried to explain in my first reply, what I’m expecting from the future is an advanced dialogue between media art and other forms of contemporary art, and possibly the end of the very notion of media art and of the art-science-technology paradigm as the only possible way to approach this kind of research.

Q 4. what is you next media art project now your are working on?

DQ. A book.

]]> http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/what-do-you-think-of-media-art-in-2009/feed/ 0 http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/dont-say-new-media/ http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/dont-say-new-media/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:56:30 +0000 Domenico Quaranta http://domenicoquaranta.com/?p=533 Domenico Quaranta, “DON’T SAY NEW MEDIA!”, in FMR Bianca, n° 5, Franco Maria Ricci, Bologna, December 2008, pp. 92 – 107.

“Don’t say new media – Say art!” Gazira Babeli

“Forget the new, drop the media, enjoy art.”¹ Régine Debatty

Queste due citazioni, entrambe molto recenti, sono emblematiche per vari motivi. La prima è l’ammonizione con cui Gazira Babeli, un’artista che vive nel mondo sintetico di Second Life, accompagna la spettacolare punizione che infligge a chiunque osi pronunciare la parola “new media” davanti ai suoi lavori: un tornado che solleva per aria il nostro alter ego digitale, o avatar, finché quest’ultimo corregge il tiro, dicendo semplicemente “arte”. Régine Debatty è una critica d’arte di origine belga che ha raggiunto la celebrità grazie a un blog intitolato We Make Money Not Art, per poi stupire – e, in certi casi, contrariare – il suo pubblico spostando l’enfasi della sua indagine dalla tecnologia all’arte senza prefissi. I due commenti rivelano, innanzitutto, che esiste un’area, ambiguamente definita “New Media” o “New Media Art”, a cui sia Régine che Gazira sono ricondotte loro malgrado; un termine e un’area in cui forse, un tempo, si sono riconosciute, ma che ora non le soddisfa più.

Questo tipo di insoddisfazione è tutt’altro che rara. Andreas Broeckmann, curatore tedesco e per anni direttore del festival Transmediale, ha curato di recente una mostra per lo Stedelijk Museum di Amsterdam, in cui abbandona programmaticamente il paradigma “New Media”, per riflettere a tutto tondo sulle conseguenze della rivoluzione digitale sull’arte contemporanea². Già nel 2005 Steve Dietz, ex direttore delle New Media Initiatives del Walker Art Center di Minneapolis, ha organizzato una mostra intitolata The Art Formerly Known as New Media; e l’artista americano Brody Condon ha dichiarato: “Ciò che importa sono le idee, non il materiale… Non me ne frega niente dei New Media. Intuitivamente, la mia età mi spinge a utilizzarli.”³ Una esternazione che sembra echeggiare quella, praticamente coeva, della curatrice tedesca Inke Arns: “Ciò che oggi, in una condizione post-mediale, è centrale nella Media Art non sono i media, ma la loro forma specifica di contemporaneità.”⁴

Il lettore medio, estraneo al dibattito in corso, probabilmente noterà in queste frasi due istanze: la polemica nei confronti di una etichetta che pone l’accento sul medium, e la volontà di riposizionare la New Media Art, descrivendola come un capitolo importante dell’arte contemporanea. Lo stesso lettore potrebbe chiedersi: ma non è sempre stato così? No, non è sempre stato così. E, purtroppo, il problema non può essere risolto in maniera così semplice.

Un termine ambiguo

L’espressione New Media Art è uno dei termini più ambigui che la critica d’arte recente ci abbia consegnato. Innanzitutto, le citazioni precedenti mostrano come si alterni abbastanza indifferentemente a due forme molto diverse: “New Media” e “Media Art”. Questa ambiguità terminologica cela, inutile dirlo, qualcosa di più profondo. Il termine “Media Art”, usato da Inke Arns e privilegiato dalla critica di matrice tedesca⁵, ha una storia più lunga, e fa riferimento all’arte che dialoga con, e occasionalmente si serve, dei mezzi di comunicazione emersi nel corso del Novecento: dalla fotografia al video, dal cinema alla comunicazione satellitare a Internet. In altre parole, il termine Media Art definisce un territorio che va da Cindy Sherman a Matthew Barney, passando per l’arte cinetica e le videoinstallazioni a circuito chiuso degli anni Settanta.

