NEWS: A CLOSER LOOK AT CHEATIMERISM

Luca Miranda’s Cheatimerism will be on display on VRAL until November 26 2020. Miranda is a young Italian artist whose practice focuses on the relationship between reality and simulation. He is especially interested in the notion of the avatar as an aesthetic entity and its representational features. In his work, Miranda actively questions game mechanics and concepts such as immersion, identification, and interpassivity. Two of his works, Alma and The Bowl (La jatte), have been presented at the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Recently Miranda completed a project titled UNDERW[H]E(A)RE by “photographing” the private parts of more than one hundred virtual characters in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity (2014), in a style reminiscent of the upskirting pornographic genre, which Urban Dictionary (currently) defines as

A relatively new practice where someone (usually a pervy guy) takes pictures up a girls skirt unbeknownst to her using his mobile phone or camera. There’s a theory that it’s the act of taking the picture whilst the victim is unaware that gives the photographer the thrill, and not in fact the poor quality photograph it results in.

The full project is available here.

We are happy to present UNDERW[H]E(A)RE in machinima form:

Luca Miranda, UNDERW[H]E(A)RE, digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 8’ 33”, 2020.

Luca Miranda, UNDERW[H]E(A)RE, Game photography, 100 screenshot, 3840 x 2160 (original resolution).

Below is a short interview with Miranda about UNDERW[H]E(A)RE.

Matteo Bittanti: The fetish is a recurrent trope in your work. In Cheatimerism, cars are the fetishized object of desire, whereas in UNDERW[H]E(A)RE, it’s the female body that is being objectified by the video game camera for the pleasure of a (presumably) male gamer. What kind of gaze is at play in these two projects?

Luca Miranda: Fetishization, abuse, and replication are crucial aspects in my work and they inform my relationship to video games. In fact, I believe that digital game worlds are governed by the fetish: the player forgets the nature of the object itself - which can be a non player character, a 3D model of an object, the level design - only to assign his or her own definition of value. But this is true up to a certain point. I prefer to use the notion of factish coined by Bruno Latour (note 1). According to Latour, there is no need to recognize that there is a fundamental separation between the product and the manufacturer, the object and the subject, because this gap is always filled by the displacement that the product creates on the manufacturer. In other words, we are always superseded by the very goods that we produce. And this also applies to the gaze, which is shaped by the technology that we use and that shapes us as well. A perfect example is the relationship between the streamer, the viewer, the video game (as a product) and technologies of vision. This creates a sort of paradox in which the viewer (including technology, which can interpret our expressions and analyze our feelings) is always watched. We have not strayed far from August Furhmann’s Kaiserpanorama. In both Cheatimerism and UNDERW[H]E(A)RE what is at stake is two kinds of gaze strongly rooted both in visual culture and in the video game experience, that is, the gaze of the possessor and the gaze of the dominator. I do not use these terms to exclusively refer to a coercive use of the act of looking. In fact, the act and the will to possess and dominate can exist even where overt violence cannot be identified. In the case of Cheatimerism, the observer’s gaze coincides with that of non player characters (NPC) “living” in San Andreas. This makes explicit the kind of relationship that we have with the consumer products we abuse. Maybe some passerby may wonder about the mountain of cars, but in the end there are always two possible outcomes: either the NPC ignores it or gets stuck between the collateral damage of the free market. Even the gamer’s gaze is often entangled in the rhetorical networks of which he or she is not aware or to which can contribute by maintaining the status quo. As for UNDERW[H]E(A)RE, here we are dealing with a peep-show dynamic. The camera (which operates as the user’s eye) is situated at a specific level with respect to the gaze of the virtual population. The interesting thing about female non player characters in UNDERW[H]E(A)RE is the fact that what matters is not what is seen by the camera – the petticoat itself never changes – but just the fact that the player can see by using the camera. 

Matteo Bittanti: UNDERW[H]E(A)RE is an “intimate” exploration of the dessous of more than one hundred virtual characters of Assassin’s Creed: Unity. What I find fascinating about your project – a visual taxonomy of digital petticoats – is that it clearly demonstrates that class exists even where it should be invisible or even non existent altogether. Only the private parts of aristocratic characters are simulated in detail, whereas those of the lower class are generic, nondescript, thus erotically unappealing. So, rather than being the great equalizer – a visual democratizer – video games seem to reinforce real life inequalities. What is the role of games in shaping the collective imaginary? 

