Essays (sorted by Exhibition Year)
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Title: Art and Technology: Bridging the Gap in the Computer Age
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1982: Art Show ’82
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Much as the majority of the art public has tried to ignore the art and technology phenomenon, it is no longer either possible or fashionable to do so. The large retrospective of video artist Nam June Paik at the Whitney Museum in New York in the Spring of 1982 was just one of numerous recent examples of the acceptance of the new technology in a traditional art environment. A lack of familiarity with the actual process by which the works are made, has caused the word “computer” in connection with art to be met with particular distrust out of the ill-founded fear that this mystifyingly complex machine might soon replace the artist in the creation of art. Yet in spite of the electronic implementation, computer-aided art is still in many ways as much a handcrafted product as conventional art forms but simply processed in a different manner. Furthermore, because most artists are as of yet unacquainted with the mechanics and potential of computers, their accomplishments on computer systems, which may assume various forms including color xerography, photo enlargements, plotter drawings or video, to name only a few, are often the product of intense collaboration in a laboratory-like environment between the artist and someone technically proficient in the computer field. This practice is in antithesis to the myth of the sculptor or painter struggling preferably in solitude in a studio to realize his artistic concepts in pencil, paint, metal, stone, or other common materials.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computers and the Visual Arts: A Retrospective View
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1982: Art Show ’82
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“In the computer, man has created not just an inanimate tool but an intellectual and active creative partner that, when fully exploited, could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new aesthetic experiences.”
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Toward Autonomous Reality Communities: A Future For Computer Graphics
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1982: Art Show ’82
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
It may live in a vacuum tube (for a few more years at least), but to hear the Mercantile Masters talk you’d think computer graphics lives in a political vacuum as well. For electronics, however, the last quarter-century has been equivalent to pulling back the string on a bow – the storing of enormous technological potential. Now the string is about to be released in the universal application of that technology: the next 25 years will be the flight of the arrow, propelling us into the Electronic Age and precipitating an historically unprecedented revolution in communications. And in the shadow of the Communications Revolution we begin to understand the awesome cultural and political implications of that protean force we refer to so feebly today as computer graphics.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: A Medium Matures: The Myth of Computer Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1983: Art Show
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We embark upon SIGGRAPH’s second decade with a growing conviction that the leading edge of culture us no longer defined by the fine arts community — by what’s being shown in galleries, purchased by museums, published in art magazines or talked about in SoHo lofts. The excitement and power and significance today seems to lie in electronic technology, especially the computer, which we are convinced will reveal the way to unlimited new aesthetic horizons and produce wholly new art forms. And yet the idea of computer art — of an art unique to the computer — remains after twenty years an unrealized myth, its horizons barely in view, its forms still to be manifest. For, ironically, most of what is understood as computer art today represents the computer in the service of those very same visual art traditions which the rhetoric of new technology holds to be obsolete.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Artists/Technologists: The Computer As An Imaging Tool
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1983: Art Show
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Despite the fact that the computer is a relatively recent invention, the debate over whether or not computer-generated art works can truly be called “art” has roots in a much older argument about technology. The usual objection to “computer art” is based on the fear that somehow the computer — like Hal in the film 2001 — will take control, eliminating the role of the artist. A less paranoid but equally misplaced response construes the absence of handwork to represent easy art, requiring less skill than more traditional forms. Similar objections were raised when photography was discovered. In 1859, Charles Baudelaire considered photography as nothing less than a major threat to the entire fine art tradition.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Mapping A Sensibility: Computer lmaging
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1983: Art Show
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“The work of art,” as the surrealist André Breton said, “is valuable only so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future.” These “reflexes of the future” have introduced, since the early 1900s, increasingly powerful visual technologies. To rephrase André Breton — in certain critical epochs, art anticipates effects that are only fully realized by newly emerging technology and new art forms.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Aesthetics: New Art Experience, or The Seduction of the Masses
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1986: A Retrospective
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In the early twentieth century, Modern artists, notably Suprematists, Cuba-Futurists and Constructivists, rejected scientific perspective and descriptive art [1]. Although this dismissal of the world of appearances in art was never accepted by the general public, Modernism evolved from that rejection.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Graphics as Artistic Expression
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1986: A Retrospective
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Computer graphics has been in existence for more than twenty years. From the beginning, people experimented on ways to use the new medium – in addition to scientific, technical and commercial application – for artistic goals. Around 1965, Germans Frieder Nake and Georg Nees and the American, A. Michael Noll, strove for that goal; they were followed by individuals such as Kenneth Knowlton, the team of Charles Csuri and James Shaffer in America, and the Japanese Computer-Technique Group. All of them were represented in the large exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” in 1968 in London.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: TV NEEDS MTV LIKE MTV NEEDS COMPUTERS
