Aesthetics: July 2008 Archive Page

Via Psychemethadelica! (Metafilter)

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there'll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I'm learning valuable skills. --Marco Kay

Jimmy Maher offers a provocative editorial in the latest issue of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved.  However, it seems to excite very little love.  Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.

Is this a problem?  Not really, I think, when taken in isolation.  I think that Emily Short, whom I have immense respect for as a writer, creator, and tireless agent for positive change in IF, intended her work as an experiment and even possibly a bit of a provocation, an illustration of what might be possible.  But where is the game that takes Galatea's formal and technical innovations and uses them in the service of crackerjack story with a fascinating setting and compelling, believable characters?  Eric Eve's recent works come close, but how many others do?  Galatea sits out there in splendid isolation.  People play it, they tell themselves and each other how interesting it was, what potential for IF it demonstrates, and then they move on.  It's not up to Emily to build on Galatea's foundation; if she retires from IF tomorrow, she's done more for the form than I or 99% of you will ever manage.  It's up to us.  Where are we?

Some of us who are very, very good are writing games like the generally acknowledged best game of 2007: Lost Pig.  On the one hand, Lost Pig is nothing to disparage.  It's hilarious; it's great fun; it's honed and polished to the most beautiful shine.  Admiral Jota deserves tons of praise and respect for his creation.

Also of note, A Blind Man's Take on Interactive Fiction:

Most gaming opens worlds for people. Interacting with characters and role-playing a career or life that they do not have in the real world allows people to imagine themselves in certain situations, or challenges the person to make certain decisions.  It is that aspect of gaming, along with the writing,  descriptions of scenes and the possibility of interacting with characters that make interactive fiction so special. As a blind person, most mainstream role-playing games are unplayable. Interactive fiction is then the bridge that allows me as a blind person, who also would like to participate in the joys of relaxing with a role-playing computer game, to step into an imaginary world.

Steampunk is one of my guilty pleasures... I think of it more of an asthetic than a literary movement, and I own neither a pair of aviator goggles nor a wind-up pocketwatch. Nevertheless, it happens that at this moment in another window I'm rendering a 3D view of an brass-and-glass spaceship ethership that features in the steampunk bedtime stories I've been telling my kids ever since I saw the last name "Gearhart" in a student roster.  Randy Nakamura sounds a little mystified by the popularity of the steampunk style, though he does a fair job exposing its sillier excesses.

[A]s Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, "In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it." Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin's theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: "Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended." The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

Does anybody today say -- without shame -- that their hobby is watching TV? Or listening to the radio? These media are so deeply entrenched in our society that we barely think of them. According to Ian Bogost, a time will come when the concept of "the gamer" is obsolete. Not because games will be obsolete, but because they will become so mainstream that the category will no longer be useful.

Videogames suffer under the weight of many misconceptions. Some of these are all too familiar: questions about whether games promote violent action or whether they make us fat through inactivity.

One that some people have tried to overturn is the idea that games are only for entertainment. So-called "serious games" claim to offer an alternative: games that can be used for serious purposes like education, healthcare, or corporate training.

But games, like photography, like writing, like any medium, shouldn't be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses alone. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account  for what videogames are capable of. After all, we don't distinguish between serious and entertainment books, or music, or photography, or film. Rather, we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving images can all be put to many different uses.

The other day at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, I attended a brown bag talk given by my Seton Hill colleague, Maureen Vissat, The Art of the 1940s: Styles and Influences. I had seen her present as part of a series of teaching demonstrations, so I knew her talk would be excellent. She wove interesting details from the lives of notable painters and gallerists to form an informative picture of how art and artists are made, and the dual role of the gallery as archive of what is already established and promoter of the new and innovative. Her slide show included several shots of the gallery spaces, not just close-ups of the paintings or portraits of the artists themselves.

Her talk was timed to coincide with an exhibit of American painters of the 1940s. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a permalink for this gallery, but for the moment, and presumably unitl the exhibit closes in October, there's a description on the current exhibitions page.

[T]his exhibition reconstructs a sampling of the exhibitions of the same title organized by Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Museum of Art) from 1943 to 1949 and includes 48 paintings, of which 42 are the actual works that were selected for exhibitions over the seven-year period. These annual exhibitions of American painting replaced the Institute's annual Carnegie International while it was suspended due to World War II.

I've included thumbnails of some of my favorite paintings below.

From the L Magazine. Some are actually just unfortunate art, but the whole list was worth it for this one:

In addition to the usage error, I particularly like how the highlights on the drops of blood seem to be made by a light shining *up* from the lower right.

Okay, and this next one is almost certainly a quadruple play:

You won't find this sort of thing on the TV news shows. Stanley Fish:

Milton's poetry never lets you relax. Even when one of the famous similes wanders down what appears to be a desultory path of mythical allusions and idealized landscapes, it always returns you in the end to the moral perspective that had only apparently been suspended. So after rehearsing the story of Mulciber's leisurely fall from heaven "like a falling star," Milton's narrator says, "thus they relate, erring," with the harsh judgment of "erring" now attached to any reader who had been entranced by the "fable" put forth by the devils. ("Paradise Lost, I", 740-747).

If the following line doesn't get you reading The Steampunk Home, nothing will:

I can think of two steampunk references to octopodes.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

From a collection of writings by Kurt Vonnegut. Read the full text of the essay, which is summarized (by Vonnegut) as follows:

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

I just saw Wall-E with the family. It's rare for me to suggest that we all go see a movie -- my wife is the cinema buff. But I had read outstanding reviews, and it is a Pixar film, so I went in with high expectations, and was satisfied. It didn't knock my socks off; the "Daddy, is he really dead?" ending was predictable -- I think the death of a supporting character was probably necessary to boost the emotional energy, but I did like the supporting cast of malfunctioning robots (I wanted them to have more screen time).  But those are quibbles.

For bedtime reading, my son and I are going through How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and I just taught him about the uncanny valley last night. So it was interesting to see how human the robots seemed in this film, and how artificial the humans seemed (though that's a design choice that fits well with the story). In the New York Times, Frank Rich writes a thoughtful review of Wall-E:

This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at "Wall-E" were in deep contemplation of a world in peril -- and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you'll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I'll keep to the minimum. "Wall-E" is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind -- a Rubik's Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of "Hello, Dolly!," a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until "time runs out."

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though "Wall-E" is laced with visual and musical allusions to "2001: A Space Odyssey," its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick's then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as "2001" did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That's more than upsetting enough.

Great news for fans of robot history and cinema history:

Last Tuesday Paula Félix-Didier travelled on a secret mission to Berlin in order to meet with three film experts and editors from ZEITmagazin. The museum director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy of a long version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, including scenes believed lost for almost 80 years. After examining the film the three experts are certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered. (Zeit Online)

Metropolis is truly stunning -- the architecture of the futuristic city scenes was a big influence on Blade Runner, and on pretty much every science fiction film since. Let's hope someone with deep pockets finances a thorough restoration of the movie.