Playtime Videogame Mythologies
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Maison d’Ailleurs Museum of science fiction,utopia and extraordinary journey Place Pestalozzi 14 - Case postale - 1401 Yverdon-les-Bains, Suisse - Tél : + 41 (0) 24 425 64 38, Fax : + 41 (0) 24 425 65 75 www. ailleurs.ch Playtime Videogame mythologies PRESS KIT / practical informations Maison d’Ailleurs Museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys Tél. : + 41 24 425 64 38 Fax : + 41 24 425 65 75 www.ailleurs.ch http://www.playtime.ailleurs.ch Place Pestalozzi 14 Case postale 1401 Yverdon-les-Bains Suisse Exhibition opens from 11.03 to 09.12.2012 tue-fri 14h-18h, sat-sun 11h-18h © Julian Oliver, Levelhead, 2008 Opening ceremony : Saturday 10.03.2012, at 18h Pictures on our ftp (every published pictures must be used with the credits mentioned on each folder) ftp : ftp.ailleurs.ch utilisateur : mda_presse mot de passe : jules2008 dossier : data sous-dossier : playtime © Experimental Game Lab, Scalable City, 2008-2010 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS / Playtime – Videogame mythologies Exhibition overview p. 3 A word from the director p. 4 The panels of the exhibition p. 5 Publication/Exhibition catalog p. 9 The museum shop p. 10 Partners and acknowledgments p. 11 2 EXHIBITION OVERVIEW Playtime – Videogame mythologies is an exhibition devoted to the culture of video games. It explores how the relationship between play, the various manners of gaming, and technology interrelate. An interactive presentation display historical documents, examples of GameArt and innovative games. Specifically, the exhibition invites to explore computer games from a variety of different angles that correspond to the five sections informing the spaces of the Maison d’Ailleurs : « Rules of Play / The Game of Life » and the introduction to the mechanics of games ; « Game Geographies and PlayNations » on the spatial dimension of video games ; « Bodies and Minds », dealing with emblematic figures, how players relate with their avatars and the involvement of the body in the video game experience ; « Assault on Reality », which presents innovative creations mixing the real and the virtual ; and a historical section « Archeology of Fun ». The exhibition Playtime – Videogame mythologies is part of Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council’s GameCulture – From Game to Art programme : between 2012 and 2012, this programme addresses the social, economic and esthetic issues raised by the video games, and provides new ways of relating to an art form so frequently caricatured. This major project allows the Maison d’Ailleurs to position itself once again as a museum specialized in prospective-programming and emerging cultures. The conception of the exhibition programme was entrusted to the guest curator José Luis de Vicente (Barcelona), journalist, researcher and expert on relations between digital art, culture and society : his knowledge and experience allowed Playtime – Videogame mythologies to be a rich, diverse and exciting exhibition. Throughout 2012, demonstrations, events and actions of mediation in Yverdon-les-Bains and in the French part of Switzerland, are organized with numerous partners, highlighting the current research in the field and offering to a wide audience the opportunity to experience the diversity of the art of video games. © Robbie Cooper, Alter Ego, 2004-2010 3 A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR Could we once and for all go without museums, these places where seemingly uselessness goes hand in hand with unprofitability? More generally, could we accept that a society no longer exhibit anything, that is, can no longer legitimately show what its citizens are creating? These are questions I have often pondered – not to come up literally with an answer, but to reach a more accurate definition of what a museum is, or should be. Take the case of the Maison d’Ailleurs and let’s suppose that we have some first-time visitors: what are they going to see, above and beyond the unusual exhibitions on show ? They will first be met by some circumscribed spaces, devised as the constituent parts of a whole that is beyond them; so this museum is first and foremost an enclosed place. Now the nature of a museum cannot be confined within this property, since it is shared by many other sites... Something more is needed : here, the fact that within it appear works that at once recall the empirical world that saw them come into being and the historical tradition of which they are a part. Very briefly, a museum may be defined as a place that stands apart from other places and houses artistic creations; the Maison d’Ailleurs is part of a society and offers a symbolic representation of that society. Interestingly, we again find the two aforementioned properties in another field: video games. Indeed, setting aside its purely playful dimension, the video game, an ill-identified cultural object, is also an enclosed place and a host for representations that dialogue with the social