Is there a place today for the concept of the ‘avant-garde’ in digital practice? Refer to specific examples in your response.
Presenting specific examples, this essay will explore where the art of ‘digital practice’ places in modern society. It will explain how a digital piece is perceived as ‘avant-garde’ and how it differs from what the typical populus would class as ‘norm’. There are a variety of perspectives to be explored but this essay will focus on the broadest two, film and interactive games. Examples will be presented in chronological order from the point which ‘digital practice’ essentially began to exist.
Before defining ‘digital practice’ it is imperative to understand what ‘avant-garde’ is, in this case it doesn't really have one. That is the beauty of it however “There has been little agreement among historians or artists as to what is meant by the term ‘avant-garde’ in relation to film. Ian Christie justly remarks that is is ‘an essentially contested concept, always open to dispute or redefinition’ (1998: 453) (O’Pray, 2003 P1).
It was around the 1920’s that europe was almost ready for appearance of the ‘avant-garde’. The resistance from the elitist and highbrow was beginning to fail under the continuous pressure of the masses, demanding that they be allowed to same. Surrealists began to take to on this new form cinema. A perfect example would be ‘Entr’acte (1924)’ a short film directed by René Clair, which premiered as an entr'acte for the Ballets Suédois production Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris (Entr'Acte, 1924). Instantly the film uses an entourage of techniques that would be far from the realm of norm, reversed footage, slow motion, frame by frame animation along with many others. Some of the footage just appears absolutely random, a piece such a this premiered in such infant times of film would be classed as almost blasphemy. Certainly the higher masses would of gave no place for ‘Entr’acte’ any other works at the time, though we must remember that there is an audience for everything. It most certainly had sparked imagination in others, offering the chance to contribute their own ideas no matter how unnatural.
Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, June 1929) was most definitely the turning point of the digital avant-garde, never before had such a shocking piece of cinema been viewed by the masses. “Dali and Bunel sought to combine images so that one would bear no logical or rational connection to the next.” Even to the masses this was something illogical and effect was only multiplied to the highbrow. The thought of seeing “the oozing eyes of the dead donkeys” and “pulling after him two grand pianos loaded with dead donkeys”. Even in the 21st century most viewers would find this uncomfortable and questions it significance but we must remember there simply was none. The shocking potential of viewing a sharpened razor blade splice through an eyeball is grim at best (fig. 1). In fact, footage became so grotesque to the point of almost unwatchable they finally banned showing blood or violence.
This of course is an oppression of those who seek freedom in their work, undoubtedly this would start a chain reaction that continues even today. The reaction being to constantly advance the norms of cinema, works that are avant-garde are eventually seen as reasonable. Until such time someone is fearless enough to take their work to another level. How far can we really progress until the senses of the human race are worn out and dumb, this is what we call ‘the end of history’.
“Nimrod, the world's first video game-playing computer, faced off against players in a game called Nim.” As stated it was the first digital game that players could play off against in a battle of knowledge and skill, “It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems.”
Who would've thought that in the 1950’s that you could be interacting with a computer that had intelligence, a truly avant-garde concept. Some people were a little suspicious of the device and not sure of it’s positivity - “his looks like a tremendous grey refrigerator…. It’s absolutely frightening…. I suppose at the next exhibition they’ll even have real heaps of matches and awful steel arms will come out of the machine to pick them up.” (fig. 2). Throughout history there seems to be a pattern emerging between the constant of the norm and the vanguard of the avant-garde, the need to constantly push the boundaries and create new ideas. Giving the population stimulus in ways they could've never imagined, such is the need of mankind in not just only ‘digital practice’ but everywhere.
Before the ‘end of history’ occurs, there are still many directions that creative individuals have yet to discover. When we finally arrive in the digital film era, the first milestone was ‘Metadata’ 1971 by Pete Foldes “A new direction in the art of film animation--using a computer to assist the animator. In this film it was the computer of the National Research Council of Canada that performed most of the work of animation.” (fig. 3). This of course before being integrated to film category was seen an ‘avant-garde’ idea, instead of shocking audiences it captivated them in awe and amazement. ‘Metadata’ was only eight minutes long, which was probably a wise idea. The piece was very contrasting and at times prolonged viewing to certain sections was sure to cause headaches, it was the various colours, shapes and figures and how they were woven together early stretch techniques that many people were just not used to experiencing yet. All though there may have been digital demonstrations before ‘Metadata’ it was definitely the milestone which gave others new purpose, ‘Peter Foldès’ was using the “first experimental key frame film involving freehand drawings” which also required a data tablet for input, the ‘key frame’ concept was still very experimental but ‘Peter’ clearly demonstrated promising results. For the first time an avant-garde concept was respected and drew more positive awareness to itself and it was beginning to spread at a quickening pace.