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1986: A Retrospective
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
J. S. Bach’s last unfinished work, THE ART OF THE FUGUE, is a magnificent network of simple theme and variations that are interwoven, transposed, inverted, and retrogressed. Some believe that Bach’s counterpoint, which consists of a complementarity of voice-parts, exhibits an affinity with algorithmic computer-program instructions and procedures. I agree, and I believe that a video counterpoint offers a special complementarity between its own musical and its visual voice-parts.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Visions of Mind
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1986: A Retrospective
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Computer art is unfolding on the basis of scientific and engineering achievements of pioneering personalities, whose vision suggested that it should be possible to wrest something other than calculation speed and numeric precision from those crude and clumsy computers; something that could be turned into meaningful images. They set out to build dedicated machines to interpret an intuitive stroke with a pen or a snapshot taken through the lens of a camera. They designed displays that show more colors and change images faster than the human eye can distinguish. They devised software to generate pictures that appear just like photographs of reality. All of this has been accomplished within the short timespan of two or three decades. The history of computer graphics reads like a tremendous technical success story.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Why it Isn't Art Yet
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1986: A Retrospective
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
For twenty plus years, I have participated in “computer art” as a developer/ experimenter /inventor of languages/interfaces/techniques, as a collaborator/teacher/writer, and as a “computer artist.” As a result of all this, I finally feel like an established practitioner in an enterprise that doesn’t (at least not yet) exist.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Feedback to Immersion
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Cybernetics speculates about the coupling of machine and person. Since Norbert Wiener’s seminal Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948), the trajectory of technology development has been one of an increasing possibility of achieving that interface. In the past decade, the possibility of defining a relationship not simply between but within technology has become plausible. Yet the commercialization of cybernetics comes neither as a technical panacea nor without deep ethical concerns. As machines mutate into biology, the philosophical and political values of technology are challenged to confront more than conceptualized situations but rather to theorize the materiality of programmed or enhanced being. At the same time, the development of”realities” that are characterized as immersive or virtual are beginning to surround experience. The penetration of technology within the body and the socialization of simulated realities is more than a signifier of technological progress-it marks a transformation of knowledge, of biology, and of the cultural order in which knowledge is linked with ideology, biology with identity in terms of a technological imperative not necessarily connected with necessity. The issues raised by this potential for the narrowing of the boundary between technology and experience are vast. In many ways the development of several parallel technologies has reached a crucial point.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Interaction and Play
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“I prefer the form of seduction for it stems from a mysterious duality/confrontational relationship, an enticing, intense, and covert attraction between the living and the non-living. It is not a form of response, but a challenge, a duel, imbued with an intriguing sense of distance and constant antagonism on which the rules of theme are also based.” – Jean Baudrillard
Reflecting upon the frantic commotion surrounding the new media, one can easily gain the impression of a world turned upside down. Naturally, there are technologies available today that in the course of evolution have attained a certain degree of complexity and perfection offering mindboggling possibilities not only for the entertainment industry but for the artist as well. However, when we consider the perilously desolate state of computer art, it is difficult to understand why in our so-called post-modern era-inured as we are to the euphoria of technological advances-so much rhetorical and institutional endeavor is being invested in persuading artists to take up technologies that neither they nor their recipients really comprehend. Traditional modernists might, of course, take a more balanced view and contend that a different artistic concept is needed. They may also view that the arts simply have to yield to state-ofthe-art technology and its inherent forms of perception in order to remain contemporary, or offer viable alternatives to the prevailing forms of application. But occasionally it is difficult to avoid the impression that instead of the artist creating the art, it is the art and the artists that now have to be manufactured for a technology, which has not arrived but has made deep inroads into our daily existence. If we exclude musicians and composers, artists have been very reticent in availing themselves of the computer, in the area of computer graphics, it was the technicians, programmers, and scientists who first submitted computer images as art. Quite the contrary was true in photography, cinema, or video, where artists soon seized upon this technology and began developing it in the initial phases without the generous support from the state and patrons of the arts.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: It is Interactive—but is it Art?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“The possibilities of egalitarian, more democratic, constructive forms offering new kinds of interaction, knowledge, and understanding may well be enhanced by the novel capabilities of the new technologies. They will, more than ever before, have to be struggled for.” – Andy Darley
The Myth of Interactivity
“Well, my next thing is going to be something interactive … ” For some years now, this has been a stock answer in interviews with artists, and not only those who already work with electronic and digital technologies. Indeed, “interactive art” seems well on its way to becoming the art form of the 1990s. Yet one shouldn’t let its present visibility delude oneself. Although contemporary interactive art may seem “groundbreaking,” the ground had already been grubbed by such movements as Fluxus and E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) in the 1960s, as well as by a great variety of “postmodern” strategies, emphasizing recycling, deliberate confusion between “the original” and “the copy,” and aiming at repositioning, sometimes to the point of reconstituting, the traditional art audience.
