Impedance: Games + Resistance (Curatorial Essay)

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IMPEDANCE: GAMES + RESISTANCE || Feb 8 - 23 2014, InterAccess Media Arts Centre || Vector Game + Art Convergence Festival 2014 Showing works by Andy Campbell & Mez Breeze, Soha El-Sabaawi, Martin Le Chevallier, Molleindustria w/ Jim Munroe, Alex Myers, Lucas Pope, Gordan Savicic, Kent Sheely, RuneStorm, & Oscar Raby Co-curated by Skot Deeming, Diana Poulsen, and Martin Zeilinger Supported by Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and InterAccess

Impedance: Games + Resistance, 2014, partial exhibition view. Impedance: Games + Resistance features games and game-based artworks by artists who use the medium and technology of videogames to comment, reflect, and provoke. Addressing the politics of surveillance, warfare, mass media and propaganda, privacy, and mass-mediated violence, the works in this exhibition challenge you to engage with difficult issues by interacting with experimental games, interactive installations, text adventures, art games, a VR documentary, and game mods. The issues and questions raised by the works in this exhibition are ubiquitous in the contemporary world. Among others, they concern social justice, inefficient and overbearing control apparatuses, the saturation of public spaces with locked and proprietary networks, torture, and the trauma of terrorism and warfare. But despite the seriousness of these issues, it is important to note that these artworks develop playful approaches to the negotiation of difficult subjects – approaches that expand conventional ideas of videogames, that require you to reflect on sinister topics through playful experimentation, and

 

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that subvert videogaming conventions in order to elevate the form beyond simple entertainment. It is equally important to note that the ‘challenge’ that these works pose to the viewer should be taken literally: don’t hesitate to pick up a controller or mouse and explore what this exhibition has to offer in digital narratives, conceptual art, and critical commentary. Assent (2013), by Australia-based artist Oscar Raby, makes use of state-of-the-art virtual reality technology and an Oculus Rift device to let you retrace the traumatic story of the artist’s father, who, as a young soldier, bore witness to the execution of prisoners by the Chilean army. Bridging the divide between interactive storytelling, videogames, and documentary, Assent is part memoir, part portrait, a careful approximation of a traumatizing story that impresses both visually and with its narrative force.

Alex Myers, Winning, installation view. Lucas Pope’s The Republia Times (2012) puts you in the shoes of an editor-in-chief, running a newspaper in a dictatorship. The game emulates simple browser-based game simulations, and tasks you with choosing headlines for the newspaper’s frontpage. Initially, this may seem straightforward, but soon you discover that there are important choices to make – should you support the regime and sedate the newspaper-reading masses, or work against it, jeopardizing the lives of your family in aid of a revolutionary cell that may be no less dangerous than the

 

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current government? In a homage to subversive editors who have for centuries endangered their own lives for a greater good, Pope tells a powerful and thought-provoking story with simple elegance, and raises uncomfortable questions about conformity, the dangers of political resistance, and the possibility of revolutionary change. Toronto-based game-maker Soha El-Sabaawi’s Penalties (2013) is a shockingly graphic nonlinear text adventure about torture and political resistance that created with the open access digital story-telling tool Twine. With great immediacy, Penalties forces the reader into the role of a torture victim who is lost in a maze of physical pain and lost memories, moving towards an unwanted but inevitable end.

Impedance, partial exhibition view. Vigilance 1.0 (2001) by the French media artist Martin Le Chevallier is a beautifully realized point-and-click game that ponders the impossibility of fairly controlling a population through seamless surveillance. Faced with a large grid of CCTV monitor displays, the player is invited to report deviant behaviour all over the parks, schools, shopping malls, and offices of an imaginary city that could be anywhere in the world. What first appears as a game of close attention and skill soon reveals itself as an exercise in arbitrariness and random accusations. Like real-world surveillance, this is a game that has no end and that cannot be won. The player, stuck in a never-ending feedback loop of surveillance footage, is just as lost as the rightly (or wrongly!) accused victims of Le Chevallier’s panopticon. As the deviant behaviour

 

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becomes rampant, the player may begin to wonder whether total control is really necessary to prevent crime, or whether it may actually trigger transgressive behaviour.

RuneStorm, Viscera Cleanup Detail, partial installation view.

Unmanned (2012), by Molleindustria and Toronto-based Jim Munroe, is a disconcerting narrative of contemporary drone warfare in the style of classic webbased flash games. A series of minimalistic scenarios and simple tasks are used to convey the frustrations of a remote drone operator working in a nameless U.S. desert state. Simple graphics and the use of a split screen create a highly cinematic effect that tells of a sad story of the tedium, alienation, and senselessness of 21st century virtual warfare, characterized not by direct enemy engagement but rather by clumsy workplace flirtation, violent videogames with the anti-hero’s son, tense phone conversations with his estranged wife, and sleepless nights of bad conscience.

