Videogames as art: Prize Budget for Boys makes digital pop by canonizing pop icons. PacMondrian takes the classic arcade game Pac-Man and combines it with Piet Mondrian’s work. Courtesy of PBFB.

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from each film by simply clicking the image.

Art can be defined as the production, expression or realm of what is beautiful. It can also be described as objects subject to aesthetic criteria. Today, some of the most recent additions to the world of art are coming from an unexpected source — videogames.

Artist Andy Warhol first took everyday things and raised them to a new level of artistic awareness in the 1960s. In his book, American Vision, Robert Hughes wrote, “He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62. From then on, most of Warhol’s best work was done over a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by repeated again and again and again, there is role for affect-less art.”

Jason Della Rocca of International Game Developers Assoc. sees games as a work of art because its components are artful and they are filled with human expression and experience.

Today’s artists are again looking to pop culture for inspiration, and videogames are providing that inspiration. Interestingly enough, videogames appear to be as interactive in art as they are in play.

“Games are unique in that the components that make up a game are all art/artful (i.e., story, music, voice acting, code, etc.), and a game as a whole is a work of art. Games are an extremely powerful medium for human expression and experience,” says Jason Della Rocca, exec director, International Game Developers Assoc. (IGDA).

Cracking the Code
In a recent exhibition at the InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto called “Controller: Artists Crack The Game Code” (Feb. 24-March 25, 2006), five artists modified videogames by exploiting glitches in the code, adding or removing elements in the game and isolating specific visual components. By hacking the game code, these works questioned the latent meaning of the gaming language — who designs the software and for what end, who is controlling whom?

In the exhibition, the artists used recognizable gaming icons to add bizarre twists to familiar territory. In Myfanwy Ashmore’s mario trilogy, viewers were invited to play three hacked versions of the original Super Mario Brothers game.

Anita Fontaine + Yumi-co's CuteXdoom created a game installation that explored the modern cultures’ addiction to cuteness. The mission was to become a member of the toy-worshipping Yumi-co cult and gain access to the exclusive temple-quarters. It ran within the game Unreal Tournament 2003.

At the recent “Controller: Artists Crack The Game Code” exhibition, Anita Fontaine + Yumi-co showed CuteXdoom, a game installation that explored modern cultures’ addiction to cuteness. Courtesy of Dave Kemp.

Apollo Shrapnel Part 1 and Restless < Wrath were two previously unseen works of Tasman Richardson’s Atari glitch video series. These videos explored abstract color and form through captures of Atari game manipulations.

Prepared PlayStation by RSG (Alexander Galloway, assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University) was an installation using three scenes inside the game Tony Hawk's Underground 2. Using unmodified versions of the PlayStation game, this work exploited bugs and glitches in the code to create jolting game loops. Videogames were the content of the work; no additional footage or editing was used. After being “prepared,” the game played itself perpetually.

PacMondrian and Calderoids by Prize Budget for Boys comprised custom-designed arcade cabinets that take classic arcade games Pac-Man and Asteroids and combine them with the work of famous artists Piet Mondrian and Alexander Calder.

“Our motto is ‘Let’s Play Art!” says Neil Hennessy, Prize Budget for Boys. “Given that art has always been what we do with our excess energy, we like how videogame art makes us reflect on all art as something we play with; not just passively viewing, listening, or consuming, but actively playing.”

Hennessy acknowledges a connection to videogame art and the work of Andy Warhol. “We're actually using Andy Warhol’s work itself in a game we're releasing soon called ‘I Shot Andy Warhol’s Empire’,” Hennessy says. “It's a light-gun game where you have to shoot at Andy Warhol’s reflection, which only appears a couple of times during his eight-hour movie of the Empire State building when he changes the film. The most boring movie ever made is now the most boring videogame ever made! We also have a game called Claes OldenBurgerTime in the works, so we’ll have two pop art videogames.”