Title: Old Ideas in New Boxes
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
When we look at ‘cutting edge’ technologies, it is the radical newness that we are encouraged to see. This radical newness helps us forget that technologies arise out of past culture. The generation raised on Buck Rogers grew up to make the space race, and the generation raised on Star Trek are making the Holodeck. In order to understand the historical significance of 3D imaging, we must place it as part of the historical development of the automation of perspective. Lev Manovich has followed this line of study in his essay, as do Paul Virilio and Harun Farocki elsewhere. According to this line of reasoning, we must look at computer graphics, interactivity, and virtual reality as moments in the larger cultural progression of the automation of visual systems.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Soft Future
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Will you see a technological utopia, a city of gleaming metal spires orbiting spacecraft, a world spared from nuclear annihilation and united by a common belief in the benefits of rational progress? Nowadays, probably not. At most your vision is likely to be an end to recession, economic stability for at least a while, a new order of gray-suited bureaucracy. Perhaps you see nothing at all, just a hazy mist of half-forgotten ideals. But when I close my own eyes there is still something there lurking in the background, like a memory chopped up into disparate fragments. It coagulates, forming an surface-it is the surface of a computer screen.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Artistic Origins of Virtual Reality
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The history of virtual reality is often obscured. It is easy to get the impression that the Big Bang occurred at NASA in 1984 and that virtual reality is a triumph of the technical establishment alone. What has been overlooked is the important contributions that artists have made to the development of the field.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Mapping of Space
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
1991 saw two events, of different importance and seemingly unrelated. One was the longawaited publication in English of what can probably be called the single most influential essay of modern art history—Erwin Panofsky’s Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form.’¹ The interest generated around the re-emergence of this legendary essay, written in 1924-1925, demonstrates that the problem of perspectival representation is still felt to be relevant to contemporary culture. The second event was the Gulf War, the outcome of which was largely predetermined by Western superiority in the techniques of perspectival representation.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Virtu-Real Space:
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
A significant shift is occurring in the makeup, physical nature, and composition of space as it is experienced in contemporary culture. This shift, which is a direct result of the ubiquitous presence of information technologies in the cultural landscape, signals that physical components alone no longer comprise the infrastructure of the contemporary social environment. The ads, which show American Express cards in locations where they function as architectural elements (i.e., a bridge support, a path on a golf course, a canopy over a restaurant dining area, and others), indicate that it is now a combination of physical components and virtual systems that support and sustain the “real” world. Virtual credit space, symbolized in the advertisements by the credit card, functions not only as structural support for the physical world, but also as solid footing and shelter for the people who live in that world. And since virtual credit space is operationalized by information technologies, it becomes clear in these commercials that the extent to which physical space has been infiltrated by information technologies is both extreme (the cards are pervasive) and covert (no one in the ads notices the cards). Furthermore, because the cards blend into their surroundings unnoticed, these corporate images also indicate that information technologies are our natural setting. It becomes clear, then, that the use of the credit card icon in these commercials represents the extent to which information technologies have become naturalized as an intrinsic part of contemporary social life.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Sculpture: New Horizons
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
An essay that focuses on opportunities for a new approach to computer-generated sculpture through the use of the interactive, user participatory attributes associated with virtual reality technology. The text briefly reviews the progress of sculpture from a static, physical art form through the use of computers as sculpture visualization tools, towards true ‘virtual sculpture’ as a metaphysical, three-dimensional experience. The author discusses two of his own recent prototype virtual reality pieces to demonstrate his projection of possible future trends in the viewers’ immersion in sculpture as an activity and an art form, not merely as an observer of a set of objects.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: There are No Philosophic Problems Raised by Virtual Reality
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