Austrian artist Gordan Savicic’s Constraint City (2007) consists of a wearable, motorized harness attached to a hacked Nintendo DS handheld gaming console. The console permanently scans for locked Wi-Fi networks, and uses the received wireless signals to power servo motors mounted on the harness, which can tighten and release three straps around the wearer’s chest. Responding to the density of Wi-Fi signals, the harness thus makes the data-saturation of our lifeworlds (and the constraints of accessing that data) felt as physical pain. In cities including Vienna, Berlin, Nottingham, and Berlin, Savicic has worn the harness on guided walks during which he documented the density of constrained Wi-Fi networks and published maps representing how these networks saturate obtrude public spaces. American artist Alex Myer’s Winning (2013) examines the dynamic of popular First-Person Shooter videogames, and strips away the pretenses of skill, fun, and narrative to reveal the violent essence underlying many such games. Instead of roaming large virtual landscapes, the two players in Myer’s “Counter-Strike: Source” mod are locked in an intimate, confined space, in a never-ending face-off of carnage from which no winners can emerge. The artist has furthermore mapped his smiling face onto the avatars’ uniforms, as if to ask the viewer, innocently, if winning could really mean to shoot somebody in the face. In the American artist Kent Sheely’s YouTube Shooter (2013), the familiar heads-up display of violent FPS (first person shooter) games – a tightly gripped assault rifle and crosshairs – is placed over a series of point-of-view YouTube videos. The immediate and highly disturbing

 

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effect is that the innocent walking tour videos begin to look like scenes on the brink of disaster. With the inserted gun and crosshairs, the vidoes of a shopping mall, Times Square, or Disneyland now have the look of imminent rampages, and remind us that violence is all too often committed in altogether wrong places. Whereas videogames generally invite participation, YouTube Shooter reverses these conventions and makes interaction impossible; the viewer can pick among a series of videos, but is then limited to the role of horrified onlooker, who can neither perpetrate nor prevent the senseless violence that hovers along the edge of the screen.

Kent Sheeley, YouTube Shooter, installation view. Viscera Cleanup Detail (in production) is an ingenious FPS-style janitor simulation by South African game design collective RuneStorm. Viscera picks up where other videogames stop: after the gory battle has ended, it is your job to mop up the blood and (literally) pick up the pieces. Replacing the obligatory gun with a mop, this game imitates the functionality of conventional games while also inverting the logic such games. The repetitiveness and futility of the player’s janitorial tasks remind us just how gratuitous in-game violence can be, and replaces the spectacle of videogame-simulated fighting with the monotony and dreariness of cleaning up the resulting mess. Initially it may be fun to try and keep a bloody mop clean and to discard severed body parts in furnaces, but soon the player realizes that cleaning up chaos left behind by the world’s video game battles is a truly Sisyphean task. #Prisom (2013) by Andy Campbell & Mez Breeze, is an immersive 3D game that places the player in a world of constant surveillance. Throughout the game, players are coerced to give up

 

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individual privacy for new experimental modes of augmented communication. Embodying a strong critique of PRISM and similar surveillance programs, #PRISOM is designed to make viewers ponder the increasing global adoption of seamless surveillance technology as well as the spreading of sousveillance propaganda that asks individuals to collaborate in their own comprehensive monitoring. What unites the artists whom we have chosen to include in Impedance is that they all take strong positions on difficult subjects, while using a medium that is often perceived to be reserved merely for entertainment and play. The works in this exhibition resist this sentiment, and use the culture and technology of videogames for social critique. They thematize and reveal things from which we may ordinarily try to escape by playing innocuous games. The works shown here will not allow that; instead of using the immersiveness of gameplay to make us forget, they use it to force us to remember and reflect. Interaction often yields a sense of connection and empathy – thanks to this, videogames may be the perfect tool for social resistance, precisely because they can attune us to the important political stakes embodied in seemingly innocuous gameplay. The works collected in Impedance are every but innocuous. They certainly have a sense of humour, but they always ask us to think and observe. They invite us to contemplate the outcome of our actions, remind us of the CCTV cameras that we stopped noticing, ask us what winning is, force us to clean up our bloody mess, translate invisible Wi-Fi signals into physical pain, and let us experience the pressure of being a newspaper editor in a repressive regime. In doing all these things, the works collected in Impedance demonstrate very powerfully not only artfulness of videogames, but also the political valence of creating, modding, and playing them.

 

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