Monthly Archives: May 2012

Andy Warhol’s Mother

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This evening the first level of [H.H] is running! Only the bare bones – the main furniture and architecture, with none of the sound toys installed. But you can walk around and explore and the big Universal Time Machine is spinning and announcing the minutes and … other things. Feeling like I might be making the deadline!

I’ve been thinking a great deal about creativity and curation over the last weeks. I’ve always excused my curmudgeonly ways because despite all my vocal distaste for everything – I still create, still add to the cultural storehouse. Only those times when I can’t create does it seem unhealthy.

My acidic views get applied to myself first and usually get the desired effect – more effort. I’ve more often murdered my own trash than let it defame me. Only if there’s no remedy in critique do I back off. This is natural to me but seems others work better on praise and sugarplums.

That creative bargain doesn’t work if you’re curating other people’s efforts. You have to like something or there’s no show. You have to justify the positive to get it included, talk it up, smooth the concerns even if you have them. You can’t just fake it, you really have to warm to things.

If I am ever going to curate, then I have to analyse the negative.

A fundamental problem I have with most art is that it works backwards. It should work like this:

  • Internal necessity demands expression (Kandinsky).
  • Exploring the means of expression over time brings a solution.
  • The artwork is birthed in a passion of creation. It takes struggle.
  • An audience is taken by surprise by this personal act and slowly comes to respect the work even if it doesn’t suit their tastes.

But usually works like this:

  • A deadline is set for exhibition or assessment by some money keeper.
  • The artist or curator, who has political ambitions, finds out the current tastes of the audience.
  • They concoct something that suits the meanest expectations of the event.
  • Everybody gets paid and the audience feels slightly amused for a short time before wandering off to the next thing.

Just about everything I pick on comes from this principle: mindless projection mapping, 8 bit graphics on iPads, Krautrock reunion tours, skateboard ballet and so on. Take for example projection mapping, which starts from having a landmark building to project onto and works backwards to any plausible idea that can be excused for doing so. To find something praise worthy – Amon Tobin’s current light show to the extent that it is supposed be a cubist aeroplane that’s he’s flying – which is a fun idea – but not when the space is just being filled with coloured blocks.

There’s always something recent than you can do, which leads to people that do it in the vague hope of finding a point to it. That was New Media. It died.

Around 2006 I was asked to participate in an exhibition of mobile art – phones and GPS and that sort of thing. I thought about it for a week before I said no, because honestly I had nothing worth saying about mobile phones. The organiser was amazed – that had never stopped anyone before.

Another principle which I find important is that the artwork be bigger than the signature. Take for example a great video that an honours student identified the other day:

It’s a visualisation of human DNA replication that has been done with a great deal of accuracy and artistry by Drew Berry – which has been commissioned by Bjork with the condition that her face be inserted into it around the 4 minute mark. “Oh look this is beautiful! But it will be even more beautiful with MY FACE whacked in there!” Actually, no. There was something that was unique, and then become the equivalent of a Thomas Kincade painting of Jesus in seconds flat. It didn’t need to be made so obviously a vanity project.

Artists will find a trademark and then be terrified to move away from it in case the audience turns on them. In fact finding a trademark – whether a slow motion skateboard or a monochrome Joshua Tree – and being branded for life like a prize steer is the ambition of ‘artists’. Again this is a reverse of the way it should be, where popularity directs the artist like a puppet show. and climbing into the cage is their heart’s desire.

These and other concerns are all to do with the politics of art, and that the art that we get to see most is that which has played the politics. Go to an exhibition and you’ll see the work of the self promoters, the glib tongues and crowd pleasers. The people you really want are invisible. What to do?

Don’t fund art, so that only the passionate will be involved. But that leaves the wealthy, and punishes the poor. It shouldn’t have anything to do with money, plus or minus. Try again.

Only exhibit when there is something to show. That’s better, although a multitude of arts administrators are not going to put up with that. They get a wage from putting things on, as much as possible. Also, there is a public benefit to exhibiting, in that it may bring some joy. So they need to be told.

Get rid of arts administrators. It has a certain charm, but why not get rid of art academics as well? If I am going to get rid of something, then lead by example. (Actually there’s a possibility that I’ll be unemployed soon, so check this space).

Refuse to be involved in the art scene. Um, yeah, that just leaves the toadies. That’s pretty close to doing nothing at all. If you care, then better to be heard than be silent.

These are all bold and not very precise. We can do better.

Make an exhibition which reveals and publicly opposes these problems. Now you’re politicking! First of all, don’t let people know they are in the exhibition. Swoop in and take them by surprise the night before opening. If they think they’re in, they’re out.

