EXHIBITION 15th Jul 30th Jan

Democracy for the Digital Image 1972-2003

Etopia Center for Art and Technology

Atari, Ralph Baer, Bally Industries, Manuel Barbadillo, Nolan Bushnell, Edwin Catmull, Jack P. Citron, , Computer Technique Group Japan, Viking Eggeling, William Fetter, Lee Harrison III, Kenneth Knowlton, Magnavox, Nelson L. Max, , A. Michael Noll, , Milton Bradley, Manfred Mohr, Fred Parke, Tony Pritchett, , Ivan Sutherland, StanVanderBeek, John Whitney, Edward Zajac.

consolasimagendigital.org

Etopia Center for Art and Technology inaugurates an ambitious project on game consoles, video games and the digital image. From 15 July 2020, Etopia_ Center for Art and Technology will host the exhibition and cultural project Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 (Consolas, democratizar la imagen digital 1972-2003), the largest exhibition ever held in Spain on the history of digital image, video games and game consoles. Curated for Zaragoza City Council by the renowned art and new media essayist Abraham San Pedro, the project embraces an impressive collection of more than one hundred consoles on display. Each console tells the story of its specific technological, economic, social, artistic, cultural and political context (lebenslage). T o help them fully understand the revolution in the digital image brought about by game consoles, visitors can explore a selection of the foundational masterpieces of early computer art created by the foremost artists in historical digital art. Most of these works have never been exhibited previously in Spain or even elsewhere in Europe. One striking discovery to be made is the raw military origin of the digital image and its subsequent evolution through the technological, scientific and artistic milestones that foreshadowed the emergence of video games. From that moment on, users go on a journey along the archaeological time line of game consoles and the digital images they were capable of producing and showing on screen, within the bounds of each technological generation.

The main exhibition lays bare the origins and the early artistic and scientific experiences of the digital image, revealing how its destiny was shaped by the emergence of the game console, a democratising force that broke into the market from 1972 onwards. Due to its origins in warfare and the vast cost of mainframe computers, in its first decades of existence the digital image had been confined to the purposes of warfare, technology and science; it was only later that it drew the attention of artists.

Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 will thus reveal a selection of major audiovisual works – military, scientific and artistic – that aidcomprehension of the context in which video games came into being. Following this fully rounded aesthetic and technological lead-in, the exhibition features a rigorous selection of the game consoles that rose to prominence during the period 1972-2003: from the first console in history (, 1972) to the best-selling console ever made ( PlayStation 2, 2001). Visitors will also watch video games being played natively – not through a present-day emulator – on the real consoles that existed in each historical period. With this project, Etopia_ engages with a new insight that is not recognised even today: that video games are cultural artefacts wrapped in a political, intellectual, artistic and social raiment, showing how knowledge is produced in our time. Throughout the exhibition period, therefore, Etopia_ will host three pop-up exhibitions in which video games are treated, and hencedisplayed, exactly as if already officially enshrined as Art.

The first of the shows,Geometric: Visual Synthesis as an Accidental Avant Garde (Geométricos. La síntesis visual como vanguardia involuntaria), running from 15 July to 26 September 2020, approaches the video game as an aesthetic experience that is manifestly abstract and radically Cubist, and thus tied to the historical avant garde of the 20th century. The second stage, Non-Places: Configuration of Spaces in Video Games (No lugares. Configuración de los espacios en el videojuego), to be held from 30 September to 28 November 2020, deals with how, over the past fifty years of technological development, there have been many different ways of creating the fictional space experience as a setting for representational interactions. Finally, from 2 December 2020 to 30 January 2021, Activism: Changing the World through Video Games (Activismo. Transformando el mundo a través del videojuego) will invite us to explore the widely diverse strategies inscribed in video games – whether express or implied – to seduce us into modifying world visions and personal behaviour.

The exhibition Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003, which will run at Etopia until 30 January 2021, will provide an extensive programme of parallel activities for all audiences: lectures by prominent specialists in the digital image and art, such as Karin Ohlenschläger, Roberta Bosco and Pau Alsina, prestigious psychiatrists such as José Miguel Gaona; experts in artificial intelligence such asPedro Antonio González Calero; and video game specialists such as Marçal Mora and Eurídice Cabañes. The exhibition venue will also host video game workshops for children and young people and screenings of recent games and cinematics that, though not yet recognised as cinematography, use the language of film. The façades of the Etopia building will be lit up with 21 visual pieces created by the curator and the artist Néstor Lizalde specifically for this project. The temporary exhibition space, moreover, will provide interaction points where visitors can play on game consoles or consult selected books and documentation on the digital image and video games.

Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 is a project directed by the Spanish new media art curator Abraham San Pedro for Zaragoza City Council at Etopia Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition is part of smARTplaces, an audience development venture co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Azkuna Zentroa-Alhóndiga Bilbao is a production partner of the shows. Permanent exhibition/Curatorial statement

The digital image is our ecosystem. It is now a natural part of everyday life (lebenslage). Tablets, advertising, social media, political campaigns, smartphones, art, news, photography, science, fashion... today any surface or device is fed by a relentless and transparent flow of digital images. This is a radical historical departure. A departure from “reality” (lebenswelt). For now reality dematerialises and translates into encrypted data and thus becomes questionable as truth. An image, when dissolved in mathematical code, becomes hidden and hence changeable. Our perception of “the real” becomes liquid, fluid, One-dimensional. Moreover, the virtualisation of cosmovision (weltanschauung) conjures up entire new worlds: immaterial, alternative, imagined universes running on code and algorithm. Like video games.

The social and technological process that drives the prevailing hegemony of the synthetic image involves several actors, who are diverse, shifting, and sometimes conflicting. Game consoles play a key role – in fact, a central role – in this cultural dynamic. Despite their apparent banality and levity – they are just “games”, after all – video games have proved to be a vigorous technical and historical force. Video games encouraged a constant push to develop new and more powerful image processors – thus speeding up the history of computing and becoming one of the core vectors towards our current hyper-technological society. The role of video games in the construction of digital society does not end here: it was game consoles that democratised the digital image. Through games, the novelty of the digital image, hitherto almost a mere anecdote on the margins of engineering, grew, thrived, penetrated the culture and finally took hold, reshaping the patterns of the visible, its forms, its signs and symbols, and its meanings: the storytelling of the present (The Social Construction of Reality).

Game consoles have been a powerful force for historic change. Now, with this interdisciplinary selection embracing the foundational audiovisual works and documents of the birth of the computer-generated image and all the significant game consoles from 1972 to 2003, visitors can retrace the steps of this thrilling story. We shall see how war, science, technology, industry, leisure and art are intertwined and travel along the same track, conjoined by a desire to enhance the mimetic sophistication of the real that underpins the evolution of the digital image. Final stop: the appearance of being real. Without this reckoning of events we cannot, in the end, understand the how and why of the digital society we are now. The history of computing is tightly bound up with war and its industry. During the Second World War, the first steps were taken with the construction of supercomputers such as “ENIAC” (United States, 1943) and the two “Colossus” machines (United Kingdom, 1943-1945). After the atomic disaster came the Cold War: a system of global confrontation overshadowed by the threat of a nuclear apocalypse provoked by the enemy. In this new world order of relations strained almost to breaking-point, vast budgets were fed into technological research and development. Multidisciplinary teams were formed (mathematicians, psychologists, military officers, engineers…) to create a new type of device: computers. Huge, lumbering, with tiny memory reserves and feeble processing power: such were these massive and hugely expensive machines in their beginnings. For decades, they ran on vacuum tubes – there were no microprocessors yet – and communicated with humans via lights blinking on control panels and, later on, cardboard punch cards.

Emerging in this context (unwelt), the digital image was a truly historic novelty, transforming the optical perception of objects into alphanumeric data concealed in the innards of a machine. Galileo, who had said that Nature is written in the language of mathematics, was now proved right. The dematerialisation of the visual sign opened up the possibility of intervening in it, and shaping it at will: hence its plausibility, and its radical indifference to truth. The computer’s own electronics then re-convert the information or message data back into a visible image. But now of quite a different sort: a synthetic one.

Only States and their armies and, later, the major Western business corporations could afford these multi-million dollar behemoths, whose true practical possibilities remained an enigma. The adherents of scientism of the 1960s had faith that machines were capable of any number of things, but it was still not clear what those things might be. The uncertainty about the possible uses of mainframe computers nurtured a fertile relationship among technology, science and art. Several institutions – universities such as Utah and London and corporate research bodies such as Bell Labs or IBM – invited artists to work alongside their engineers and explore the visual capabilities of the new devices. This synergy between different areas of knowledge – humanistic and technical – gave rise to the history of the digital image.

