Amiga Gaming Retrospective

Jeremy Reimer on ArsTechnica:

"The Amiga was born a game machine, but it entered a world where the video game industry was well-established and changing rapidly. Long gone were the days where a lone coder would stay up all night in his basement for six weeks and bang out a hit for the Atari 2600. Even the younger and smaller computer game industry had moved far beyond Roberta Williams putting floppy disks into ziplock bags and answering phone calls from players in her kitchen. The success of the Commodore 64 (and on the other side of the pond, the Sinclair Spectrum) meant that more money was available for computer game development, and it was a good thing too, as the more powerful 16-bit machines were starting to seriously test the limits of a one-man development team. For the first time, specialized careers were starting to emerge in game development. The Amiga's rich, 4096-color palette demanded people who were skilled artistically to create the sprites and backgrounds. The four-channel sampled sound chip cried out for musicians to make it sing. The larger size and complexity of the games required that someone other than the programmers be asked to test the games before they were released."

[read on]

art conference papers by pablo helguera / lol!

Entangled. Technology and the Transformation of Performance

Chris Salter's Entangled, Technology and the Transformation of Performance, explores technology’s influence on artistic performance practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Entangled, Chris Salter shows that technologies, from the mechanical to the computational—from a "ballet of objects and lights" staged by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1917 to contemporary technologically enabled "responsive environments"—have been entangled with performance across a wide range of disciplines. Salter examines the rich and extensive history of performance experimentation in theater, music, dance, the visual and media arts, architecture, and other fields; explores the political, social, and economic context for the adoption of technological practices in art; and shows that these practices have a set of common histories despite their disciplinary borders.

sample chapters available

geert lovink interview

politics of internet culture / interview: geert lovink

Do read this !

conversation of Garnet Hertz with Jussi Parikka on Archaelogies of Media Art published on

CTheory.net/Resetting Theory/rt020 - 4/1/2010

www.ctheory.net

lessons in web art. thomas dreher

cyberneticzoo.com a history of cybernetic animals and early robots

Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson interview - jonCates (2007)

"Make your own exhibitions. Examine it, rip it apart and learn from it and do copy it. Don´t forget that stealing is everything." from the Museum Meltdown arken.map README by Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup (1996)

i am currently releasing an interview that i did w/Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson on the Art Game Studies platform which i introduced here:

http://bit.ly/apCkM8

Bernstrup and Torsson collaboratively created a series of Art Games in the form of Art Mods called Museum Meltdown from 1996 to 1999. these Art Mods are among the first of their kind, New Media Art interventions into the site of their own exhibition which utilize the possibilities presented by First Person Shooters and level editing. i interviewed Bernstrup and Torsson in 2007 to discuss these Media Art Histories for an essay of mine called Running and Gunning in the Gallery: Art Mods, Art Institutions and the Artists that Destroy Them, which will appear in From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art, edited by David Getsy. our discussion is both technical and conceptual, involving questions of Institutional Critique, site specificity and personal reflections of the often self-relfexive process of making museums meltdown...

jonCates
Chicago
2010

Art Game Studies resource

i am releasing a new + open collaborative/community-based resource on/for Art Game Studies here:

http://bit.ly/5GdzNL

this list is primarily drawn from classes that i teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where i have developed the New Media curriculum in the department of Film, Video & New Media. the list includes works that i + others have taught, played, researched, written on, developed, screened + exhibited as well those that have been developed by my students, colleagues, peers, fellow artists + myself. as such, this resource is subjectively crafted from my own experiences but hopefully objectively useful as a contribution to the field of Art Game Studies + Media Art Histories.

the resource will be used in my upcoming course Art Game Studies, a new Media Art Histories course being offered by the Art History, Theory & Criticism department + Film, Video & New Media. this course is both an overview of Art Games as well as introduction to the theories + discourses of Game Studies. the research for this resource also comes from + contributes to my ongoing work in this field, such as my essay, Running and Gunning in the Gallery: Art Mods, Art Institutions and the Artists that Destroy Them, which will appear in From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art, edited by David Getsy, to be published by Penn State Press.