sphere and with earlier video game productions. It goes without saying that this enclosed place is not quite of the same order as the museum venue, which is physical whereas the other is virtual; conversely, visitors pass through a museum like a video game, i.e. from space to space, from representations to more representations But then... what do we get when the confined world of museums lays out the confined world of video games (which is itself already a world that includes representations)? We get Playtime, i.e., the ‘exhibition’ of an ‘exhibiting’ space; a mise en abyme therefore. It turns out that such a recursive process has always been viewed as stirring a feeling of amazement and hence as a condition for the possibility of a critique. Since the video game is on show in a place that is itself ‘a place of representation’, the mise en abyme device allows the visitor to grasp the nature of these two closed worlds which are museum practice and video games. This nature is easy to understand, since these two areas are in relation with all the other social places, ‘but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize or invert the whole set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect’ 1. In other words, the Maison d’Ailleurs and video games share a single essence: they are, to quote Michel Foucault’s concept, heterotopias (a material one for the museum, a symbolic one for the games). In this sense, when the science fiction museum takes over video games worlds, what it is doing is to take as its own material that already in itself depicts certain aspects of society. Then, by standing back from this material, the Maison d’Ailleurs offers its visitors a chance first to question a (virtual) space that partly reflects society’s values and ideologies, and secondly, through this space, the society that gave rise to it. Hence, taking advantage of the reflective impulse that any heterotopia will produce, the visitor is led to question his or her own reality and existence. I am delighted to present Playtime – Videogame mythologies for, as a museum director, I am very keen to take part in the thinking process that comes to us from the world of video games. Through Pro Helvetia’s GameCulture programme, the Maison d’Ailleurs can be accepted as a heterotopia that ultimately offers our citizens an exhibition enabling them to think about what already informs their everyday lives and which will soon be a key component thereof. To exercise one’s thinking power, and so taste freedom: a museum’s usefulness strikes me as being proven. Marc Atallah Director of the Maison d’Ailleurs 1 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in: Diacritics, Vol. 16 N° 1 (Spring 1986), John Hopkins Press, p. 23. 4 THE PANELS OF THE EXHIBITION Section I : Rules of Play / The Game of Life If games are a form of culture, what form of culture are they? Like dance or sports, games deal with movement. Like architecture and garden design, they imagine spaces. Games can also include narratives and storytelling. But above all, games are complex systems; dynamic processes engaging different actors in input-output relationships and feedback loops. In the last fifty years information theory, cybernetics and network theory have shown us that to describe our time accurately, we need to recognize we live in an age of increasing complexity, where political, economic and social processes evolve through the non-linear interactions of multiple agents. Videogames may be the first form of popular culture to reflects this. The very first videogames like Pong, Asteroids or Spacewar! were too low-tech to look realistic, and could only represent characters and spaces in very abstract ways. But since their very inception, games behaved like dynamic systems. The player engaged with other elements in a space where action was determined by a set of simple rules. This section explores how game systems behave, the importance of rules and other key notions in games design like physics and storytelling. Artworks in section I : 1- Gamelife : Games as Emotional Memoir, a short films gallery : (a) Game Over Project, NOTsoNOISY Guillaume Reymond (b) Play, David Kaplan & Eric Zimmerman (c) Pixels, Patrick Jean (d) Spitfire (Capture the Can), Saman Keshavarz (e) Super Mario Bros., Andreas Heikaus (f) Arcade City / Milan, NotWorkingFilms, Fabio Palmieri (g) Rémi Pacman, Rémi Gaillard 2- Made of Myth, Marc Da Cunha Lopes (France), photographic series 3- The Game of Life, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (US), interactive installation 4- Crayon Physics Deluxe, Petri Purho (Finland), game 5- Loopscape, Ryota Kuwakubo (Japan), interactive installation 6- Sleep is Death, Jason Rohrer (US), game 7- Passage, Jason Rohrer (US), game Section II : Game Geographies and PlayNations Science Fiction writer William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” when he watched two kids playing on their Atari console and noticed that for them, the screen was not showing moving images; it was a portal to another kind of territory.