Make sure that every second exhibit is actually bought from a service station and pay people to write lavish essays about them in the catalogue. Or actually hold the exhibition in a service station.

If you’re dealing with a known artist refuse their trademark and force them to do something else, for example, the tuba. Make them anonymous. Have every work in the exhibition signed by Ethel Schwug. Or swap tags.

Force everyone to make something called “Piss Christ”. Make everyone work on one single object called “Piss Christ”.

I’m feeling more confident about this curation business already.

 

Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist

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…and other mind fucks. Happily for me while compiling a list of weird games for a lecture, a discussion opened up on Something Awful on that very topic. Pleased to see that I had already nominated some of the finest, and also to learn of new wonders to behold.

First: this promo for Octodad is something I will forever treasure in my heart. Video art.

The game itself simulates an octopus in a suit attempting to convince people that it’s a completely normal dad; mind numbingly difficult, pathetic and wonderfully spiteful. I’m more into their using a messed up ’tilted cart’ version of  the game as the sales pitch -  it instantly holds an unreasonable position.

Randy Balma probably started just as a simulation of repeatedly driving a school bus into oncoming traffic high on mushrooms, but as the high highs higher it launches a rocket propelled Big Ben into collisions with space junk. Messhof (Mark Essen) has followed an Art Game path since graduation in 2008 – his latest Nidhogg won big in the 2011 Game Developers Conference. But to my mind he’s lost that intense distaste for all life that marked Randy Balma’s contribution to civilisation. Which I share.

I hadn’t heard of The Adventures of D. Duck before. Apart from appearing to be designed by a traumatised 6 year old it’s a reasonably standard point and click adventure starring grossly deformed animals.

But if you are going to truly Adventure, then go straight to the obsessive compulsive side of the field – the outsider Role Playing Games. Queen of the pack is Dream Diary, hatched by ‘Kikiyama’ in 2005. Like nearly all such outsider RPGs it’s built on RPG Maker, a Japanese authoring kit for depressingly similar landscapes of castles and armed dwarves. Dream Diary, or Yume Nikki probably first gained praise for eschewing all dwarves – which grew wildly when players realised that the AUTHOR IS PROFOUNDLY DISTURBED. Maybe.

Definitely.

For a game where you spend most of your time lost in an 8 bit pixelated nightmare it’s created a rabid community of fans who are obsessed with every aspect of the hero girl Windowed (‘is she a transexual?’), her tiny apartment that she can only leave when asleep (‘post traumatic stress’) and the vaguely threatening wildlife that live in her dreams. Like the ‘Bird People’:

All of whom look like Julia Gillard, but are said by fans to represent childhood tormentors. They’re harmless unless you stab them in which case they’ll confine you to dreams where the only escape is to wake up. The subject of most fan obsession is a cross eyed piano player who looks a little like Michael Jackson meets Ryuichi Sakamoto who crash lands a space ship on Mars so …

Hell, it’s too complicated. Just watch this small bit.

I don’t particularly like RPGs (not into dwarves) but I’m currently working through a French one called OFF. This one has more traditional heroes and battles, but your main character is a baseball batter, aided by angelic hoops and guided by a pretentious cat judge. I managed to get through a city made of meat fountains and fought against a giant bird which lives inside another cat. I’m told it’ll all make sense if I can get to the end of it. It’s that promise of hidden knowledge that drives me on (and probably why people become Scientologists). I’m just a bit tired of fighting whales in the shopping centre.

Normally I choose peaceful stories, like The Woodcutter.

Should have sent a poet.

Then there are the Art Games. LSD Dream Simulator is a Playstation title allegedly based on 10 years of dreams had by a lady called Hiroko Nishikawa. If so, the poor thing dreamed in very blocky low resolution graphics. Walk around blocky streets finding blocky animals floating in the sky, or blocky corpses on the ground. Touch something and another dream starts. They get more dour and morose over the 365 days of game time. Sometimes a bad thing may happen. That’s about it.

Since the days of LSD the graphics have got better but the attention whoring and lack of genuine engagement remains the sure sign of an Art Game. There’s a common texture to Yume Nikki and LSD but the differences are most helpful. Whether it’s a prank like Randy Balma or a warped world like Yume Nikki, it’s the insularity of the game that makes it appealing, the complete disregard for audience. They’re a personality you have to engage as the Other, as you do with real people you first meet.  Art Games want to be agreeable – LSD even comes as a coffee table book. That’s too comforting and controlled, like small talk with a celebrity*.

