archive: Max Payne Cheats Only Gallery
Posted on Monday, December 20 @ 14:36:17 CET by julian |
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The Spacex gallery in Exeter, UK has an exhibition with work by Jodi that no-one knows seems to know much about. If anyone in the Exeter region has seen the show and wants to gift us a review of the Max Payne Cheats Only Gallery, we'd be delighted to hear from you.
Instead of the main character being controlled by a gamer, a series of loops capture him wandering aimlessly, without regard for his mission, searching for the spaces where the logic of the game breaks down. (rhizome).
Max Payne Cheats-Only Gallery, which enables Max Payne (the main character from a popular video game known for its shoot-em-up violence), to explore a more unpredictable side of his personality.
In this ten-channel video installation, Payne wanders the film noir-style sets of the video game without regard for his mission, searching for the spaces where the logic of the game breaks down.
‘JODI’s dedicated pursuit of the computer as an artistic medium puts them in the company of the great modernists, but their work is visceral and of the moment,’ says FACT Curator, Michael Connor.
And from here...
Abstract
In September 2004 the artists Jodi showed the installation Max Payne Cheats Only Gallery at the FACT gallery in Liverpool, United Kingdom. On the one hand the very presence of an artwork made from the raw material of a game in a gallery space was intriguing. On the other, the form that the installation took -- with screens showing short looped video of the game in motion with an open cheats console exposing flaws in clipping and areas of broken game space -- appeared to miss the point of why and how games might be understood as an aesthetic experience. Peering through small holes in the gallery wall the viewer was treated to a record of someone else’s manipulation of the game’s interface.
The nature and level of that intervention was, in some senses, self-consciously radical. What it drew attention to, whether intentionally or not, was the agency allowed in games for variant, plural and resistant playings. That sense of agency, however, clearly only belonged to the artists who had appropriated the game in order to display their own artistic practice. Shorn of a game controller of any sort the viewer was invited to watch, but was not allowed to play. The game had been played, but what I will term the “future-orientation†that is essential to the experience of games in play was absent. Jodi had turned an experience that is always about the future and plural possibility that might be generated through play into a dead artefact.
In this space between the way games have begun to enter the gallery as (visual) art, and the ways in which the practice of play demands a different aesthetic understanding, I locate a misapprehension of games as something other than played experiences where the aesthetic is generated in a maelstrom of anticipation, speculation and action. Digital games prioritise the participation of the player as he or she plays, and that player always apprehends the game as a matrix of future possibility. The focus, always, is not on what is before us or the ‘what happens next’ of traditionally unfolding narrative, but on the ‘what happens next if’ that places the player at the centre of experience as its principle creator, necessarily engaged in an imaginative act.
In this paper I examine the implications for any aesthetic understanding of games of this concentration on the image produced through play, rather than on the process of play itself. I argue that undue focus on the image thrown upon the screen mislocates the aesthetic of games in what is seen (which may be technologically interesting and even aesthetically pleasing) rather than what might be about to be seen. Drawing on Saint Augustine’s understanding of the memory of the future outlined in the Confessions, I argue that the screen image of a game is not the focus of play, but is an indicator of the success or failure of play in the past. The essence of videogame play is not located in this present moment of visual reporting but in a future memory, and one reason that contemporary videogames resist categorisation as public display or visual art is that this ephemeral present of experience cannot be captured in an image, but can only be found in the imagination of the player.
We are used to the commercial orientation of games towards a future not yet seen, with their extended production schedules and marketing campaigns generating an often extraordinary amount of attention on a speculative future that is rarely realised, and the promise of exponentially improved hardware always offering a tomorrow of more polygons and faster rendering towards the chimera of apparent photo-realism rendering on the fly. Current theoretical models of game aesthetics, despite the thinking about games and temporality by critics such as Markku Eskelinen and Jesper Juul, has not yet fully understood the key temporal specificity of games that I seek to explore.
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