"The artist tends to be a man who is fully aware of the environment [...] The artistic conscience is focused on the physics and social implications of technology. The artist builds models of the new environments and new social lives that are the hidden potential of new technologies" (Marshall McLuhan, 1964) 0. SolidLandscapes. An oxymoron. There is nothing “solid” about these virtual landscapes. Solid comes from Latin solidus, indicating firm and stable objects. The virtual landscapes of the videogames, on the other hand, are fluid and unstable. They simulate solidity, but are fragile, more fragile than the reality we take for granted. These spaces are made of polygons, that is, they appear to have three dimensions. They are solid in the sense that they present a “uniformly close and coherent texture”, according to the Marriam-Webster. SolidLandscapes. 1. Our lives have become intertwined with information technologies to the point that today it is impossible to live without them. Videogames have contributed significantly to this viral and virtual contamination. Virtual and real are so integrated that it becomes problematic, if not pointless, to distinguish between the two. The gamer, after all, embodies all the characteristic of the cyborg, using prostheses to interfere with electronic ghosts on a screen. Our living spaces are becoming more and more videogame-like. Driving on an Italian highway, frequent LED-signs inform me that “Performing a U-Turn Will Cost You Up to 10 Points”, a warning which seems to have come out of the latest racing game. 2. Our spaces are changing shape before our eyes. Marc Augé's non-places have been superseded by hyper-places, the electronic landscapes of the videogame that have transcended the screen to become a forma mentis, a way of understanding and conceptualizing reality, an updated version of Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping. Hyper-places are abstractions of mediated spaces, like the ones we experience on television and cinema. Hyper-Places are spatial instantiation of simulations. Hyper-Places are pervasive in technologically advanced societies. These spaces have their own set of rules. Their inner logic, peculiar chronologies, specific dynamics. Videogames do not really simulate reality: rather, they simulate mediated realities. Otherwise said: Electronic Arts' Fifa Soccer is not a simulation of soccer (the sport) rather, it is a simulation of televised soccer, with its own visual and rhetoric conventions and codes. 3. Videogame spaces are as real as the real ones, or, as Baudrillard would say, as fake. After all, human beings are spending more and more times in simulated environment. Videogame spaces are global: they speak a visual language that, in most cases, transcends local idioms. These spaces are not historical, rather they create their own history even when they evoke real historical events and settings. These are spaces that can be traversed individually but also collectively. Some can even be inhabited. These spaces are excessive, hence the prefix hyper. We cannot explore them completely: they always escape us, somehow. Videogames are about architecture, not narrative. But architecture is not what used to be. As Virilio noticed in 1991, “architecture [is] no longer in architecture, but in geometry; the space-time of vectors, the aesthetic of construction is dissimulated in the special effects of the communication machines, engines of transfer and transmission” (1991: 64). Videogames are about simulating movement in space(s). Videogames are about manipulating time and space. In these sense, they embody all of the characters that Bachtin identified in the chronotope. "One of the biggest revolutions in Western culture occured when the world of the arts in the eighteenth century began to deliberately create landscapes and environments as a way of controlling mental life" (Marshall McLuhan, 1964) 4. In Megalopolis (1992), Celeste Olalquiaga writes about “psychasthenia”, a psychological disorder in which the individual becomes confused in (by) its surroundings to the point of losing sense of direction. This happens in enclosed, simulated spaces such as shopping centres, casinos and theme parks. But also in videogames, where the compulsive repetition of a single act - such as jumping over a simulated bridge or driving the streets of a virtual city over and over and over again - can lead to what Olalquiaga a loss of confidence so that "all acts are suspect and self-perception is unreliable" (1992: 7). The mechanical repetition that videogames induce, tend to paralyse the individual. This happens at various levels, the most ironic being the fact that videogames allow human beings to travel far without really moving. A game allow you to walk in the streets of an American city, fight against the trolls that hide in the hills of a fantasy realm or play soccer in the most famed stadia of the planet without leaving your room. Gaming activity is all about obsessive repetition: pressing buttons and manipulate a