From the Quaternions Sent Thu, Mar 4th 1999, 06:28
From the Quaternions Sent Thu, Mar 4th 1999, 06:28
Could this possibly be more bizarre? A NY Times article on Blip Bleep, Soundtracks to imaginary Videogames... >From Pong to Song: Video Games Inspire Artists By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL No one will ever confuse Donkey Kong with Don Quixote, but in a quest for epic aesthetic adventure and pulse-pounding conceptual excitement, many digital artists and musicians are turning to video games for creative inspiration. At least two exhibits of computer games designed by artists are planned for the first half of this year. And the pervasive cultural influence of Pac-Man, Pong and other arcade classics can be heard in "Blip, Bleep", a compact disk released late last year by the tiny New York label Lucky Kitchen. Each of the 18 tracks on "Blip, Bleep" is a soundtrack to an imaginary video game. The album's diverse contributors have even fabricated descriptions for their made-up diversions. To play "Family Tree Polo," for example, you would "bounce through time in your ambulance" and "save your injury-prone ancestors so you may eventually be born." But if the written game summaries tend to parody the genre, the musical efforts, which range from thumping electronic dance tunes to atmospheric sweeps of synthesizers, are utterly genuine. Especially on the songs that incorporate samples of actual game noises, they reveal the degree to which the arcade's aural ambience has shaped the sound of modern music. "Those sounds have really invaded what we've come to know," said Keith Whitman, a musician in Somerville, Mass., who spent countless hours with Atari's Wizball in his youth. For "Nuclear Cats Get New Home," recorded under the moniker Blitter vs. Hrvatski, Whitman and his brother sampled the chirps and burps of vintage Commodore 64 games, then used them as the foundation of a deranged drum 'n' bass track. Daniel Raffel, a graduate student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program who co-founded the Lucky Kitchen label with the Hoboken, N.J., artists Aeron Bergman and Sandra Salinas, said that the sound of the video arcade has left as deep an impression on the digital generation as the bluesman Muddy Waters once did on the Rolling Stones. "This really goes back to the roots of a lot of people," said Raffel, who lovingly recalled the virtues of his Vectrex game console and said that in second grade he dressed up as an Atari computer for Halloween. The intersection of artistry and gaming is not entirely new. For example, "Eve," the 1997 CD-ROM game by the musician Peter Gabriel, contained virtual environments built around the work of four contemporary artists. And one has to wonder if the difficult-to-navigate interfaces of some online art projects were fueled by a gamer's maze-crazed mentality. While artists and musicians explore the world of games, commercial game developers are seeking to have their work recognized as art, as seen in the campaign by game-music composers to establish a Grammy Award category for their genre. But as the not-so-grizzled survivors of Tomb Raider and Duke Nukem come of age and begin to express themselves, it seems natural that video games will figure in their creations. Anne-Marie Schleiner, co-editor of the online-art journal Switch, noted that the game summaries accompanying "Blip, Bleep" often depict mundane activities, as when a character named Trashcandan takes out the garbage and finds there are monsters lurking around the corner. "Our everyday outlook is being infiltrated by video-gaming paradigms," she said. "You're walking down a hallway and you expect to see monsters, and you have this goal in mind. It's this way of looking at the world that you get when you play a lot of video games." Schleiner is curating Cracking the Maze, a virtual exhibit of artist-designed patches and plug-ins -- chunks of code that alter a game's appearance and performance -- that is due to appear on the Switch site in late June. The show will provide examples of programming that can, say, change a game character's gender or the features of a virtual environment's landscape. An exhibit of artist-developed video games will also be presented as part of Synworld: Playwork/Hyperspace, a symposium on simulated environments to be held in Vienna in late May. According to Schleiner, new-media artists' increased interest in video gaming may also have something to do with how costly the creation of three-dimensional environments with virtual-reality technology turned out to be. "In the mid-90's, it was the dream technology that everyone wanted to do, but it required massive capital and investment," she said. "Suddenly, artists realized, we can work with some of the same ideas [in video games] that we were interested in with virtual reality." Beryl Graham, who curated an interactive art exhibit called Serious Games in London in 1997, had a simpler explanation for the appeal of electronic games. "The fact that computer games are capable of inspiring totally obsessive absorption is almost bound to interest artists and cultural theorists," she said. But for Graham, the games present a profound puzzle: "The sound -- just what is it that makes those audio tracks so intensely annoying for anyone but the teen-age player?" Actually, the tunes on "Blip, Bleep" are unlikely to cause much irritation to fans of electronic dance music, who are already accustomed to living their lives to a computer-generated soundtrack. In fact, Raffel reported that the initial pressing of 1,000 disks is close to being sold out, and that the 750 copies with blue-felt covers handsewn by Bergman and Salinas were gone. Raffel solicited recordings for the disk in a few Internet postings, including the Intelligent Dance Music mailing list. Word spread quickly, resulting in about 50 submissions, all from unknown performers. Explaining the large number of responses, Raffel said, "There's the link to things that everyone could relate to: the video games we all played as a kid, which got us into computers, which got us into making music, which got us connected to the Internet, which got us all in contact." Raffel also believes that veteran competitors were rising to a challenge. "I think people might have seen making a track as part of a game," he said.