Artists Re:Thinking Games

re-posted from neural.it:

Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana - 
Artists Re: Thinking Games


FACT/Liverpool University Press, 
87 pages
, 2010, 
English
, ISBN-13: 978-1846312472
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, the two founders of Furtherfield (a collaborative artist-led community and organization dealing with art, technology and social change since 1996) are joined by artist and curator Corrado Morgana in editing this nice compendium of texts about game art. In the Furtherfield tradition the book is centered on artistic practice and is engaged with re-thinking games and their set of expected rules and stereotypes. So a few unedited interviews and texts by a valuable roster of contributors (Mary Flanagan, Mathias Fuchs, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Heather Corcoran, Daphne Dragona, Emma Westecott and David Surman) share quite a few remarkable concepts and topics: from "slow gaming" defined by Corcoran to the "interpassivity" formulated by Fuchs and the freedom of movement in game space discussed by Schleiner. Morgana, in the introduction, tries to frame many of these practices within Situationism and its strategies, including the preeminent and famous détournement. And strategies are undoubtedly essential for game art, so Morgana also points to the hacker approach as the other reference for artists who recombine games technically and conceptually. Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Space Invaders: Art and the Computer Game Environment" at FACT Liverpool (which travelled to the Netherlands Media Art Institute), this book talks about artists who construct non-normative games, and collects a representative selection of the significant game art scene.