i am offering this resource freely + openly to anyOne who wants to contribute to or comment on these histories. i will be revising the version that i use in my classes based on your contributions + comments. i hope that artists, academics, researchers + theorists of Art Mods, Art Games, Artware + New Media Art (1) in general find this resource engaging + useful as an open + collaborative/community-based resource that we can develop together, to help document these emerging theorypractices. (2)

jonCates
CHICAGO.US
2010.01.20

1. a note on taxonomies + my approach: in my thinking/feeling on the subject, Art Games are a subset of Artware (or Software Art) which itself is a subset of New Media Art. i will use the term New Media Art, as it is used in the field by authors such Michael Rush in his New Media in Late 20th-Century Art from 1999 or Mark Tribe + Reena Jana in their collaborative book simply entitled New Media Art. i am also using the phrase "New Media Art" as we use it in the Film, Video & New Media Department. When we use the phrase New Media we refer to time, screen + code based Digital Art that is connected to the histories + theorypractices of Media Art, i.e. Film Art + Video Art. we are primarily concerned with experimental Media Art + we see New Media Art in relation to all other forms of experimental Media Art such as Film, Video, Animation, Installation, Art Games, Machinima, Realtime Audio Video, Web Art, Software Art + Free & Open Source Software. i also take this perspective from two of my own professors, Lev Manovich + Sean Cubitt. For Cubitt + Manovich Video Art and New Media Art are (respectively) both hybrid categories of creative cultural work, meshworks of interconnections that are socially situated technological forms. i am similarly motivated to understand Art Games in this manner.

2. a note on the contents of the Art Game Studies resource: this resource is not intended to be comprehensive but rather as i described above, collaborative + open. not all works in this list can be included in any given syllabus, courseware, research project, published essay, book, etc. still, i believe it is very important to openly compile + discuss such lists in order to respect + encourage multiple parallel Media Art Histories to develop. in this initial version i have not included many commercial mainstream or mass market gaming products or services in terms of chronologies of hardware (i.e. particular consoles) or software (i.e. specific games). in the cases where i have included these they are primarily in place to document the development of a genre (such as the First Person Shooter) or a crossovers between markets (such as in the case of Electro Plankton by Toshio Iwaii).

COPY-IT-RIGHT 2010

Gothic Chic in the Future Favela - Bruce Sterling (2009)

Bruce Sterling delivered a keynote talk "Gothic Chic in the Future Favela" @ the conference You Me and Everyone We Know is a Curator in Amsterdam. Morgan Currie transcribed + has published a transcript on the Masters of Media collaborative blog of the new media master students of the University of Amsterdam. Currie's transcript of Sterling's talk follows below. - jonCates

"Bruce Sterling: Gothic Chic in the Future Favela

The next decade we’re entering into the teens. It’s a decade inhabited by digital natives, rather than digital revolutionaries, though this is something that has already happened. It’s already behind us, after 1989,when we switched from analogue to digital, from actual to virtual, from scientific to user-centric, local to global, multinationals to financial moguls.

Most of my life has been spent talking about this change. This next decade is in the hands of people who don’t care about that. They don’t know what a typewriter ribbons was. They don’t remember older ways of doing things abolished by these revolutions. Digital natives are growing up in a depression, when banks make people poor, and healthcare makes people sick. Digital natives never have to be told to digitize anything. The hardware is all around. Their immediate response is to grab for a mobile or a laptop.

The driving forces of the digital revolution continue and intensify, but there is no previous order left to rebel against. We don’t get a digital new world order. Digital culture is too fluid and inherently destabilizing, there are too many small pieces to join, and it’s always in beta form. The digital is a tool, but not a tool that interest groups can use to advance their own interests. We don’t get prosperity or governance from it. It’s not a force for good or ill but a phenomenon like electrification, the railroad, or other transformative infrastructures. Railroad natives were bored to death by people who explained railroads as if they were impressive. They’re just there once they’re there.

Now we need to comprehend the teens…today. My intuition is that the teens offer two categories of historical experience. What’s it like? Gothic high tech and favela chic. These two cultural sensibilities are not here yet.

Gothic high tech is the analogue past, It’s the industrial order with enormous holes and absences, with dead areas formerly thriving but that have been undercut or disintermediated, or digitally layered over or off-shored or abandoned. They no longer pay or socially function. They are ruins. In the graphics world they’re obvious: analogue graphics, letter set, hand-letter typed fonts, scissors, glue, type setting machines, books, magazines, print media, and the early digital media of 80s and 90s, stuck on abandoned websites and dead social networks. No one is in charge; it’s visibly decaying. Megatons of it, irrelevant, incapable of restoration, the walking dead…the House of Usher.

This will worry us. Rot was caused by the fact that you are super high tech. These are the consequence of the transition. The transition has torn money out of the system faster than wealth was generated. You are the curator of conditions of gentile poverty. The curator repurposes it; the heritage industrialist, the cultural industrialist, the knowledge worker of a dysfunctional heritage have awesome access, but are broke. The European cultural experience becomes the global experience. Amsterdam’s industrial shipping infrastructure has become a tourist attraction. Repurposed city centers are now common in Europe; they are shrink-wrapped ruins of Chinese restaurants, Braziliian night clubs, the spear heads of globalization. High-tech gothic.

