essay

ARTICLE: PERFORMING WITH/IN RED DEAD REDEMPTION

Elisa Sanchez, En mémoire de Dandelion, video, sound, 4’ 12”, 2021, France

Today is the last day to watch Elisa Sanchez' Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible on VRAL. To celebrate the conclusion of the exhibition, we look back at three artworks that appropriate and repurpose Red Dead Redemption.

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In the past few years, several artists have used Red Dead Redemption 2/Online to create remarkable, often unclassifiable works. Although Rockstar Games’ Wild West themed videogame is the common denominator, the artists’ approach, intent, and execution vary considerably. Let’s consider three examples: Marie Foulston’s The Grannies, Kara Güt’s Welcome to my Desert Nexus (Deep inside my desert heart), and Elisa Sanchez’ Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible.

Let’s start with The Grannies. A short documentary clocking at 17 minutes, the film was originally conceived as a two channel installation at Now Play This, a video game festival in London. It presents the experiences of a group of players calling themselves The Grannies as they discover a secret area of the game where “normal” (read: consistent with the designers’ original intentions) rules do not apply. The players use their avatar as a vessel to explore such bizarre and weird territory. Here the relationship between the player and the avatar is clear and unambiguous. The filmmaker’s emphasis is on the artificiality of the simulation and the unexpected materiality of ethereal game spaces. The Grannies is first and foremost a statement about the nature of video games made by expert players, i.e. Kalonica Quigley and Marigold Bartlett, Melbourne-based friends and game developers, along with friends and fellow game-makers Ian MacLarty and Andy Brophy. Formally speaking, the video maintains the split screen/dual screen format of the original installation, unlike the works by Güt and Sanchez, which follow a less hyper-mediated approach, thus resulting in a more immediate and “transparent” viewing experience.

Kara Güt’s Welcome to my Desert Nexus introduces an extra level of performativity. Based on an existing screenplay, it features a group of player-actors performing within the game Red Dead Redemption Online before a live audience. Gemma Fantacci describes Welcome to my Desert Nexus as a“three-act play combining different aspects of performance and online gaming, IRL acting, and avatar dramatization”. A commentary on the myth of the frontier - “a facade upon which the player could paint their fantasies, just as the frontier of digital space is a facade for the same. In thinking about the facade and the false promise of infinity” (Kara Güt) - Welcome to my Desert Nexus is primarily a live performance, one in which things could go wrong - both on a technical and practical level. The actors' performance is recorded and subsequently shown as a machinima. Kara Güt’s Welcome to my Desert Nexus is a groundbreaking hybrid of gaming and theater, literally and metaphorically redefining the notion of “play”, in physical and online spaces. The theatrical performance is imbued with liveness, that special kind of hic et nunc that Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of the artwork and that Philip Auslander explored in his seminal text Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999). Although the play does feature meta referential elements (it was, after all, inspired by Sartre’s No Exit) , it is mostly consistent with the Wild West tropes and conventions of the original source, Red Dead Redemption. The actors maintain their in-character persona throughout the entire play….

Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE & VIDEO ESSAY: Albert Mason or, in game-photography as "Manifest Destiny"...

Request for RDR2 mod, https://foundynnel.tumblr.com

…OR, the queering of in-game photography

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Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in 1899, when photography was still considered a “new medium” or, as the cliché goes, a “medium in its infancy”. In fact, the device that turned photography into a mass medium in the United States, the Kodak Brownie, was introduced a year later, in 1900. Photography nonetheless plays an important role within the context of the game. On a narrative level, it is embodied by the character of Albert Mason, a real-life nature photographer that the player first encounters in a quest entitled “Arcadia for Amateurs”. French artiste-astronaute Elisa Sanchez (2021) describes her encounter with Mason in her autobiographical essay:

“Arcadia for Amateurs” is a side mission where I met Albert Mason. Arcadia, a country of villages in the mountainous part of the Peloponnese in ancient Greece, has become a symbol of a primitive and idyllic place where people lived happily and in love. It is also the name of one of the first homosexual associations in France, which made me hope for a romance between Arthur and Albert. But, of course, there was no way to make Arthur Morgan anything other than a strict heterosexual.  

