Games AS Art: The Aesthetics of Play
2006; Routledge; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2691-5529
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Technology, and Culture
ResumoAbstract Connections between Fluxus indeterminacy, collaboration and open-endedness are connected to contemporary art and its creative and sometimes subversive moves. Beginning with Marcel Duchamp's interest in games and continuing to John Cage's interest in chance operations along with various Fluxus artist's conceptions, author moves through techniques and issues that underpin digital development and its relation to Fluxus principles. Questions are raised and answered: What is a game? Why art? Collective action through networks and Open Source strategies are explored. Mods, patches, scores and chance and ways in which they subvert existing games or integrate creative capacity of designer with player are discussed and sometimes shown. Prologue: Portrait of Artist as a Young Gamer [What is art?] That little that men have always played with one another. MARCEL DUCHAMP It can even be argued that much of Duchamp's constitutes a series of moves designed to rewrite rules of art ANTOINETTE LAFARGE (SHIFT-CTRL) IN 1922, ANDRE BRETON WROTE THE FIRST MAJOR ARTICLE ON work of Marcel Duchamp for French review Litterature. Breton regarded Duchamp as the most intelligent man of 20th Century, but was dismayed to find that artist spent majority of his time playing chess. But clearly Duchamp's fascination was more than a mere distraction. Among last works painted before completing his landmark Nude Descending a Staircase in 1912, Duchamp did a series of studies and paintings attempting to depict inner processes of opponents in a chess game. He played with a personal chess set he carved himself by hand, and his close friend and partner in Dada, Man Ray, earned his living for a time by making chess sets. At what was arguably height of his art career, he retired to become a professional chess player. Photographs of Duchamp depict him playing chess more than any other single activity. One of most famous of these shows him deeply engaged in a chess match with a naked Eve Babitz in midst of a 1963 retrospective of his work at Pasadena Museum of Art. The fact that he chose to make this statement in particular at a retrospective is telling. Was Marcel Duchamp really an artist, or was he in fact what today would be called a gamer whose art was merely a hobby, or perhaps even a itself? The fact is that Duchamp started with painting and ended with games; his later work appears more and more game-like. The following pages will explore phenomenon of games as an art medium, drawing corollaries and contrasts between Fluxus movement's neo-Dadaist passion for games, and emerging contemporary practice of digital based art. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that spirit of Fluxus lives on and may in fact be even more at home in context of cyberspace. What Is A Game? I SHALL BEGIN WITH A DISCLAIMER/CONTEXTUALIZATION. I AM a designer/writer, a sometime artist and an accidental theorist. Due to a number of recent trends in culture and academia, I can now situate these disparate activities under general rubric of game researcher, a role that has remarkably quickly shifted from pariah to oeuvre du jour. The majority of contributors within this issue are well qualified to discuss art, from perspective of practice, history or criticism. As will soon be revealed, I have spent a great deal more time thinking about nature of games, from both theoretical and practical angles, than I have about art. In 1983, I began working as a writer and designer in New York City. I was immediately plunged into role of scribe, writing descriptions of concepts being developed by a vastly multidisciplinary group of people, none of whom were designers. I had intuitive sense that some of these concepts were games, and some were not. …
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