At first, the new relationship between humans and machines was confined to certain elites. Computers were intended only for a tiny circle of initiates, and the sphere of art was not in touch with social reality as it might be today: to society at large, therefore, these new ways of seeing and creating images remained out of sight. During the first two decades of the period – until the emergence of personal microcomputers in the early 1980s – the digital image, both in its Komputergrafik art form (not recognised as Art until the closing decade of the 20th century) and in its scientific or industrial applications (CAD), was a minority phenomenon that participated little or not at all in the construction of the collective imaginary (ideascapes). This remained the case until the advent of game consoles. In essence, a console is simply a “dedicated” computer with a single purpose: gaming. Games can be run from code hardwired within the machine itself (e.g., -type consoles) or from an external medium (removable, swappable ROM cartridges). These inventions triggered a historic social and technological transformation: computing (of a limited kind, but computing all the same) had reached the masses. The digital image (this new space of intangible and revolutionary reality) became a familiar feature in ordinary living rooms in the developed world.

The hardcore digitalised visual regime we see today cannot be attributed to consoles or video game culture alone. But it is impossible to understand the process of transformation to the Network Society without recognising the key role played by these little machines: a role as a driving force in the dynamics of technological development – fuelled by wild business competition – and as an agent that naturalised revolutionary change – almost a paradigm shift and Scientific Revolution– in culture and thought. To see is to think. And now we see/think digital.

At the main exhibition we shall be able to enjoy advertisements and historical films produced by the US Army, and its SAGE program (1956), which generated the earliest digital images on the cathode ray tube monitors of OA-1008 consoles – in addition, the images were interactive, foreshadowing the future mechanisms of the video game. Visitors will watch Edward Zajac’s first ever computer-made film (Simulation of a Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System, 1963), for Bell Labs; a documentary by Ivan Sutherland and MIT on his revolutionary screen design system, Computer Sketchpad (1963); a documentary about the arduous coding efforts required to generate computerised films using the FORTRAN language and SC-4020, undertaken by the father of the computer image, A. Michael Noll (1968). Also on display users will find Computer Graphics on paper, represented here by the masterpieces of William Fetter, Human Figure (1964), Ninety Sinusoid Curves by A. Michael Noll (1965), Untitled by Jack P. Citron (c.1967) and Modular Pattern, printed from a IBM 7094 computer by the Spanish artist Manuel Barbadillo (c.1968). Next, visitors will watch two very different kind of digital animations: one where an animated character is brought to life for the first time in a computer-generated film, The Flexipede (1967) by Tony Pritchett; and another about a forgotten computer-driven human motion capture system, Lee Harrison III’s ANIMAC (1967-69). Public will also enjoy the digital art history milestone Poemfield No 1 (1967) by Stan VanDerBeek who, with Kenneth Knowlton, created fascinating alphanumeric tapestries with the BEFLIX language.

On the journey across the aesthetic and technological landscape at the dawn of the digital image, visitors next encounter the seminal work of the founding father of computer graphics John Whitney, per·mu·ta·ti·on (1968), digitised for the very first time specifically for this exhibition. We continue with Japan’s first experience in moving digital images, Computer Movie No 1 (1969) by Computer Technique Group Japan – never before exhibited in Europe. Next, another major figure of media art, Manfred Mohr, will fascinate us with his film – deceptively simple but in fact highly complex – Cubic Limit (1973-74), in its recently restored version by ZKM. After this geometric exercise, visitors find the first three-dimensional, shaded human digital image in motion – a hand and several faces – created by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke in A Computer Animated Hand and Human Faces (1972), in its recently restored version, never before exhibited. This path through the historical digital context culminates with the astonishing scientific work DNA with Ethidium (1978), by the computer engineer Nelson L. Max – this piece has never before been exhibited in Spain.