Albert Mason is an amateur photographer who wants to take pictures of the wildlife of the United States. Clumsy, knowing neither the fauna nor the flora, he solicits my help to protect him from the wild animals he wants to photograph. The romantic visions of the Wild West conveyed by the press and popular literature - which describe the splendid sunsets and the rough comradeship of the men of the frontier and yet ignore the massacre of the native population and the hardness of life - inspired man living in the Eastern cities like Albert Mason to try their luck in the West, in search of a more fulfilling life. 

Mason’s character was inspired by George Shiras III, who was the first to use flash photography, thanks to the explosion of magnesium powder, to photograph the night life of animals. Albert Mason dreams of the Wild West as Arcadia: a wild country, which has not yet known the throes of civilization, filled with magnificent animals that are waiting for him to be revealed. Albert displays a sense of wonder that is quite similar to the one I felt when I entered the game. As fascinated as he is, I observe with binoculars dozens of animals, listed in an encyclopedia that grows richer as I discover them. I pick flowers, track raccoons and get mauled by grizzly bears, and I can’t help but feel the beauty of the moonlight or the reflection of the sun in the streams with each step. Red Dead Redemption 2 is fully aware of its aesthetics and incorporates a photo mode which allows the player to capture images of the great wilderness.”

As Sanchez writes, the fictional Mason is indeed based on a historical figure, George Shiras III, like several other characters featured in the game. The “real” Shiras was born into a wealthy family in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, later becoming part of Pittsburgh, in 1859. His father, George Jr., was an attorney who served on the United States Supreme Court for eleven years. Shiras III attended the most exclusive schools in the country: he was an undergraduate at Cornell and — following in his father’s footsteps — received his law degree from Yale. He eventually became the U.S. Representative from the state of Pennsylvania. He was also an amateur wildlife photographer and his photos were featured in the National Geographic. In 1906, the influential magazine published 74 of his photographs and in 1928, Shiras donated 2,400 of his glass plate negatives, which are now part of the National Geographic Society archive. In turn, Shiras III’s award-winning Midnight — a suite of ten photographs of deer taken at night, all of which were taken from a boat using a jack light and illuminated by flashlight — were instrumental in the somehow controversial transformation of the National Geographic from a technical magazine into a mainstream publication (Brower, 2008, pp. 173-174)…

Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT AU-DELÀ DU DÉSERT FLOU, PLUS AUCUNE SAUVEGARDE N’EST POSSIBLE (PART TWO OF TWO)

What beliefs, ideologies, and values inform the most popular video game set in the Wild West? Elisa Sanchez, the author of Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde provides thought-provoking answers in a compelling essay in two parts.

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Watch Elisa Sanchez’ Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible

the first part of this essay is available here


Wild Wild West

In English, the word frontier does not only characterize the demarcation between two territories or two things, but designates a region or wilderness located on the edge or beyond a populated territory. This frontier is not a political or even a geographical delimitation. It is an area in motion, a space that moves with the population growth of white settlers. It is the West, with a capital W, always far, far away. It is a goal, a challenge, vast enough to absorb thousands of settlers and yet remain unconquered, eternally offering new adventures to those willing to risk their lives to experience them all. The frontier is a symbolic place, real and imaginary at the same time. It does not matter that its conquest was won at the expense of the land and its occupants.

In his 1893 article, the historian Frederick Turner discusses the importance of the frontier and westward expansion in the formation process of the American people: their identity and core ideas (e.g., democracy) are based on the idea of eradication. Specifically, the conquest of the West would consist of a double overcoming of borders, not only geographical, but also internal. The widespread popularization of his thesis on the frontier, which would make the one who overcomes it gain strength and individuality, has influenced a great number of narratives and folk stories, which describe the mythical Wild West by highlighting characters that are bearers of individualism and violence. Turner ignores gender and race, and says little about class. He sees the natives as an expression of the wilderness to be conquered at all costs. Like mountains, bears, and wolves, indigenous people consist of an obstacle to westward progress and self-realization.

The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action.

(Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Martino Publishing, [1920] 2014)

Turner, and many others with him, subscribe to the idea that conquest and killing are conducive of human progress. They are a necessary price to pay, regrettable perhaps, but non negotiable. Only genocide can make humanity evolve. But by making the frontier an exclusively male and white phenomenon - thus excluding women and racialized people -Turner postulates that the only point of view that matters is that of the white settlers. To tell a story is to organize reality by assigning a unity of time and place, to allow some voices and silence others. The myth of the frontier provides a plot, as well as a direction: straight for the sun that sets the sky ablaze with purple and scarlet. But if one stares for too long ay the sun, one becomes blind.