joypad, mouse, or keyboard. Psychasthenia is about phobias, obsessions, compulsions, or excessive anxiety, the precursor to compulsive/obsessive disorder. There is a third more intriguing definition developed by the social theorist Roger Caillois: “legendary psychasthenia refers to the ability of some animals to alter their appearance in response to their physical environment. A chameleon, for example, changes colour in order to blend into its surroundings”. Caillois compares this biological phenomenon to psychological experiences of subjects who perceive themselves becoming absorbed into, or mixed up with, the physical space surrounding them (one of his examples is the fear of the dark). It is easy to enter in a videogame space. It is harder to exit. 5. Most videogame spaces are designed to encourage particular forms of behaviour, such as destruction and killing. But not all spaces are the same. The Sims, for instance, offers a Stepford Wives-like environment in which players can live the life they secretly dream but do not dare to confess, transforming their loved ones in subservient automatons. Videogames' spaces perform a specific function. Arrows and blinking objects direct the player who, in turn, is consciously and unconsciously mapping the spaces as it explores it. In a sense, videogame spaces are the prototypes of the cities of the future. Paul Virilio argues that the airport prefigures tomorrow’s urban spaces. Airports are standardised spaces (or non-places, according to Augé), air-conditioned, and under a pervasive surveillance. Simulations are like airports, in a sense Games like the SimCity series give the player an almost absolute panoptic power. 6. Mauro Ceolin takes a screenshot of a game and transforms it into a postcard from the future. But that’s not all. He digitally erases all the avatars and videogame characters, leaving the spaces completely empty. The videogame spaces, thus, become somehow eerie, strange, and unsettling. The SolidLandscapes series reminds me of those apocalyptic movies which depict derelict, abandoned, desolated cities. The empty London of 28 Days Later (2002). The desolate San Francisco of On The Beach (1959). The deserted New Work of the Omega Man (1975). As Kim Newman writes in Apocalypse Cinema, “The commonest recurring image of the Apocalypse, in literature and in film, is the dilapidated and depopulated city” (2002: 18). Ceolin perfectly recaptures this sense of uneasiness, loneliness and alienation. 7. Videogames represent the latest and most effective manifestation of the proliferation of the iconic in contemporary culture. Ceolin’s SolidLandscapes is a collection of urban and fantastic spaces from the most popular videogames. They prefigure an imminent catastrophe. The anonymous building of the FlightLandscape is awaiting a dramatic collision, an aerial penetration that would produce a spectacular collapse. Deprived of his main anti-hero, Tommaso Vercetti, Grand Theft Auto becomes a generic urban space that seems just too quiet. Something is happening in that building, I am sure. Something unsettling and disturbing, I just know. The same applies to the Tony Hawk landscape: the absence of cars and pedestrian is somehow unsettling. Even the most colourful and cartoon-like scenarios (Mario, Kirby, and SimGolf) fail to conceal their sinister tone from the eye of the viewer who is quietly expecting an explosion of violence. Ceolin freezes the videogame, which is constantly moving, to create something else. Ceci n’est pas un jeu video. To paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, a video game is truth 30/60 times per second. Ceolin’s artwork is a big lie: his paintings look like a game, but they are not. Video games are a syncretic form or art in the sense that they combine all of the other arts: drawing, painting, architecture, music, cinema, interactivity and iterativity. The SolidLandscapes series brings in the foreground the visual aspect of the videogame, but by doing so, he alters the very fabric of its source. Mauro Ceolin becomes a vector of solids, instrumental in the diffusion of appearances. SolidLandscapes. An oxymoron. Milan, October 2004 Matteo BIttanti REFERENCES Augé, Marc (2002) In the Metro, Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press. Augé, Marc (1999) An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Cultural Studies), New York: Verso. Bernardi, Sandro (2002) Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano, Genova: Marsilio. Lefebvre, Henry (1991) The Production of Space, New York: Blackwell Publishers. Massey Doreen (2000) Cities Worlds, New York: Routledge. Newman, Kim (2002) Apocalypse Movies, London: St. Martin's Press. Olalquiaga, Celeste (1991) Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sorkin, Michael (1992) Variations on a Theme Park : The New American City and the End of Public Space, New York: Hill and Wang. Virilio, Paul (1991) The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Cambridge: MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. |