Following this technical and historical introduction, game consoles take their place as the core element of the exhibition. The devices are arranged along a segmented time line of sequential generations of information processing capacity. Here starts a journey through six generations of consoles, from 1972 to 2003. There is a total of 63 console sets. We call them “sets” because most of the machines are displayed alongside their cartridges and widely diverse peripherals (external keyboards, 3D glasses, guns, memory extensions, racecar steering wheels, computer mices, interactive robots, etc), raising the number of objects on display to more than two hundred. All the consoles that have played any sort of meaningful role over the three-decade period are present. Ralph Baer’s coveted 1972 Magnavox Odyssey; the first Atari console, Home Pong (1975); the first console to use ROM cartridges, the (1976); the second to do so, the RCA STUDIO II (1976); the undisputed queen of consoles for decades – and almost a pop icon for history – the (VSC) (1977); the only console with vector graphics, the Milton Bradley (1983); the incredibly powerful (1979) and the Colecovision (1982); and the Japanese forerunners of what in the rest of the world we later came to know as the Sega (1985): the SG-1000 (1983), SG-1000 II /Mark II (1984) and the Mark III (1985). Also present will be the Japanese Sega (1998); the (1996); the Nintendo Virtual Boy (1995); the MSX System (1984); the successful low-cost Coleco Telstar series of consoles (1976-1978); the (1994); the Nintendo GameCube (2001); the Microsoft (2000); and the Sony PlayStation (1994). The entire trajectory of this historical, scientific and technological adventure is meticulously displayed to us, alongside all the technical information on each of the pieces. Each generation of machines is illustrated by two video screenings of genuine plays of video games of the time recorded using actual hardware, so that viewers can get to know and understand the protracted process of technical and visual evolution and improvement that arose from this long-distance race among the competing consoles. Throughout the tour of the exhibition, visitors will also find video documentaries revealing further striking aspects of the history. The first screening is located in the “Black Room”: a curated selection of videos of genuine plays of coin-op arcade games (1971-2003) collated by the curator, attesting to the “other half” of the video game world that arcade machines, albeit now forgotten, undoubtedly were. Close to the “Black Room”, users can enjoy an anthology of television advertisements (1972-2003) selected by the curator that trace the evolution of the consoles themselves and the societies to which they belonged.

After visiting the spaces and areas of the project, viewers will be able to find out first-hand about the most recent past, which has not yet been examined by historians and academics as the multilevel and cross-cutting phenomenon that it in fact is. The importance of these devices and their digital image iconospheres arises from their influence on consumer and leisure habits and the technologisation of society, with the consequent opening up to new immaterial worlds configured as video game metaverses. These environments operate as spaces for vital expansion or sublimation, driven by the psychological projection of the “omnipotent self” as the centre of the universe (axia mundi). There is also a manifest and essential contribution to the weakening of the logic of cause and effect, which among younger generations has transferred from video games to the street. The story of game consoles is far more than a mere assortment of strange, old arti-facts: it tells us about who we were, and how we evolved into what we are now. If we are now digital, it is to a large extent thanks to these revolutionary little machines.

© Abraham San Pedro, 2020 Pop-up exhibitions

In the awareness that the video game is a medium that carries an artistic and social charge, albeit not yet officially recognised as such by academia, Etopia is committed to proposing new ways of exploring and delving into these cultural products, fostering an appreciation of their agency as semiotic discourse and their aesthetic power. Hence, the approach here is to accept and integrate the video game as yet another artistic manifestation, with all the traits that are incidental to that status.

Etopia will therefore host three pop-up exhibitions in which video games are displayed as if already officially enshrined as Art. In some cases, attention will be paid to their aesthetic values and technical strategies; in others, to the internal narratives of the discourses embodied in video games.

The first of the shows, Geometric: Aesthetic Synthesis as an Accidental Avant Garde (Geométricos. La síntesis estética como vanguardia involuntaria), invites visitors to savour the aesthetic delight of the Cubist abstraction in which some video games are embodied. To open the way to “elevating” video games to aesthetic entities, the exhibition begins with Symphonie Diagonal (1921) by Viking Eggeling, the leading figure of Absolute Cinema and audiovisual modernity in the 20th century. The piece is composed of strict geometries in motion. Later, we shall encounter a range of milestones of the most radical geometric abstraction in the history of video games.

The second pop-up show, Non-Places: Configuration of Spaces in Video Games (No lugares. Configuración de los espacios en el videojuego), examines the various programming and technical strategies rehearsed over these fifty years of video game history to create the fictional space experience as a setting for life and action: from the static single screen area of the earliest video games to the dynamism of scrolling in the 80s, and emerging of the Open Worlds (sandbox) and also ulterior Generative Worlds of today’s titles.

Thirdly, Activism: Changing the World through Video Games (Activismo. Transformando el mundo a través del videojuego) offers visitors a selection of games that – from widely different points of view – seduce players into changing their everyday modes of thought and behaviour. Here, users come face to face with works where the inner texts of the game (indirectly or expressly) encourage a form of behaviour or promote an ideology under the guise of mere entertainment. However, if the watcher activates his own critical eye, he or she can readily perceive the game’s narratives, symbols and signs designed to persuade. Documentation node

Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 has a clear vocation to expand knowledge and work as an effective tool to scrutinise and understand our highly complex and changing present. At first glance, one could make the facile claim that “everything is on the Net”. But that is untrue. Not all documents, music tracks, books, manifests and essays are available online. And many of those that are – indeed most of them – are bereft of any editorial filter that might preserve a scrupulous commitment to the accuracy of data and facts. Over the Internet anyone can say anything and make themselves heard, and even elevated to the same footing as an expert in the field – finally, they are taken seriously, when they present as dogma what is in fact doxia.