It’s not conservative or backwards looking to say the basic means of production are cut and paste. This enables one to skip the boring parts that require original thought from scratch. No blank page is already blank.

Favela chic takes the logic of software and networks and applies them to institutions no matter what they are. It’s like taking a mac laptop and using it to hammer in nails. It represents the promise of change, instead of making do with overused stuff. It makes sense to young people and idealists. It’s consistent and easy to grasp. The problem is that over time, it tends to be squalid. It is user centric rather than planned. It’s made of small pieces joined: beta, open source rather than refined by competition. It pastes over institutional failngs with utopian rhetoric. Time reveals its slipshod cheesiness and cheapness, its poor engineering. Electronic democracy is about blogs, spam, flame wars, rather than the responsible participation in society. Sharing music means destroying the music industry. Digital artisanship means precarious employment. Dot com starts ups means existing monopolies on the ground and occupational forces that can’t establish functional governments. E-banking means financial panics. It’s endearing but flawed. It can’t take yes for an answer, which would imply building something solid instead of the next favela. It can’t acknowledge downsides. The universal forces of time and entropy apply to their labor. Revolutionaries are allergic to continuity. Digital culture will need critical reassessment in about five or seven years from now.

For people in museums this is more problematic. Because it’s more about irruption. We should scan all of our museum holdings and put them online, but now no one comes through our doors. How can we pay to maintain our website? The favela chic response is to just change the subject.

Mackenzie said the mobile internet is gonna be twice as big as the laptop revolution. The logical step isn’t to create a workable public order but a decent civilization. The logic is to transform everything into equivalents of internet architecture. Citizens become users, laws become code, cities become urbanwear applications.

Will we become internet civilization? No, the internet is unstable. Guidebooks become old fashioned immediately. The internet has gothic high tech aspects that can’t be disguised. Whereas the museum’s purpose is to hold on in perpetuity. There is no storage method for digital data that can predictably last for fifty years. Favela chics are jargon imperialists. They say if you’re not on search engines you don’t exist.

What is the response? The Unesco Cultural Heritage, academic conferences, live events. This conference is about picking over the ruins of favela chic and pulling it into gothic high tech. The digital is going to vanish like the dot coms, unless efforts are made to snatch it back. But that’s the problem. Nothing is left to conserve. Advanced but rapidly decaying hardware is everywhere. Maybe we’ll have an internet of things?

It’s critical to understand this will pass, this period has clear issues and a victory condition. There’s a promising situation called chic favela gothic. We’ll grow into an oxymoron. Realizing contradictions open things back up. Favelas are the plant nurseries, the squats, the reunited spaces, repurposed structures. High-end, low-end, for everybody. Chic favela gothic looks like a violent contradiction of terms, but it will make sense.

In 2020 children of digital natives will be interested in their analogue grandparents, in our parents. Those living from ‘45 to ‘89 will be romantic to young people denied that way of life. The digital revolution will have outlived its luster. It won’t be shiny or new but fashionable to count cost and valorize painstaking, beautiful analogue things that belonged to long dead atomic ladies and gentlemen. They’ll prize analogue museum pieces for weird, wrong reasons. What does a chic favela gothic institution look like? How does it strategize? It wouldn’t want a gothic ruin, but an unprecedented, elegant combination. Everybody lives in museums, in resolving contradictions. In new forms of the old continuity.

In the digital dark ages we may lose tons of stuff. I’m worried about the death of analogue published documents, magazines, and newspapers. We may lobotomize ourselves. We may become haunted by totalitarian states that ceaselessly reinterpret the past. Actual people’s experience that are set in record then incessantly reworked. The internet lends itself to that. Things we see stored there are not really restored. We don’t have storage methods. We can have a black out that lasts years. The internet is vulnerable to all kinds of passing upsets.

There may be a tipping point where it’s easier for a social network to start a religion or a museum, rather than the other way around. We may start making printouts of our digital stuff. But I say in my book Shaping Things that design objects exist as data and only occasionally as printouts. Right now we’re doing a crap job. No social network is also doing a cool store. Deviant art could lead the art world; deviant art has tons of art and could build a Deviant Art museum. Los Angeles low-brow artists have their own curators, collectors, and distribution system. But I worry about rhetoric that valorizes this stuff. Time will not be kind."