There is widespread agreement that virtual reality presents serious new challenges to perceived ways of thinking about such fundamental concepts as reality, simulation, representation, perception, and sensation. It has been seen as a practice that might have deep consequences for conventional ways of construing the mind-body problem, including the minimal requirements for a body, requirements for the coherent reception of sensation, and the relation between reason and intuition. Most fundamental of all, it has been said to entail a new kind of space, differing from Cartesian and other spaces and requiring new definitions of space and form. This paper argues, on the contrary, that virtual reality does not raise any new philosophic problems.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Transformed And Transforming Image In The Shift From Print To Digital Culture
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1995: Digital Gallery
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper investigates issues germane to “reading” images in a digital medium by considering both visual language as it is constrained by hardware and software, and visual culture as it is changed by a medium that pushes us towards a thought idiom that embodies multiplicity and simultaneity.
Images in and of a culture reflect our cultural understandings of ourselves. Images in any culture are constantly changing, and as they change, they transform the culture. Likewise, as a culture undergoes change, the images of the culture are transformed. In this way, image and how we read images are both the trace element of and a visual wake following the shifts in our collective understandings. Image operates both as an integral part of an organic, changing energy system that generates momentum towards a culture shift and as a footprint that references visual metaphors in describing a cultural shift that is taking—or has taken—place.
To understand the transformed and transforming nature of images in culture, we must first understand the components of the image, particularly the compositional or visual language and the cultural context of the image. What sits between the visual language and the cultural context of the image is the medium in which the image appears. It is not that the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan has suggested; rather the medium creates both a cultural context and a medium-particular visual language, contributing significantly to the meaning we “read” from an image.
Medium in a larger sense designates the boundaries of our collective understandings – our epistemology – in the ways in which it is integral to both how we “read” the cultural context and visual language of the text and how that constructed “reading” defines our thought idiom. Just as the medium in a fine arts context creates a medium-specific visual grammar and a cultural context from which the artist is able to shape an image from his or her own inner vision or knowing, so too does medium in the larger sense define what kinds of “pictures” we collectively create to understand or know the world. In this way, the digital medium is much more than a new tool or toy used by visual artists. Rather, this paper argues that our tentative steps towards using this new medium represent a shift as significant as the move from oral culture to print culture — that we are in the midst of a shift from print culture to digital culture.
Through a comparison of images based on Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Mona Lisa, this paper lays a foundation for similar comparisons of hypertexts which use visual images. By looking at the characteristics of digital visual language and cultural context and noting the similarities and differences between them and the more familiar print culture visual language and cultural contexts, this paper considers issues germane to reading images in the digital medium.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Getting Women Wired: New Connections in Art and Technology*
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Does computer science in its theory and practice embody discrimination nation against women, and if so, how does embedded discrimination work itself out in applications to the arts? This essay, guided by this introductory question, will connect concerns of discrimination against women in the field of computer science with issues that arise in the development of theory and application in the emerging electronic computer based arts. Bias against women in computing, I will suggest, occurs in the epistemology or knowledge construction of modern science, works itself out in knowledge construction of modern science, works itself out in knowledge distribution and socialization processes, alienates women, ethnic groups, and class groupings, limits access, and skews applications in the arts.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Internet Hybrids and the New Aesthetic of Worldwide Interactive Events
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This essay discusses interactive art events realized on the Internet in conjunction with other electronic media, such as television, radio, telephones, and telerobotics. The essay includes references to material that can be immediately accessed on the Internet. The reader is invited to read by the glow of the CRT, letting digital strokes carry him or her from one country to another.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Bridge
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In the dream, I am driving over the Charleston Bay Bridge in South Carolina. As I reach the crest of the bridge, my car veers, lifts, and suddenly, without the car, I am flying high over the bridge and the bay. It is snowing, and I am very cold, high in the dark blue night above an even darker blue sea. I realize I am numb. I am dead, I think. It is not an unhappy thought. Thinking I am dead brings a wonderfully exhilarating and freeing sensation. I am at peace.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Hypermedia, Eternal Life, and the Impermanence Agent
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1999: technOasis
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We look to media as memory, and a place to memorialize, when we have lost.