New Media è un termine ancora più vago. Come molti hanno osservato, dal collage in poi, ogni nuovo mezzo a disposizione degli artisti è un “new medium”. Nel corso degli anni Ottanta e Novanta, tuttavia, si è progressivamente affermata l’equivalenza “New Media = media digitali”. Questa equivalenza ha preso piede, in primo luogo, nel linguaggio comune, per poi essere ratificata dagli studi accademici e da alcune figure influenti. Negli Stati Uniti e nel centro Europa università e scuole d’arte hanno aperto corsi e dipartimenti di New Media. Nel 2001, lo studioso americano Lev Manovich ha pubblicato The Language of New Media⁶, che si è imposto rapidamente come uno dei testi sacri del nascente filone dei “New Media Studies”, di cui la pubblicazione, nel 2005, del libro The New Media Reader ha determinato la definitiva affermazione.⁷

Una conseguenza indiretta di questo processo è stata la vittoria dell’espressione New Media Art su altre etichette più o meno felici, presentatesi alla ribalta nei decenni precedenti. Termini come Computer Art, Digital Art, Cyber Art, Multimedia, Hypermedia, arte elettronica etc. sono rapidamente spariti dalla circolazione, o ridefiniti in modo tale da adattarsi a un momento specifico della storia a cui appartengono. È a questa storia che dobbiamo fare rapidamente riferimento nel tentativo di capire qualcosa di più sulla New Media Art.

Turing Land

I primi tentativi di utilizzo della tecnologia informatica a scopo artistico risalgono ai meravigliosi anni Sessanta, e all’esplosione sperimentale che segue alla crisi dell’espressionismo astratto. Video Art e arte programmata nascono negli stessi anni di quella che allora viene chiamata “Computer Art”. Entrambe hanno qualche difficoltà a trovare la propria strada in un mondo dell’arte che sfidano su più fronti, ma entrambe, in qualche modo, ce la fanno. Per il computer, la storia è diversa. Da un lato, l’accesso al mezzo è complicato, sia in termini economici (i primi “home computer” compariranno una ventina di anni dopo) che tecnici: se non hai una formazione ingegneristica, difficilmente ci puoi mettere le mani sopra. Inoltre, il mezzo stesso è profondamente diverso. Basandosi sul calcolo digitale, il computer non si limita a compiere, come altri media, una semplice, singola operazione, ma ridefinisce tutte le operazioni precedenti. È un mezzo tutto da costruire, e alla cui costruzione la creatività e l’arte possono dare un contributo attivo. Bisogna dar vita a interfacce, disegnare forme di interazione tra l’uomo e la macchina, immaginare nuovi modi di organizzazione dei contenuti. Questo introduce una relazione tra ricerca artistiche e mezzo assolutamente inedita, e destinata ad avere un impatto duraturo sulla New Media Art. Come nota Manovich nella sua introduzione a The New Media Reader, le due storie (quella della costruzione del mezzo e quella della New Media Art) si intrecciano a tal punto che, al limite, è possibile vedere nei mezzi che si impongono lo sviluppo più riuscito delle corrispondenti ricerche artistiche: l’Apple Macintosh e la sua interfaccia uomo-computer come punto d’arrivo delle ricerche sull’interattività; il Web come coronamento della ricerca sulla letteratura ipertestuale.