Enter digital game ‘SimCity 1989’ (Fig. 4,5) with currently 16 versions of the game to present day, it would “go down as one of the most influential and popular games in gaming history”. What makes this game relevant to the avant-garde movement though? Well for the first time a game was created where you’re essentially a god, the masses had been given power in a virtual form. Nether the less abusing this gift was extremely easy and without consequence. An article written ‘Keith Yost’ accounts his times a child playing ‘SimCity 2000’ and you can hear the shear excitement in this excerpt - “10-year-old me was like a modern day Herman Cain, with bold plans to run my government on unimaginably low tax rates. I’d meticulously plan out every square inch of my objectivist utopia, and then check the box beside every penny-pinching city ordinance the game offered. Why pay for schools, police stations, and hospitals, when you can just merge them all together?”. He goes on to talk about the present SimCity 2013 (Fig. 6) and even though the launch wasn’t what everyone thought it would be, the incredible idea that captured people's imagination back in 1989 continued on for the long awaited release.
The game isn’t merely for fun as it used to be, in recent releases of ‘SimCity’ it is commonly used to try foresee population struggles in a modeled town structure. A studied conducted by the name of ‘SimCity vs. The Suburban Sprawl’ attempted to convey the efficiency of various suburban layouts e.g. a grid system (Fig. 7), radiating sprawl (Fig. 8) and a cul-de-sac (Fig. 9). “SimCity may be just a game, but it's interesting to see how the simulator responds to real-world suburban design scenarios. Players will have to strike a balance between optimizing for "the game" and building something that's aesthetically pleasing and conducive to their own gaming narrative. “. Once again concepts that began as avant-garde (pushing the boundaries, searching for new ideas and directions) have given light to whole new world of possibilities that are applicable to real life situations.
Ever since the creation of the internet , freedom of speech has never been more strong. ‘animation-avantgarde.com’ is a website that encourages individuals to submit their own avant-garde works in an animated format. For example ‘Max Hattler’ and his piece ‘aanaatt’ is a stop-motion animation around 5 minutes long and was successful enough to make into the ‘film list of animation avantgarde DVD 01’. The DVD features many strange and wondrous animations ranging from irregular to extreme expression, in a society that pressures young people to behave and act in certain ways it’s crucial they’re given an outlet. This form of avant-garde is allowing us to show people that it’s fine, in fact beneficial to reveal more of their own personality and strive to be unique. ‘Pierre Hébert’ “famous Canadian filmmaker and key-figure for experimental animation and live-visuals’ writes in an article that “it is of international important that the ANIMATION AVANTGARDE program exists with such a strong and clear programming bias”. He strives to allow experimental film it’s fair share in short film festivals instead of the usually enclosed world of animation that inevitably leads to compromises in mainstream for the domination of comedy and laughter. The survival of the avant-garde in digital practice relies on people like ‘Pierre Hérbert’ who are willing to go out of there own way to ensure that this concept keeps pushing on through the ever increasing oppression of normality, eventually with persistence normality will finally give way each new wave of creativity.
We can briefly broaden the horizon of ‘digital practice’ and turn our attention to FutureEverything (previously known as Futuresonic). A news article on the bbc website labeled “FutureEverything gathers technology’s avant garde” spoke of a three day celebration of digital culture where “Artists, musicians, engineers and hackers from around the world recently descended on Manchester”. To encourage an avant-garde collection of technology to be demonstrated a £10,000 prize was to be given to move impressive and creative idea. Runners-up were “"Prime Numerics", an algorithm-based computer programme developed to perform real-time live analysis of the language used by the three UK party political leaders during the last televised debate before the election.” It ranked each political leaders speech based on different assets, now take this same technology and imagine the educational uses that could built on it’s foundation.
“The first prize went to Eyewriter, a team who developed a pair of glasses designed to track and record eye movement, enabling people to draw pictures using their eyes.” Being three years ago, technology using the eye for operating a computer system has become almost reached the consumer market e.g. Google Glass (Fig. 10) which has already demonstrated features that would have seemed practically impossible, there main problem is getting the masses used to the idea of wearing a strange apparatus on your head, while it’s compact it is still very noticeable. We can safely assume that Google are a pioneering company in the avant-garde, from self-driving cars to a search engine studying and analyzing billions of documents on the web.
In the past fives years, game companies that of Electronic Arts (EA) and Sony have dominated the marketing and media of new game titles. Leaving absolutely no room for the minority trying to spread their more meaningful ideals. They have clamped on to the municipal pipe that funds all game development companies and have engulfed the resources for their own, each new title suffers “increasingly from “creative failure”” and lacks the “boundary-pushing branch of popular digital culture”. Thankfully other companies have given many tools and publicity too indie developers all over the world, currently Xbox (Microsoft) harbour over 3,000 indie games. These games are instantly playable and will be swiftly approved as long as they are of good nature. The pattern emerges again, we cry out for the minority to once again pump creativity into what we eventually see as the norm. Avant-garde ideas are seen like never before with the amount of technology at our disposal, a whole new genre itself can be opened for the Xbox Kinect. Reverse engineering, re-working the foundation code, using open source information and much more are giving limitless adaptations to the demonstrations and project continuously surfacing.