Hypermedia pioneers envisioned the ultimate media within the ultimate archive, with each element in continual (versioned) flux and constant new additions – dynamism without loss.
Instead we have the Web, where “Not Found” is a daily message. Projects such as the Internet Archive and Afterlife dream of fixing this uncomfortable impermanence. Marketers, instead, promise agents that will make the Web comfortable through filtering (hiding the impermanence and overwhelming profusion that its dynamism engenders).
The Impermanence Agent operates differently. It begins by telling my stories – my grandmother’s stories – and as users browse, the images and texts they pull from the Web are interwoven with her stories. In time, the original stories are lost. New stories, collaboratively created, have taken their place.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: INTERACTIVITY AND RITUAL: Body Dialogues with Artificial Systems
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1999: technOasis
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Digital technologies provide dialogues with artificial systems, allowing acquisition and communication of biological signals with electronic databases. As interfaces and computers capture, manage, and transform signals, they generate new forms of life. In my latest interactive installations, bodies repeat behaviours, simulating a sort of ritual or ceremony with responses in real time. Stored data managed by neural networks offer states of unpredictability, and the adaptive capacity system determines the emergence of a “living environment” in self-regeneration. The variables place us within elliptical zones and build up present times in which the actions of the amalgamated body with complex systems enable exchanges in cyberspace. In a psychic and physical exploration of the environment, mixing natural/artificial, analogic/digital, real/virtual, we experience consciousness propagations and think, dream, and understand our human condition enhanced by technologies.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Virtual Imaginations Require Real Bodies
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1999: technOasis
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Virtual reality (VR) works of art conjure up ideas such as virtual sex, virtual frontiers, and to some, disembodiment. Those who uphold the notion of disembodiment claim that works of art that embrace VR technology necessarily encourage a state that affirms the Cartesian duality in which people can leave Earth, nature, and body behind. I counter this notion because I do not believe that the mind can be separated from the body; rather, the two are inexplicably intertwined.
Although this “Gibsonesque” scenario is rich with metaphors and metaphysical implications, I suggest that any virtual space is an embodied experience because the imagination of the artist and the viewer refer back to the body, to nature, and to the Earth. From the physical reality of Earth and our bodies, we may understand and perceive many more realities, perhaps facilitated by virtual space art installations. In fact, I maintain that even the virtual is real. It is a perception that is a real experience, which makes reference to our encounters with the physical world and our flesh.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Metaphoric Networks in "Lexia to Perplexia"
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
As leading theorists and practitioners such as Marvin Minsky, Daniel Hillis and Brian Antwell Smith have been telling us, computers are much more than hardware and software.’ In their most general form, computers are environments of varying scope, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. Indeed, in Edward Fredkin’s interpretation, computational processes ultimately generate the fabric of the universe.’ It comes as no surprise, then, to find researchers arguing that computation is fundamentally altering the ways in which humans conceive of themselves and their relations to others. There are of course many approaches to this issue, from sociological studies to human factor analysis. Among these approaches are artistic works that tell new stories about the formation of human subjects, instantiating these stories in images as well as words. To explore this systemic shift, I will take as my tutor text Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia.”‘ In this complexly coded work, human subjectivity is depicted as intimately entwined with computer technologies.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Towards Computer Game Studies
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Part 1: Narratology and Ludology
It is relatively stress-free to write about computer games as nothing too much has been said yet, and almost anything goes. The situation is pretty much the same in what comes to writing about games and gaming in general. The sad fact with alarming cumulative consequences is that they are under-theorized; there are Huizinga, Caillois and Ehrmann of course, and libraries full of board game studies, in addition to game theory and bits and pieces of philosophy-most notably those of Wittgenstein’s – but they won’t get us very far with computer games. So if there already is or soon will be a legitimate field for computer game studies, this field is also very open to intrusions and colonization from the already organized scholarly tribes. Resisting and beating them is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence.
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