Queste affinità elettive, se da un lato conferiscono alla New Media Art un ruolo inedito – e ancora tutto da esplorare – nell’ambito della storia culturale del Novecento, dall’altro ne hanno fatto un’arte “anomala”, da un punto di vista contenutistico e formale, e “marginale”, se vista in rapporto al mondo dell’arte tout-court. Anomala, perché sorretta da istanze molto diverse da quelle comuni all’arte contemporanea; e marginale, perché nata, esibita e discussa al di fuori del mondo dell’arte stessa. In altre parole, quello a cui la New Media Art ha dato vita è un vero e proprio mondo dell’arte autonomo, con esigenze sue proprie e un pubblico che raramente, e solo in piccola parte, si sovrappone a quello dell’arte contemporanea. Un territorio definito da festival come Ars Electronica, da meeting come l’ISEA, da musei come lo ZKM di Karlsruhe o l’ICC di Tokio, da riviste come Leonardo, da editori come MIT Press. Lo stesso Manovich, in un testo del 1996⁸, ha chiamato questo mondo Turing Land, in omaggio ad Alan Turing (il padre dei computer) e in opposizione a quella che chiama Duchamp Land, ossia il mondo dell’arte contemporanea. Secondo Manovich, se quest’ultimo richiede opere “orientate al contenuto”, “sofisticate” (perché richiedono, per essere decifrate, il possesso di diversi codici culturali), “ironiche”, “autoreferenziali”, con un approccio spesso decostruttivo nei confronti dei media utilizzati, la Turing Land richiede opere orientate al medium, tecnofile, semplici e prive di ironia, e che prendono la tecnologia molto seriamente. L’attenzione al “craft”, all’abilità “artigianale”, sparita dal sistema di valori dell’arte contemporanea, riemerge nel mondo dell’arte digitale; così come scompare la tradizionale differenziazione tra arte, design e creatività industriale.

La data di questo testo non è casuale. Il 1996 è un anno cruciale per la storia della New Media Art, e per capire i suoi sviluppi recenti. L’avvento di Internet e la diffusione di massa dei personal computer infliggono un duro colpo a una storia quarantennale di sperimentazione “ai margini”. La net.art, che si afferma proprio in questo periodo, non ha nulla in comune con la Turing Land descritta da Manovich: è ironica, decostruttiva, tecnoluddista, e si concentra più sul contenuto che sulla tecnologia. Con quest’ultima intrattiene un rapporto ambivalente, di odio e amore: parla del mezzo, esaltandone alcune potenzialità e criticandone molte altre. Guarda a Duchamp e a Nam June Paik, ed è molto critica verso le ingombranti installazioni interattive del decennio precedente.

La net.art inaugura un nuovo modo di relazionarsi alla tecnologia: un approccio che si diffonderà come un virus, trasformando la New Media Art in maniera irreversibile, e arrivando a rendere obsoleta la sua stessa definizione, e ogni presunta distinzione tra due mondi. Eccoci arrivati al punto.

Una nuova fase

È dunque imminente una convergenza tra i due mondi? Nel 1996, Manovich risponde negativamente a questa domanda. Dieci anni dopo, la sua risposta è la stessa, ma molto meno netta e decisa. In un’epoca in cui, come ha notato anche Germano Celant⁹, il computer è diventato un elemento indispensabile di ogni processo creativo, accanto ad artisti che utilizzano la fotografia senza considerarsi fotografi e ad artisti che utilizzano il video senza definirsi video artisti, ci sono artisti che utilizzano i nuovi media senza ritenersi “new media artist”. Alcuni hanno rapidamente conquistato le vette del mondo dell’arte: penso a Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, “new media artist” che hanno avuto la fortuna di non avere mai nulla a che fare con questa etichetta.

Al contempo, un festival come l’Ars Electronica di Linz è diventato uno strano connubio tra la mostra d’arte, la fiera industriale e il Luna Park, in cui le opere d’arte si trovano a convivere con prototipi industriali, oggetti di design e vari tipi di gadget. E in cui lavori che mettono in primo piano il contenuto vengono letti e valutati in rapporto al loro uso del medium. Nella passata edizione, ad esempio, in una sezione dedicata al tema attualissimo dei mondi virtuali, i re-enactment di Eva e Franco Mattes, che rimettono in scena in Second Life alcune celebri performance degli anni Settanta per indagare il senso di concetti come “corpo”, “violenza” e “sessualità” in un mondo sintetico, si poteva giocare con Stiff People League, un prototipo messo a punto dal Sociable Media Group del MIT Media Lab che consente al pubblico “reale” di giocare a calcetto su un campo “virtuale”. E nella selezione dedicata all’animazione digitale i video d’artista convivono (e competono) con il kolossal hollywoodiano Pirati dei Caraibi.

