imaginetic

By: crazykaro

May 16 2010

Tags: artwork, database, economy, facebook, Manovich, mise en abyme, software, user, video games, web 2.0

Category: Just Words

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In our last lecture and tutorial, we were concerned with software as an image of culture and a process, a cultural activity. I already read parts of Lev Manovich’s “New Media Language” for a paper I wrote two years ago, so I was already a little bit familiar with the database aesthetic of new media. We also talked about open-source software, and I think a term that is equally important would be web 2.0.

Websites (or software) like facebook, myspace or twitter don’t provide the content itself, they merely provide their users with an empty structure that is supposed to be filled by the users – what made those websites so incredibly successful, as the users were actually creating the content themselves.

The same development can be observed in the video and computer game industry: User-created content is getting more and more common, and is even expected in some genres. The fascination of games like The Sims or Spore lies mostly in the possibility to create content and share it with other people on the web. Other games rely almost exclusively on user-generated content, like Little Big Planet, a game that is basically a toolbox to create characters, levels and entirely new games (what could probably be called a recursive process: a game that consists of creating new games other users play and alter to create new games again). It is also a way to escape economic limitations – as it becomes more and more expensive to program a video game, creating an empty structure and leaving the creation of the content to the users is a way to realize successful and creative games without a huge financial risk (for example, the game Gran Turismo 5 did cost over $80 million dollars to develop, Grand Theft Auto over a $100 millions).

I also have already heard of the Droste effect, though under a different name, and in a literary context: mise en abyme. It also describes the reduplication of images or text, ‘into infinity’. Fractals, the mathematical images where a greater structure consists of smaller and smaller parts that are all similar in shape to the whole, are probably another incarnation of an mise en abyme.

Manaovich’s database aesthetic gave me the idea of making my final artwork for this course a non-linear one, transcending a classic narrative, and make it circular instead. I wonder if instead of 3 minutes of movie I could make three one-minute ‘movies’, that run on three seperate screens, in an infinite loop. It would mimic a basic database narative, as the user can watch an access different parts of the movie when he or she wishes, or all at once.