“The Rise of a Queer Games Scene”, an extremely clever, creative and avant-garde idea which is hard to establish in the 21st century. Accompanied by a short documentary “Queer Games The Secret Avant Garde Of Video Games” it’s basically an upcoming movement that is about ‘transgender’ humans who are using video games as a way to express their personal experiences to others and help them relate. "Games are designed by a small, male-dominated culture and marketed to a small, male-dominated culture, which, in turn, produces the next small, male-dominated generation of game designers." insists ‘Anna Anthropy’ in her book ‘Rise of the Videogame Zinesters’. We as a culture are so used to following video games, they set a stereotype and the majority of us follow that stereotype. “video games is a really good way to trick people into becoming more enlightened, educated human beings."
“Mattie Brice made the game Mainichi, about her day-to-day life being queer”, she wanted others to know that there is more to games than the typical stereotype . An idea that was shown almost no press attention for a few years has taken with an avant-garde view. Slowly but surely we are breaking the barriers of game development to almost the point where anyone can make one - “I would say that Anna's book has really showed what is [already] being done. That you can [make games] too. It opens up the doors to a larger audience, to people who didn't know they could make games”
Finally we see the avant-garde starting to repeat itself, and recent article by ‘Rebeca Puebla’ named “Cool CG art: The Bride in ‘Un Chien Andalou’” goes into her CG modeling of the famous grotesque scene in which we see an eye being cut open by a sharp razor blade (Fig 11). She goes into detail of how she interpreted the classical surrealist movie moment and moulded it to her own. Her take on ‘The Bride’ is clearly more severe and sinister, the way she seems to be so calm even with the razor blade so close. It may purposely take on cartoon characteristics but it’s certainly convincing (Fig. 12). Many of the details are taken into account throughout the modeling, from the 1920’s with very limited options we now have access to vast amounts of tools that allow use to change almost any aspect of imagery we desire. “My aim was to recreate it as closely as possible, but that has proved to be difficult while working within my usual style.” this shows the importance that we shouldn’t strive to be exact but always place our own spin on recreation.
In conclusion we could assume that ‘digital practice’ may not even exist without creativity. Without this constant battle for balance between the norms and the avant-garde people would never see a reason to create something new. It’s in our nature to constantly move forward, progress in any way possible. When the regular path is too full or blocked our minds automatically search for a new line of focus and such has been the creations for the past century. Each person has their own perspective and unique view on everything they experience, ‘digital practice’ fuels a new fire that is in the prime of it’s existence with limitless possibilities. It’s almost as if film has been created all over again but this time with more dimensions, it gives people empowerment to know they are driving a new ideal into a new age and the ‘avant-garde’ are certainly carving their own path.
“The world is still new... it seems old to us, but only seems because our lives are so short . . . our human race has been around for such a brief amount of time that the universe hasn't had the chance to detect us yet. One blink is all it needs to miss our dance through actuality.” - Carlton Mellick III
References & Quotes used in text
Films
-
Entr'Acte (1924) Directed by Erik Satie/René Clair, Paris.
Websites
Books
-
O’Pray, M. (2003) Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions. Columbia: Columbia University Press
-
Sitney, A P. (1979) Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978. US: OUP USA
-
Anthropy, A., (2012) Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. US: Seven Stories Press
-
Dyer-Withford, N. and de Peuter, G. (2009) Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. US: University of Minnesota Press
Images
Fig 1, Ulrich Gregor/Enno Patalas, Geschichte des Films 1895–1939,
(accessed 12 June 2013).
Fig 2, Pete Goodeve, September 1951, issue of Electronic Engineering magazine.
Available at <http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/06/replay/>
Fig 3, Metadata, Peter Foldès, 1971,
Available at <http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YbPikjjylJ4/0.jpg>
Fig 4, SimCity, 1989, Will Wright
Available at <http://obsoletegamer.com/simcity-the-city-simulator/>
Fig 5, SimCity 2000, 1994, Will Wright
Fig 6, SimCity 2013, 2013, Will Wright
Fig 7, Google Maps, 2012, Google
Fig 8, Google Maps, 2012, Google
Fig 9, Google Maps, 2012, Google
Fig 10, A closer look at the Google Glass experience, Alex Masters, 2013, The Independent, UK
Available at <http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/02/20/a-detailed-look-at-the-google-glass-experience/>
Fig 11, Cool CG art: The Bride in ‘Un Chien Andalou’, Rebeca Puebla, 2013, 3dworldmag, US
Fig 12, Cool CG art: The Bride in ‘Un Chien Andalou’, Rebeca Puebla, 2013, 3dworldmag, US
Entr'Acte (1924) Directed by Erik Satie/René Clair, Paris.
O’Pray, M. (2003) Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions. Columbia: Columbia University Press
Sitney, A P. (1979) Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978. US: OUP USA
Anthropy, A., (2012) Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. US: Seven Stories Press
Dyer-Withford, N. and de Peuter, G. (2009) Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. US: University of Minnesota Press
No comments:
Post a Comment