remediation

ARTICLE: A CURSED MACHINIMA

Deciphering the metaphors of Hey Plastic God please don’t save the Robotic King, Let him drown in Acidic Anesthetic

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Photosensitive seizure warning: A very small percentage of people may experience a seizure when exposed to certain visual images, including flashing lights or patterns that may appear in video games. Even people who have no history of seizures or epilepsy may have an undiagnosed condition that can cause these “photosensitive epileptic seizures” while watching videos with flashing lights

By now, you should be familiar with Babak Ahteshamipour’s highly synergistic practice: he has been combining painterly works with machinima for a while. But what’s perhaps more unique is the artist’s interaction between his own musical production and machinima. Working as the ultimate artist-editor-musician-producer, in 2022 Babak released Hey Plastic God please don’t save the Robotic King, Let him drown in Acidic Anesthetic, a video made for his album Specter, Spectrum, Speculum released via the Independent Cassette label Industrial Coast.

In his review, Kiriakos Spirou wrote:

The album belongs in the wide range of media-based practices that comprise Babak Ahteshamipour’s artistic output, which include painting, sculpture, video art, and digital art. As such, it is part of the same universe of cultural references, appropriation, critique, and irony that characterises his work in general. Central in Babak’s work is the way he negotiates violence and trauma — such as the anxieties of environmental collapse, neoliberal economies, western supremacy, and war — through mock playfulness and jest. In his visual work, he appropriates references from pop culture to conceal feelings of sheer terror under a neurotically splashed veneer of funny. To the same effect, he appropriates in his music the tropes and aesthetics of feel-good video game music, twisting their soothing familiarity into moods that span from ironic ennui to sugar-choked despair.

Both dealing with the power fantasies of a modern day despot who dreams of owning the world — the perfect metaphor for the gamer —Specter, Spectrum, Speculum and Hey Plastic God… bring the sheer darkness of digital culture to the forefront. The dominant themes of commercial video gaming — search and destroy, command and conquer and so on — are the leitmotifs of both audiovisual productions, which can be interpreted as a cautionary tale: the narcissism intrinsic to digital media may lead to delusions of grandeur, or worse, madness.

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A FEW THOUGHTS ON VIDEO GAME LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS

Jason Rouse, DayZ En Plein Air, Oil on board, 12’ x 18’, 2014

The emerging genre of video game landscape paintings is rife with contradictions. This is why it is so interesting.

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In Jason Rouse’s artistic practice, the distance between the canvas and the screen tends to disappear. What is at stake, here, is the same convergence that Anne Freidberg discussed in her masterful book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), an overlap that applies both to framing devices and to what we could call, after John Berger, ways of seeing. This is especially manifest in Kossoff Flees Ukraine, in which a scanned painting of Leon Kossoff is imported through photogrammetry into a video game development toolkit and then “animated” via algorithms, images and sounds. The painterly nature of Kossoff Flees Ukraine is also evoked through the “slow pace” of the video itself, which in turn alludes to the popular first-person shooter/open world DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2018). We can look at a previous work by Rouse, DayZ En Plein Air (2014), as the ideal companion piece to Kossoff Flees Ukraine.

Created almost a decade ago, DayZ En Plein Air is the outcome of the artist’s ongoing study of the relationship between the medium of painting and the medium of the video game. Such exploration can be described as a process of de-contextualization: Rouse translates digital artifacts into paintings and vice versa. This practice, by all means, is far from unique. It is, in fact, relatively common within contemporary art: consider, for instance, the work of such artists as Aram Bartholl and Miltos Manetas. The former has consistently, almost compulsively introduced elements, assets, and even behaviors that originated within the domain of video games into the real world: such intrusions often trigger a cognitive dissonance in the viewer, whose impact is enhanced by a powerful aesthetic experience concocted by the German artist. In the meantime, Manetas has recreated through the medium of painting the iconography of digital tools such as Google Maps, as part of his ongoing, encyclopedic project Internet Paintings…

Matteo Bittanti

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Bohemia Interactive, DayZ, video game, 2018

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