Translator: Megan Currie Reviewer: Mateo Upegui
[Ideas that transform you]
[María Luján Oulton: The Art of Play]
I'd like to ask you to raise your hand if you believe
that the image behind me is a work of art.
There's not much room for doubt, is there?
What about this other one?
It could impress us more or less, depending on our aesthetic tastes,
but nobody will be horrified by the sight of a Mondrian in a museum.
What happens if I show you a urinal?
Here come the first doubts.
It's not just any urinal.
'Fountain', presented by Duchamp for entry into an art exhibition
where all works of art were to be accepted.
And this one was left out.
The other commissioners charged with deciding what would be included
left it aside.
Duchamp gave up.
A conceptual, irreverent, politically incorrect work of art.
Because sometimes art can be all these things too.
What about this one?
A box of washing powder, and not even a real one. A replica.
But what if I told you it's a Warhol?
The faces are starting to change.
A name with value.
Another work of art, a 20th-century avant-garde icon.
In this case, art which talks to us about what is happening,
about commercial art versus art of the elite. Why?
Because art isn't always pretty.
Art isn't always a canvas.
In fact, in its origins art was much more than that.
Art was a ritual. Art was politics, it was communication.
That's why art can sometimes be fleeting, it can be brutal,
it can horrify us, like Marina Abramovic
and her 'Performances' which seek to move us,
which seek to comment, to tell a story;
which are political, social and at times religious declarations.
Or art can team up with science and create a rabbit like Alba,
a fluorescent rabbit who sparked debate over whether her true 'parent'
was the artist Eduardo Kac or the laboratory which commissioned her.
Is this a breakthrough? Is it a work of art?
With this in mind, who would say that a picture like this could be art?
That maybe video gaming is one of the new avant-garde art forms.
Just like Duchamp in his day.
Or like Warhol in his.
And it's not me who's saying this, nor a group of fanaticized geeks
who play video games 24/7
and who know all the tricks in the book.
No, this is something that is happening worldwide.
And which is being validated by institutions:
institutions of art and of technology;
and museums, like the Smithsonian which this year dedicated a several-month long exhibition
to the history of video gaming,
the cultural influence of video gaming.
And the decision of which works were to be included in the exhibition
went to the public themselves.
Or, for example, a museum of technology like the one in Berlin.
It has a wing dedicated solely to video games.
From the first console up to modern-day productions
made by artists who work with gaming devices.
And why not festivals too?
Like ARS Electronica, a festival which takes place in Austria
and which is characteristic of art and technology.
It has a category called Interactive Art
which for a while now has been assigning awards to video games.
Commercial video games, independent video games,
devices created by artists.
These are all different ways in which the video game
can come to be considered as an art.
I'm not saying that all of them are art, but some are.
And it happens, and it was inevitable that it would happen
because art is something unique to man.
Art is a way we have of expressing ourselves,
of communicating, of transmitting emotions.
Art keeps on changing with the ages;
with each society it uses different tools.
Technology was inevitable in this century
and video gaming is one of the many faces it can assume.
And these are some of the many faces behind these creations.
These people could be the next Warhols.
They are the ones who walk among us.
We are the ones who will say: "Yes, this could be art", or "No",
and time will tell if we were right or wrong.
I suggest we take a quick look at six examples of video games
which are probably not quite Mona Lisas,
or Warhol's Brillo Boxes,
but which are paving the way for what is to come.
Perhaps the easiest art form to liken it to is cinema.
The video game goes one step further,
from the seventh art to the eighth.
Now we have interactivity, something which art
has been striving for since it left the canvas,
which some branches of art are striving for.
To involve the other, to remove him from the place of the observer,
to hook him in, to make him the protagonist.
By its very nature, video gaming has all of this.
Take Assassin's Creed, for example: a 'mainstream' video game
which could be outdone by the more 'indie' ones
but which has a lot going on behind it all.
It took three years of work, 500 people developing it,
departments dedicated to photography,
to character design, to narrative.
Here, Renaissance Italy has been reconstructed.
They worked with historians, architects,
specialists in this era.
It's the only method we have today to explore these places.
A while ago there was an exhibition in the Museum of Decorative Art
on paintings from that period.
Line after interminable line waiting for a glance into that time.
It's the same thing here. We're being taken along for a journey
where we are the ones who travel through the story.
We are the protagonists of this tale.
And just like Hollywood has a flipside like Cannes festival
or Berlin's Golden Bear, with entries which try to tell another story,
transmit another experience, which have multiple meanings;
video games have that too,
with companies which present themselves as purely artistic.
This is the case with That Game Company, a Californian enterprise
which says it develops video games which are like interactive poems.
This is its most recent work, Journey.
The journey of the hero, present in every narrative.
Every book and every film talks about this journey.
Perhaps a journey unique to each player.