Il mondo della New Media Art è cresciuto grazie a forti investimenti pubblici e privati, e si è dimostrato abbastanza dinamico da riuscire a inglobare tendenze e ricerche che hanno poco a che vedere con i suoi presupposti ideologici e la sua storia. Adattarvisi vuol dire costruirsi una carriera in un contesto dinamico e fluido, meritocratico e aperto all’innovazione, all’interno di una comunità caratterizzata da un forte senso di appartenenza; ma vuol dire, anche, rimanere fuori dal discorso critico sull’arte contemporanea, e dai suoi meccanismi di attribuzione di valore.

Il risultato è che, come dicevamo, critici, curatori e artisti nutrono una crescente insofferenza nei confronti di quel contesto e, di conseguenza, nei confronti della stessa etichetta New Media Art. Liberarsene è il primo passo di un difficile percorso verso il sistema di senso dell’arte contemporanea, intrapreso da un numero sempre più alto di artisti. Ma liberarsene non è facile. Significa, spesso, rompere con la propria storia, e ricostruirsi una carriera in un contesto – quello dell’arte contemporanea – forse più maturo, ma anche più sclerotizzato, sicuramente più conservatore. Un contesto che, come hanno notato Joline Blais e Jon Ippolito¹⁰, ha trasformato il gioco di Duchamp – la definizione contestuale dell’arte come ciò che accade nel mondo dell’arte – in una forma di pigrizia intellettuale, caratterizzata dall’incapacità di elaborare nuove definizioni di arte.

E tuttavia, questo percorso è stato intrapreso. Non è più possibile tornare indietro. La New Media Art è uscita dal suo paradiso terrestre, e deve cominciare a fare i conti con una realtà ben più complessa. Cambiare questa realtà, importandovi ciò che ha reso la New Media Art uno dei fenomeni più rilevanti degli ultimi sessant’anni, è la sua sfida. Imparare a conoscere le sue regole è la sua necessità.

Questo, sia ben chiaro, non mette fuori gioco la Turing Land. La sua sfida è quella di continuare ad essere un incubatore e smettere di essere una prigione. Coltivare l’ibridazione dei linguaggi, riflettere e determinare l’evoluzione dei media. Operare virtuosamente sul confine. La New Media Art è morta! Viva la New Media Art!

NOTE:

First published on Spawn of the Surreal, May 22, 2008.

Yesterday morning I spent a couple of hours in Second Life to visit Kiss the Sky, an huge exhibition curated by artist DC Spensley (DanCoyote Antonelli in SL) for the New Media Consortium in collaboration with the Museum of Hyperformalism, directed by DanCoyote himself. Kiss the Sky pretends to be the “definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism”, with 37 installations by over a dozen artists: Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

The notecard of the exhibition includes the following definition of Hyperformalism:

“Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.”
The press release goes on saying that Hyperformalism removes “the comfortable cliché of anthropocentrism”, talking about immersion and abstraction, and concluding that Hyperformalism exceeds our traditional concept of art, because it is “native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view.”

This last point is very important, because I think that the very concept of “nativity” is in the same time the strength point and the deafness point of the hyperformalist strategy (and of all the “not possible in real life” approach). Visiting the exhibition, I was quite surprised to notice that I enjoyed it a lot. In the end of the long tour I was quite bored indeed, but nothing different from any big exhibition of abstract art – or from an exhausting visit to the Venice Biennale. Some works, in particular, gave me a great aesthetic and immersive experience. If you are planning to go and see the show, I suggest you to have a look to Pulse Points, by Nebulosus Severine – an enormous ice block that can be visited like a room, with some strange sculptures frozen in it like a Siberian mammoth; to the ambitious Fractus V, a colossal kinetic sculpture which made me think to Boccioni and Pomodoro for its bronze-like textures; to Juria Yoshikawa‘s works, in particular Spiny Bumblebee Abstract; to the ambiguous, surreal sculptures by Chance Abattoir; and, finally, to a classic by Adam Ramona, the wonderful A Rose Heard at Dusk previously installed on Odyssey.