The phrase Inscrutable Energy popped into my mind today (the birds** are busy at the moment.) I think it requires that the appeal of a work is a bipolar force – the positive is represented the sweet, brightly coloured game like Angry Birds. The negative is much harder to create and to define but it’s equally powerful in inspiring playfulness.

I’ve a couple of projects looming for 2013 in which I’m being asked to justify a theme appropriate for the art of this moment – a hard thing (deservedly hard) for anyone as old and cynical as me. The New Aesthetic is not it. I really think it’s The Inscrutable. Only the inscrutable can withstand the forces that would apply metrics to art and devolve it into recipes and academies. The only power that can defeat Research is The Inscrutable. That should be our goal.

* For reasons I won’t go into I shook hands with Kevin Rudd today. He spoke to me like The Queen addressing a Commoner. I bet it was as tedious for him as was for me.

** It’s hard to answer when somebody asks about sudden inspiration. I tend to say that ‘the birds put it there’ because that’s how it seems to come, and the image is (hopefully) less offensive than claiming to be inspired. Sometimes the birds get too busy – right now a month or so of depression has lifted and the manic chattering of birds is driving me a bit nuts. It’ll end with a bang in about a week from now.

{opmitter}– lost battle / winning the war?

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This week I started to wind back the doctorate. People tell me there is no shame in going part time, in fact the research office were very supportive about not trying to work 70+ hours a week. December 2011 was utterly miserable (it included Death, Taxes and a healthy helping of Walls) and I can’t face that level of insanity again. Brutalist U willing, I am back to 16 hours a week on top of my day job.

When visiting the FASS research office I spied two familiar cases sitting on the shelf: my “album of albums”. I think the FASSRO were quite happy to get their shelf space back and I was happy to see that one of the cases was still intact! Nice to have it back again after these years.

Anyway, I’m at a point where shit gets real, So far I’ve talked about still images and that’s not enough. A video work is a moving image and you can’t assign it a single point on a graph. It would rather be a kind of tube extended through the five dimensions. I’ve decided to call that a Twistie, because I can. In my review one of the panel noted that I hadn’t really described how a sequence of abstract scenes would form the equivalent of a story arc. At the time I said that the system couldn’t decide on the relationship between sample points – it takes a human operator to discern a Twistie and drive the replay through it. I still think that’s correct.

However the Twisties don’t have hard edges. When there’s two videos near to the sample point, each is represented proportionally in the result, just as when you tune a radio you can hear two adjacent stations. If you were to lay two videos near each other they can and will overlap and intersect. Very pretty but not quite a ‘retrieval’ as advertised on the tin. That needs to be made clear.

Another big problem presents as I have been asked to create material for demonstrating the device. It needs to be abstract and be able to be performed according to OCEAN. So I need Anxious and Neurotic and so on expressed as videography – which I started to make by using the same colour and form decisions as have been made since the beginning of motion pictures. But my argument has been that these weren’t reliable measures. Am I just disproving myself and maybe elements like hue and brightness really do hold the key? If you are willing to self critique then it can be depressing to spend weeks finding fault in your argument instead of the pleasure of moving along a learning path. I suspected that I’d got myself in a tangle but instinct told me that part of it was sheer bloody tiredness and that the blockage would pass.

Since I started to write this entry something wonderful happened.

I had to give a lecture about game sound, in which I always include a quick rundown of FMOD. In a demo of the new FMOD Studio the demonstrator sets up a whole array of sound cues that are connected to game states – then he creates a ‘fear’ controller. He raises a slider on the MIDI controller and says quite calmly ‘so we can create automation based on fear and…’ my mind did an atomic explosion. YOU WONDERFUL BASTARD YOU JUST SHOWED ME A PARADIGM. I am not going nowhere, there is a light visible ahead of me…

How long has this been sitting in front of me? I’m a fucking idiot. The intention of FMOD is to parallel a branching visual narrative. Because a game is a state machine, the multi-track in FMOD doesn’t represent a single fixed time line. Rather it uses the x axis to hold individual durations that overlap depending on the values called up by the game engine. For example, given the intensity of a battle sequence, mix the sounds in a given way at a given point along x.

First garbled thoughts: untie this from a story arc and limit the controllers to the OCEAN psychological grid that I’m proposing. Replace the sound flows with video clips. The operator places the clips on the multi-track, having previously assigned weights to key frames within them. Automation lines are splines that flow through the control points we’ve identified = maths is relatively easy. Now as we change the OCEAN levels, the clips are replayed in an appropriate mix at states along the multi-track.

Even if that reads clear as mud, it’s something achievable, something that is a relative of a procedure that is already ‘standard practice’ and yet an incremental advance. As I am trying to facilitate an art form that’s the exact place to be. I feel like Baird and his hat box.