Controller: Artists Crack the Game Code

Some time in the mid-’90s, comedians Penn and Teller created a video game called Desert Bus. The object of the game was to drive a bus down a straight and desolate highway through the Nevada Desert. The wheels on this virtual bus were out of alignment so you couldn’t just leave it running, you had to keep steering to stay on the road. After eight hours, you would arrive in Las Vegas and earn one point. To earn a second point, you had to drive another eight hours back to Los Angeles. As a conceptual conceit (though it is rumoured some actually played it and the alltime high score is 12) addressing violence in video games, the banality of everyday life, the passage of time, ennui and the American landscape, Desert Bus is a rare and ingenious example of self-reflection and critique in this nascent medium. It is also an unacknowledged precursor to a recent group exhibition of artistically hacked video games at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto. Desert Bus, like the best work in “Controller: Artists Crack the Game Code,” invites both gamers and non-players to reconsider not simply what it means to play a video game, but what it means to be.

As they have with film and music, artists are now taking video games and reconfiguring them in unsuspected ways for creative ends. It is fitting that an early work (not included in the InterAccess exhibition) by Corey Arcangel, one of the most prominent artists working in this field, was a rejigged “shoot ’em up” game he dubbed I Shot Andy Warhol. Similar to the Pop artist’s repetitive series of commercial images, the hacker’s “broken” game deflates the professed intent of the consumer good to reveal repressed and unacknowledged meanings. Tasman Richardson does this on a basic level with his Atari Glitch series, but the results are purely formal and the videos of abstract digital imagery and noise sampled from the output of damaged Atari game cartridges miss the point of “glitch” aesthetics entirely. Originally applied to a highly theorized branch of electronic music that exploited processing errors in computer sound software to elicit a particular strain of information anxiety, “glitch art” is only affective when the technology is current; otherwise, there is just nostalgia. Art group The Prize Budget for Boys suffers a similar fate with their admittedly elegant marriage of classic video game graphics to modernist aesthetics in Pac-Mondrian and Calderoids. Like all the works in this exhibition, familiarity with the original is essential to appreciating the final product, but in this case, once the novelty wears off, there is not much more to these works than the game itself.

Anita Fontaine’s CuteXdoom, a video game within a video game, introduces the essential element of participation and, more importantly, identification. Fontaine created her work inside another and appropriated the latter’s graphic infrastructure to drape her own images and narrative. The payoff— a frenetic collage of computer graphics—is purely visual, but to reach it, it is necessary to enter a virtual world and become someone else, moving through it, navigating its edges to find its heart. The pleasure of being absorbed into a creation is the driving force behind the multi-million-dollar gaming industry and the unique experience offered by video games. The exceptional art in this exhibition exploits and explores this.

Myfanwy Ashmore works with obsolete video games but manages to avoid pure nostalgia by reducing her games to their basic elements (space and time), producing a condensed tragic narrative. As if coded by Samuel Beckett, her Mario Trilogy places the eponymous plumber underwater, in prison or wandering through an empty landscape, with only the viewer/player to move him around aimlessly until the game clock runs out and he dies. We imbue this simple avatar with agency through the control pad, creating a connection between the two of us, a relationship of identity. (And how strong is that identification when the player has spent hundreds of hours “being” Mario, triumphing over endless challenges, growing with him from game to game?) By leaving us with nothing to do but wait for his/our death, Ashmore creates an oddly affecting tribute to time’s passing.

In fact, every video game is essentially about mortality. Most, unlike Desert Bus, do their best to deny it through distraction, filling up the space between beginning and end with a plethora of activities and adventures. Alexander Galloway and the RSG software collective, however, manage to isolate instances of immortality in the virtual world. Their installation Prepared Playstation presents three scenes found within the skateboarding game Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 that trap the player in a never-ending loop, sustaining the game play indefinitely. One in particular keeps a skateboarder spinning endlessly on a concrete pylon while, in the background, darkness turns to light as the virtual days pass. But this triumph over the program is meaningless and eternal life quickly becomes limbo’s torment. Never having to die means never getting to live and you can’t help but identify for a moment with this monument to the loss of our electronic selves. ■

“Controller: Artists Crack the Game Code” was on exhibit at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto from February 25 to March 25, 2006.

Terence Dick is a writer who lives in Toronto.