1. Everything, in SL, is constructed. Is everything art?

I enjoyed these works, really. Or, better said, my avatar enjoyed them; he had some interesting experiences, like every time he discovers something new in SL, being it art or not. This is one of the first problems coming to my mind, and one of the things that prevents me to fully enjoy Hyperformalism. Everything, in SL, is constructed. Everything can be art. Do we have to rely on what people say about their work, or on what the New Media Consortium suggests to call art? Yes and no. The answer is related to what we think SL is.

2. Is SL an art world?

So, what is SL? A software or a world? If it is a world, probably there is an “art world” in it. That is, in Howard S. Becker‘s words (1982), a group of people “whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.” Artists, critics, collectors, galleries, institutions and so on. You don’t need a great experience of SL to know that you can find in it all the key figures who build up an art world. So, SL has an art world and Hyperformalism is its avantgarde. Since it can be understood only by people living in that world, and belonging to that art world, no surprise if it is not recognized by any RL community. Better, there’s no need for that: art, to exist, needs to be recognized as such only by its own art world.
Simple, don’t you think? Yes and no. The problems come when you don’t think, like me, that SL is a world.

3. SL as theatre

SL is a platform. When you enter it, everything you do is to set up your own performance. Choose an avatar. Edit it. Find a name, a costume, a position on the platform. Write down your script and act it. Add some furniture to the stage: everything you do is just a step forward in the development of your story. And of the collective history of SL. Your story can be similar to your (real) life, or radically different. Can be work, play or art. So, the SL “art world” is not real, it is just a collective myth, a narration, and in this sense it is very interesting. Most of the stories are boring, because most of the people are bad players. But some stories are very interesting. Think, for example, to Anshe Chung. Aimee Weber. James Wagner Au. Sugar Seville. China Tracy. Molotov Alva. Or Gazira Babeli. All beautiful stories. Not all of them are art, because not all of them want to be recognized as such. But if Anshe Chung will say. “my story of the first SL billionaire is art”, she will be a better artist then DanCoyote Antonelli.
Like Anshe Chung, DanCoyote is adding furniture to the stage. But while Anshe Chung describes the Anshe Chung Studios as an entrepreneurial venture, Dancoyote describes his installations as art.
Indeed, Dancoyote seems to have understood it, maybe in a vague and faded way. His story is great. His young avatar; the myth of the sixth finger; Hyperformalism as the SL avantgarde: all these things are good entries in a good story. Probably what he does is not art, but Dancoyote Antonelli is, without doubt, the best artwork by DC Spensley. Also other artists, such as Adam Ramona and Juria Yoshikawa, wrote an interesting script for their avatars. Adam Ramona’s avatar is wonderful. But all of them are confusing what their avatars are doing in SL with what their humans did in real life: they call it interactive installations, sound installations, optical art. And they neglect their script, which is exactly what gives sense to what they are doing, and what – I’d dare to say – can make their work interesting even for a real life audience which never experienced SL.
But most of the self-pretending SL artists make their own work without caring at all about their story. SL art is a midsummer night dream, that in a few years will turn into a nightmare, with people realizing that they wasted their time without creating anything valuable. Wake up, artists! Without narration there is no art in SL!

4. Performance, but not only

After what I wrote, probably you can understand why I think performance is the most interesting way to deal with SL. Gazira Babeli, Second Front, Man Michinaga, Eva and Franco Mattes are all feeding, with their works and acts, the mythologies of that cluster of stories that is called SL. They perform everywhere. They don’t need technical settings to be experienced, because my imagination does not need technical settings. They play with the vernacular background of SL, and with their culture and tradition, not just with codes, prims and scripts. They don’t add furniture to the stage, but stories to the script.

And, last but not least, they don’t distinguish between “native art” and “RL art”, because there is no such distinction: there’s only art. That’s why I count among the best examples of art related to virtual worlds such works as Cao Fei‘s RMB City and Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott‘s No Matter: they are not – not only – native, but they say something interesting on both the worlds their authors deal with – and they contribute to both the narratives.