interview

Curating artwork that deals with video games has a number of unique and often hidden challenges. In the past, most video game art shows took place at informal or mixed-use fan spaces like comic book stores, parties, or conventions. As video games become more mainstream, and the fine art world increasingly engages with video games and video game culture, the venues and curation of these shows become critical factors for how these broader audiences experience the art.

Fresh from curating and installing the art show “Screen Knowledges: Photography in the Era of Videogames” at a space called ETA (a hybrid music venue, bar, and gallery in the trendy Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles) Kent Sheely and Eron Rauch sat down to share some of what they learned from curating the show.

Photography, and how we use it to understand the world, is undergoing massive changes in the era of digital information technology. While these fractures, slippages, and mismatches can be frustrating, they can also be incredibly fertile sites for artistic production. After all, what could be more apt a metaphor for media-bombarded 2017 than the awkward, sometimes distressing act, of trying to figure out how use a technology that is almost 200 years old to deal with the implications of the futurist-media du jour, video games?

My own work, dealing with photography, virtual landscape, glitches, and the unseen traces of online gaming, has been fueled by this tension. And who would be a better partner in conversation about this often amusingly awkward, but also surprisingly potent, act of making art that combines these two massive cultural forces, than Kent Sheely, an artist who is perhaps best known for his video art/performance piece “Modern Pacifism,” in which he tried to play through Call of Duty without killing anyone. Inspired by our collaborative curation of a show about photography and video games called Screen Knowledges, we sat down to discuss the ways we find subject matter in our relationship to video games and art history.

In the lead-up to collaborating to curate an art show Screen Knowledges, which looks at what contemporary artists are doing to advance screenshot and in-game photography, Kent Sheely and I did a large number of studio visits. These meetings involved looking at each other’s work, but also sprawling conversations about the threads that wove through our own artistic oeuvre, our personal lives, the work of each other, and of our fellow artists.

My massive ongoing project Valhalla Nocturnes, which is made up of long-exposure abstracts and self-portraits shot while playing video games late at night, became something of a focal point for our conversations around artistic process. After we finished the show, Kent used this project as a jumping point to talk about some of the often thorny and contradictory aspects of the process of making art that often get covered over by institutional wall blurbs and PR language.

Though it waxes and wanes in public consciousness and gets called by different names (screenshots, virtual photography, or more recently, in-game photography) over the past decade there have been a whole host of artists who have explored video games through photography. My first project that combined the two was a series from 2001 which re-printed cryptic landscape images found on Everquest forums, after learning the reason one of my old friends had dropped out of high school was to play the game. Kent Sheely has also been exploring this far-flung cultural space for just about as long as anyone else.

After collaborating to curate a recent art show about video games and photography, titled Screen Knowledges, I had a moment where I realized what a long, winding trek it has been to get to this artwork in 2017. Given his status as one of the most veteran artists in this genre, I wanted to talk to Kent about the arc of his oeuvre and hear his thoughts about how the field has changed over the past years.

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES ist eine Serie von vier Interviews mit vier Entwicklern von vier verschiedenen Kontinenten, die eines gemeinsam haben: Sie haben sich inspirieren lassen von Sagen, Mythen und Folklore aus Ecken der Erde, die vom Medium meist ignoriert werden.

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES is series of four interviews with four game developers from four different continents who looked for narrative inspiration and found it in unusual places: In the folklore of their own people, region or family, and in other storytelling-corners of the world which are too often neglected by the mainstream.

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES is series of four interviews with four game developers from four different continents who looked for narrative inspiration and found it in unusual places: In the folklore of their own people, region or family, and in other storytelling-corners of the world which are too often neglected by the mainstream.

DEEP-ROOTED GAMES is series of four interviews with four game developers from four different continents who looked for narrative inspiration and found it in unusual places: In the folklore of their own people, region or family, and in other storytelling-corners of the world which are too often neglected by the mainstream.

Jim Rossignol used to be a games journalist before he ventured into games development with Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Now, his studio Big Robot is working on The Signal From Tölva, a single-player FPS set on an alien planet. I wrote about this promising project for Der Standard; here’s my full interview with Jim.

You have made the switch from writing about video games to creating them. How did that happen?

Gradually. In 2010 I worked on a project commissioned by Channel 4, and ended up forming a small games studio to get the game - an educational puzzler called Fallen City (sadly now defunct) - designed, produced and published. With the money left over from that, plus a Kickstarter in 2012, we raised the money for Sir, You Are Being Hunted. I didn’t work full time on that, because we needed to pay the designer, programmer and artists, and so I remained a writer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun through most of its development. Fortunately it did well enough that I was able to work full time for past two years on our new game, The Signal From Tölva. It has only being during that period that I’ve really considered myself to be a game creator, although the switch still remains sort of opaque to me, perhaps because of how slowly it has happened..

Tangiers has been on my radar for a long, long time. Announced and Kickstarted in 2013, the stealth game inspired by the surreal and dark imagination of William S. Burroughs has had a few delays. I talked with Alex Harvex, Tangiers lead developer, about games and literature, Burroughs and the experience of mixing literature and video games.

Literature - at least "serious", high-brow literature - and games usually remain worlds apart. What inspired you to try and take William S Burroughs' (WSB) work as the starting point for Tangiers?

Quite simply and quite selfishly, I wanted to make a game that I'd want to play! When I entered into thinking of making Tangiers, there was a significant trend of indie games relying on introspective nostalgia. The appeal of Fez for example was completely lost on me, and I found that incredibly alienating.