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army surrounded a camp of Miniconjous Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The soldiers searched the camp for weapons; caught in the grip of five hundred soldiers and four cannons, the Miniconjous had no choice but to comply. But during the search, a shot rang out and the army opened fire and machine-gunned the Miniconjous. Three hundred corpses were dumped a few days later in a mass grave; nearly half were women and children. While the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to portray the destruction of Wounded Knee as a battle, later investigations clearly established that it was a massacre; the Miniconjous Sioux were outnumbered, starved and unarmed. Yet some twenty soldiers who participated were awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest award given to a member of the U.S. armed forces. It was not until 2019 that these awards were rescinded.

I am Arthur Morgan, a strong, violent white man with a thick beard and two guns. I know this body is not mine, and yet. Where does Arthur Morgan, the avatar who rides tirelessly under beautiful sunsets, and Elisa Sanchez, who plays the game over and over again, begin? Arthur is not only the main character in the story I am being told; as a player, I am an active participant in the story and embody the character. His actions are my own, and while the roads we travel have been laid out by others, I choose to travel them…

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This is a Patreon exclusive article. To read the full text consider joining our Patreon community.

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT AU-DELÀ DU DÉSERT FLOU, PLUS AUCUNE SAUVEGARDE N’EST POSSIBLE (PART ONE OF TWO)

What beliefs, ideologies, and values inform the most popular video game set in the Wild West? Elisa Sanchez, the author of Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde provides thought-provoking answers in a compelling essay in two parts.

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Watch Elisa Sanchez’ Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible


The unbearable nostalgia of the setting sun

It is through the conquest of the West that the American notion of the frontier was constructed, one of the most enduring myths of our recent history. The frontier is cast as a horizon to be reached, to be seized, to be conquered, where one can fully realize oneself and, at the same time, fulfill the promise of a much greater destiny, a promise that entails the victory of civilization over the wilderness. By making this universe palpable to the point of outrageousness for the sheer pleasure of players, Red Dead Redemption 2, reintroduces the narrative of the frontier and its conquest which had informed the Wild West film genre for decades. But it also fails to provide something different, to rewrite this myth from a point of view that does not coincide with that of the conqueror.

In 1899, the mythical Wild West is living its last days. As a result of one of the most dramatic genocides of the history of mankind, native peoples have been chased off the plains to make way for white settlers; the forests were cut down for their wood, the hills gutted for their coal. In these apocalyptic times that accompany the end of the cowboy as a hero, I assume the role of Arthur Morgan, a member of an outcast crew led by Dutch Van Der Linde. I have a thick beard and two guns. I attack trains, rob banks, and pick flowers. I have died a thousand times and come back to life a thousand times more. I roam the territory where my story is set, crossing mountains and swamps, plains and deserts, always on the move, always searching.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an action-adventure game, developed and published in 2018 by Rockstar Games. According to the game's official website, RDR 2 tells "an epic story set in the heart of the unforgiving wilderness of the United States," in a vast and immersive world. Every inch of this world has been meticulously thought out, every detail scrupulously studied to make it feel alive and authentic. RDR 2 required thousands of employees, eight years of development, 700 voice actors, 2,000 pages of script and 500,000 lines of dialogue.

It's an absurdly ambitious game that broke new records at launch. It’s an incredible achievement that required enormous effort and sacrifice. Rockstar Games’ studios have embraced an extreme work culture ethos, crunch squared: “voluntary” overtime and pressure to work more than they should. During the end credits, thousands of names scroll by, showing all the people who worked on the game. Well, almost all of them: these credits, a guarantee of visibility and recognition, are also a means of pressure. To see your name in the credits, you were required to keep you head down in the trenches until the end of the project. Few professions are characterized as a “passion job”, a qualification that would justify spending time and energy to be poorly, or not at all, remunerated.

The professions of video game developer and artist-author are among them.

Hic sunt dracones

At the beginning of the game, the map of my universe is covered by an opaque white fog, which will dissipate as I progress. This mist, so fragile and yet terribly thick, hides any relief, any city, any road. In medieval cartography, the expression hic sunt dracones (here are the dragons) was used to designate unknown or dangerous territories: where cartographers have not yet gone, monsters covered with scales remain…

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