Likewise, our current digital society is beginning to lose sight of the book as the referential space of canonical knowledge, learning and, therefore, of mature reflection. The mental exercise involved in “reading” a screen, where oblique trajectories are traced by circling gazes, and the mental exercise involved in reading text in a book (from left to right and from top to bottom, in the Wester World) make a great difference in the cognitive processes set in motion. Therefore, even from within the heart of this project, which is deeply involved in scientific development and the dynamics of constant change and technological progress, here it is a vindicate for visitors, especially the youngest among them, an institutional reinforcement of the figure of the “book”. There will be a reading area in the exhibition space providing a selection of books on the digital image and video games, to open doors, arouse doubts and curiosities and, it is to be hoped, encourage an enthusiasm to resolve them through these or other publications. Interactive space for game console play

Thanks to the support of the Azkuna Zentroa art centre (Bilbao), the main exhibition has a space devoted to actual gameplay on historical consoles where users can enjoy titles selected from the Azkuna Zentroa collection for their historical significance. From the time the centre’s doors open every morning until they close in the evening, all young (and not so young) people are welcome to experience new sensations and challenges through this carefully picked selection of games. By no accident, the playable game consoles are located between the main exhibition and the parallel pop-up show, so visitors cannot miss them – and, if they wish, they can then make contact with the diverse knowledge and practices on display there. The titles made available to play by Etopia visitors will include:

Sega Mega Drive Collection (2010), Final Fantasy XII (2007), Minecraft (2013) and Evolve (2015).

Talks and discussions

Any exercise of dissemination and collective reflection requires a theoretical underpinning that lends form and shape to it, by awakening transversal ways of thinking about and understanding the phenomena. Etopia aims to promote the digital culture and thought that, by its own nature, today’s technologised society brings forth. This space encompasses – without defined boundaries – interactive art, psychology, history of digital art, computer engineering, sociology, artificial intelligence and political science.

During the months that Consoles, democratising the digital image 1972-2003 stays open at Etopia, there will therefore be lectures and panel discussions featuring renowned figures from widely different fields who will come together to build a holistic view of the processes and dynamics that video games and consoles have brought to the world. All events will be recorded on video and, alongside a textual summary, archived on the project website for further consultation (consolasimagendigital.org)

September 2020 Digital image and the video game: an interwoven story. Abraham San Pedro, project curator

Interactive art vs. video game: Where is the boundary (if any)? Karin Ohlenschläger, director, LABoral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón

October 2020 Promiscuous relations among Art, Science, Technology and Society (ASTS): Exchanges, flows, collaboration, appropriations and conflicts. Pau Alsina, professor, UOC/Artnodes

November 2020 Onwards: a long technological road, from Pong to Pokémon’s augmented reality. Marçal Mora Cantallops, Retromaquinitas

December 2020 An approach to the genealogy of the digital image in art. Roberta Bosco, EL PAÍS/Il Giornale Dell’Arte

January 2021 The perception of space in video games: limits and construction of Euclidean space. Eurídice Cabañes, ARSGAMES

February 2021 What is there behind a video game? Is a video game smart? Pedro Antonio González Calero. Chair Professor, Universidad Complutense/ UCM Artificial Intelligence Applications Group

March 2021 Psychological mechanisms of reward and dependence in relation to video games. Dr José Manuel Gaona, psychiatrist, addiction expert

April 2021 Quasi-real: time, space, action and the power of the self in video games. Abraham San Pedro, project curator Consoles: Democratising the digital image 1972-2003 is part of smARTplaces, an audience development venture co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Azkuna Zentroa-Alhóndiga Bilbao is a production partner of the show.

Curator: Abraham San Pedro

Coordination: María Blasco Production: Sergio Artiaga Display design: Trazacultura Graphic design: Carrascal&Co Façade: Néstor Lizalde Digital conversions: Cristian Coban, PhD / CVC Productions, United States Proofreading: Gloria Diaz Photography: David Gracia/Trazo Parallel activities partner: Fundación Zaragoza Furniture, fittings and temporary architecture: Zaragoza City Council construction teams Insurance: AON-Gil y Carvajal With the support of the ETOPIA_ team, and staff members of Zaragoza City Council, the smARTplaces network and Azkuna Zentroa-Alhondiga Bilbao.

You can download graphic materials on the assembly of the exhibition, the catalogue, and the pieces on display from the “Prensa” section in the website of the project (work in progress): https://consolasimagendigital.org/prensa/

For further information, please contact the communications team: [email protected]