We wake up in the desert, alone in the vast emptiness
with nobody to keep us company, and a light to follow.
In Journey, the meaning will be different for every player.
You enter into a painting, you enter into a poem.
You are the one who walks among the verses.
And sometimes another character appears, which is someone who is online
at that precise moment, who is undertaking their own journey,
their own destiny,
and who connects with us through sound.
We don't have a familiar language,
we can't chat, we just emit sounds.
We sing, we communicate, we keep each other company.
And when the other player disappears, he takes away a little token...
and we're left alone to continue our journey.
All fairly sensible up to here, it seems.
It's aesthetic, we understand it. It's not so crazy.
But what happens if we get just a little more experimental?
Daniel Benmergui, Argentinian. Works with narrative.
How do we tell a story?
In this instance, he takes up the theories of the Russian constructivists.
(He picked on the nobodies).
This storyteller won the Nuovo Award in the IGF,
the Independent Games Festival, this year.
The prize par excellence for experimentation in a video game.
In a comic-strip style, he sets out a storytelling for us.
In this case, Adam has to die.
We have Adam and a tombstone.
If we put Adam in the first frame
and the tombstone in the second, Adam goes 'kaput'.
Sometimes it is inspired by cinema, such as Indecent Proposal, for example
Here we have a happy couple, but if we add a treasure chest, the couple will break up.
Our protragonist's decision is up to us:
whether he will choose love or money.
It's all experimentation.
It may or may not seem like art, we'll see, but it is happening.
And art, as we said before, can also be political.
Art can have a strong message to convey.
At one point, muralists in Mexico went out into the streets;
they went out into the streets to talk about politics.
To educate the town.
To make people aware of what was happening.
Here, Gonzalo Frasca from Uruguay presents us with September 12th,
inspired by the events of September 11th.
He puts us in a random town in the Middle East.
Civilians walking around, and some of them are armed.
A telescopic sight, and no objectives. There are no rules.
It's down to us to decide what to do.
Our first instinct is to kill the bad guy.
But what happens is that we shoot and in the missile blast, there will be casualties
who did not have to be the ones to die.
The civilians will gather to mourn their dead relatives
and they too will become terrorists.
Violence breeds violence, it's simple.
But being told this is not the same as being fully aware,
as becoming responsible for these actions ourselves.
'Serious games', games which are related to social reality,
to what is happening to us.
Video gaming moving towards education,
video gaming as a tool to connect us with the younger ones,
who are practically born with joysticks in their hands these days.
Or, an experimental video game developed in this case by a musician.
Deep Sea, a diving suit, a gas mask which isolates us completely
from our surroundings, and a pair of earphones.
We are at the bottom of the sea.
Our mission is to escape from the savage beasts
which are pursuing us.
Our resources are a joystick and the sounds we hear.
It's about the experience. At one point when art came out of the canvas
it started to work with the body, with emotions,
with feelings and sensations;
the 'performances' and the 'happenings' began to appear.
Creating movement, appealing to other sensitivities.
Marta Minujín is an icon over here,
you'll probably have heard of 'Mayhem',
where you would walk through a kind of scenario where things happen.
It was a step beyond the visual.
It meant entering into the experience with your whole body.
But we were still witnesses. Here, we are protagonists.
And on top of this, new possibilities arise for people with sight problems, for example.
The idea is simply to start working
with all these capacities we possess.
Finally, Pain Station, developed by artists.
In their university graduation thesis
they come back to Pong, one of the first video games.
A game of ping-pong. You have your hands ready
to play table tennis on a tablet.
The problem is that for every ball we miss,
for each shot we can't return,
the second hand placed on the board will receive a punishment.
They get burned, they receive lashings.
This game is on display in the museum of Berlin
as a contemporary development of artists working with video games.
At the limits of what is ethical, the limits of gaming, the limits of art.
But this is the idea, to push the boundaries.
And it is important to bear in mind that all of these proposals
are bringing back the value of games.
Something which perhaps we had put aside,
which we thought was for children, but isn't for children.
Games are for grown-ups too.
Games can be serious.
Games laid the foundations for all cultures and societies.
Games make us socialize,
they make us connect with others.
And games, on the artistic side, can take certain liberties.
They can explore, they can experiment, they can be risky,
irreverent, provide new experiences, open doors.
That's what this is about.
To be attentive, not to sit tight in our comfort zones,
yearning for bygone ages and better times
when we understood everything we saw.
Not to be stuck like Woody Allen's character
in Midnight in Paris dreaming about travelling through time.
Realizing that all around us, change is starting to happen,
that it's up to us to wake up this internal curiosity,
to change our viewpoint, start seeing again.
That there are fundamental changes happening,
that video games are one of the possible new faces of this change.
And perhaps this is an easy way to come closer to this idea.
I invite you all to return to play.
(Applause)