Luca Miranda: Exactly. In Assassin's Creed: Unity you can only see the underwear of aristocratic female characters – at least as far as clothing is concerned. But what matters, again, is not the undergarment itself and what it conceals. As I mentioned before, what really matters is being able to see that specific piece of garment. Such a possibility is symptomatic of a certain tendency in video game design. That is, the obscene, pornographic elements of the game exists to satisfy a tendentially masculine gaze. This is a dominant feature of commercial video games. These games may offer an extreme degree of customization and selection of the ethnicity of one’s character, but it is precisely just that…customization. Video game characters – in mainstream gaming, as well as many independent titles – often reflect a militaristic, patriotic and belligerent type. In the case of female NPCs in UNDERW[H]E(A)RE their only purpose is to be watched. A player may well not do so throughout the game, but the possibility is there. All you have to do is get under the “right” woman’s skirt. As you mentioned, if you situate the the camera under the clothes of less aristocratic female models you can't see anything but a void. This is not just a technical issue. There are in fact a series of tensions underlying the culture of video games that serve as operational models for the collective imaginary. In an age marked by cultural, ethnic, social, and economic disparities, the strength of monopolistic capitalism and uncritical homologation have become more manifest than ever. The representative forms of video games are symptomatic of the functioning of the entertainment industry and the complex videogame ecosystem as a whole. There is a concealment of fundamental mechanisms and manipulation of tastes, ideas and ideals, both conscious and unconscious. 

Matteo Bittanti: Video games and pornography rely on similar aesthetic imperatives – the excess, the grotesque, the obscene – and produce similar pleasures. They’re both performative and mechanical, even methodical in their execution. They also teach us what to desire and how to desire. How does UNDERW[H]E(A)RE address the proximity of the visual regimes? How does machinima bridge the gap between the viewer and the simulated reality?

Luca Miranda: The relationship between pornography and video games is stronger than it may appear at first, both from a purely aesthetic point of view and in relation to an affective and ideological perspective. Think about the figure of Bowsette in late 2018 or Fortnite as the second most searched term on Pornhub in 2017. These may seem tangential affinities, but I believe that they reveal a lot about the mechanisms of pleasure and desire endemic to virtual worlds. The pornographic excess and the pain-pleasure nexus that can be found in the videogame experience are conjoined in a recursive loop; so much so that we reach a point where it is difficult to separate the concept of freedom of fruition from that of pornographic (visual, tactile, multisensory) consumption. The commercial video game stimulates the famous Lacanian enjoyment that Žižek summarizes with the consumerist imperative “Enjoy!”. The incessant tasks that video games require from the players – missions, side quests, DLCs, extra content, etc. – are increasing. Their function is to keep that loop hidden, the continuous recycling of the same mechanisms and rhetoric. As far as UNDERW[H]E(A)RE is concerned, it does not so much want to address a discourse towards the predominant visual regime of contemporary entertainment as to make itself the visual regime through which video games teach us how, what and how much to desire. Because of its non interactive nature, machinima can provide critical detachment, showing the contradictions inherent in our narratives and tools and opening a dialogue towards these issues. 

Matteo Bittanti: Your work contains multitudes. The very title of your work alludes to a space, a time, and a material good, thus evoking the very nature of digital games, which simultaneously are product and a situated experience, a temporal practice, and a technological device. What kind of agency does the player have in this relationship? And how does that differ from the artist’s? 

Luca Miranda: Digital worlds can open up multiple dimensions simultaneously. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to use catchy phrases like “today we are all gamers” to justify things like gamification. Such a term, generally related to marketing and social management, obfuscates the real nature of game culture. Despite the incessant marketing about unrestrained freedom within the virtual space it seems obvious that the role of the player is becoming more and more passive. Interactivity has been replaced by interpassive dynamics. There is a fundamental difference between the artist and the consumer. Both are users, but the artist engages with a game in a creative way. He assumes a critical attitude towards a work while the consumer wears himself out in the game by moving away from a real awareness of the work that he or she is performing in order to play. In this sense, the artist is not an elitist type, quite the opposite: the consumer can become an artist if he or she starts to play for real, that is, by appropriating and subverting the game. This is the kind of play performed by modders, Game Artists, and youtubers who break the codes of the game to reveal their “invisible structures”. Even cheaters in a certain sense can be called artists. 

Notes

1 See Bruno Latour. Il culto moderno dei fatticci, Milano, Meltemi, 2017, pp. 31-32.