The first person I chose to research was conceptual artist and game designer Zach Gage. In an interview with Rhizome, he described his more artistic works as “investigating this situation of humanity transforming our lives into a virtual space, and how this new space gives sort of a physical property to ideas.” He says that online theoretical and conceptual pieces are just as valid as any physical art. His MFA thesis work ‘Data,’ which addresses our use of data in our lives and how we may take it for granted, uses computer files and other online data and physically manifests it in ways both entertaining and insightful. In addition to his many artistic projects, Gage also designs games in the form of iOS apps. He is responsible for creating multiple games including the strategy puzzle games Spelltower and Unify and 3D drawing game Sonic Wire Sculptor. Although simple at first glance, his games are rewarding in the intricacies and curiosities of the mechanics. He plays with the philosophy that code and words are not just thoughts and building blocks, but actual objects that can be interacted with.
The specific project of Gage’s I’m choosing to focus on is a collaboration between him and computer scientist Ramsey Nasser entitled Killingspree. On his portfolio page, Gage describes it as simply “a game about shooting people in videogames.” Killingspree is a custom first person shooter based on the graphics of Wolfenstein 3D, a game largely responsible for the popularization of the first person shooter genre, with sound clips taken from Unreal Tournament. Debuted in New York in January 2011, Killingspree begins by replacing the faces of enemies with the faces of people who attended the galley who were photographed upon entry, thus making each enemy a unique and real person. The “enemies” have no weapons or method of attacking, and instead walk up to the player and block his path, waiting to be shot. The player shoots them in the head and they fall to the ground in a bloody mess and their corpses stay there for the remainder of the game. As the bodies pile up, the frame rate slows, making the game less enjoyable to play. The entire game takes place in a single, square room and has no goals or objectives other than obtaining a high score. The game only ends when the player decides to stop.
At first, Killingspree appeared to me as a sort of commentary on the subject of violent games. You always see it in the news, concerned parents and “experts” saying that the violence in video games is responsible for making kids grow up troubled and dangerous. Because Killingspree puts the shooter in an environment where he is essentially killing real people who may or may not be in his immediate surrounding, this seemed like a reasonable connection. I e-mailed him about this, and he replied that in essence, the piece was an investigation of the violent tropes in video games. Also, he said he deliberately put elements of abstraction (the faces) into the game as a way to prove that abstraction can make such violent acts easier. Even though the thing you’re killing has a real face, it’s still a virtual body with early 90’s Wolfenstein graphics. This strange and unnatural aspect seeks to encourage players to kill more, while the eventual slowing frame rate tries to get them to stop.
In his description of Killingspree, Gage says that he expected that there would be distaste among viewers, but instead the game was met with enthusiasm and enjoyment. People played the game longer than expected, some going for more than twenty minutes and only quitting when the frame rate made the game almost unplayable. I thought that this kind of reaction could have been met with mixed emotions. On one side, many people are enjoying playing and interacting with the game, but on the other side, one could view people’s willingness to kill a virtual person with a real face and real eyes as possibly concerning. I asked him about this, and he said the he was definitely surprised, but it was nice. Although not what he expected, he felt that the presentation was stronger because it received so much positive attention. Also, he noted that because people were happy and driven to “blow each others heads off,” he feels Killingspree is strongest when viewed as a performance work. Instead of just sitting back and watching and admiring like you would do at a painting museum, it invites you to be more involved, and maybe try it out.
The second artist I chose to research was Brian House, a New York based social and locative artist and musician. House has previously taught at Columbia’s graduate school of architecture and at Parsons Design and Technology. Currently, he is a resident at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and a creative technologist at the New York Times Company. Additionally, House composes electronic and instrumental music for solo performance and installation, his avant-punk band Multitudes, and multiple other electric ensembles. His work has covered many styles of art; experimental music, interactive and narrative art, and participatory systems. As said on his website, “he seeks to negotiate between programmed constraints and the serendipity of everyday life.”
House’s collaborative project called Yellow Arrow is what I chose to focus on. Introduced in 2004, Yellow Arrow consisted of yellow arrow stickers that people placed in public places to draw attention to something which they might find interesting. Each sticker had a unique code on it, as well as a phone number. Contributors placed the sticker, then wrote a message including the code and texted it to the number on the sticker. On his description of the project, House writes “Messages range from short poetic fragments to personal stories to game-like prompts to action.” When someone finds the arrow, they can text the code to the included phone number and receive the original message of the contributor, and they can also reply to send a message to the author or the message. Before being shut down in 2006, Yellow Arrow consisted of 6864 arrows in 467 cities in 38 countries. All contributions and content was archived and preserved on flickr.
Yellow Arrow relates directly to our reading on crowd sourcing. This project relies almost entirely on participation from people other than the creators. People ordered stickers from the website and placed them in public at places of personal significance. In addition to sharing using the text based system, their website yellowarrow.org included a map where participants were able to annotate their arrows with photos or maps to allow for a deeper sharing experience. It’s interesting because participants are not only able to interact with the project itself and the archive of messages and locations of arrows, but they’re also able to interact with other participants. Although there are many projects with a similar concept to Yellow Arrow, it is unique because there are so many possible levels of interaction
In only two years, Yellow Arrow collected almost seven thousand contributions around the world and beyond, as there was even an arrow located in second life. House wrote that the purpose of the project was to highlight the hidden secrets, personal stories, and unique characteristics and quirks in our everyday life and environment that we may never even notice. Because he noted on his website that the project was active before the popularization of Facebook, Myspace, Google Maps etc, I was curious as to how this idea got started. I e-mailed him about this but unfortunately did not receive a response. I also asked him why the project was shut down. I can only speculate that because it was growing so fast, it was interfering with other projects of his and the other creators. Rather than let it keep going longer than it should and slowly decay, like the Simpsons, they pulled the plug and archived everything.
As far a similarities between Killingspree and Yellow Arrow go, the most obvious one is that both projects rely on participation from people other than the creators. Killingspree only functions with the pictures of gallery guests being put into the game, and Yellow Arrow needed people to place the stickers all over the world and spread the word about the project to others. Without outside participation, the projects would probably not work. Another similarity is that both works place focus on participants interacting with each other, not just with the project itself. In Killingspree, this is achieved by shooting a picture of their face. Not direct interaction with the person, but interaction nonetheless. For Yellow Arrow, people who stumble upon the stickers are encouraged to text the code to the given phone number and read the original message by the person who placed the sticker. That way, he can see why the person put the sticker there and maybe learn something about the place where it is.
Among the many differences between the two works, the most obvious is the format in which it is presented. Killingspree is a video game, and Yellow Arrow is a public art project. Because Gage and House put their focus on two very different ideas, their art is surely going to be very different. Gage looks at how we interact with virtual media and data and how it can impact our lives, while House focus both on how people interact with elements of their daily lives. Because of this, Gage has more works based around computer elements than House. Another difference between Killingspree and Yellow arrow is their intent. Killingspree was designed to address the stigma of violent video games and how easy it is for people to be violent, while Yellow Arrow was a way of showing a city throw one individual’s eyes. Although there are distinct differences between the two, both artists seek to discover how our lives can be impacted by things we might take for granted. For many people, virtual data and the intricacies of our living environment can be the building blocks of our world, and these two artists take them and turn them into art with the purpose of showing how important they really are.
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