Friday 23 August 2013

ra

Rap music is something special. As a teen my peer group was either into rap or into metal, rap, for me, is the far more important of the two. At a base level; it's just cool. Something about speaking very fast with a skeleton of a song looping under it just shrieks cool. The bass lines inspired by funk, the vamps taken from roots reggae. But then there is something a bit more to it. The rap idea of "realness", something to have and express (kind of missing the more important point of questioning "realness"). Hip hop is about keeping it real, a realness that is distinct from reality. Reality is forced on you, realness is what you inflict back. More than that. Rap is the epitomy of "Art is theft", "Good poets borrow, great poets steal", "There's nothing to say that hasn't been said" et al. Non-apologetic. It's exciting to deface things that we live among. Miming the warped original. Punk, metal, country, techno/ dance doesn't come close to hip hop. No ownership, vessels and filters, mimetic souls made up of stolen goods, a "fuck you" to creativity hindering copywriting, paraphrasing in an alien voice, post-modder, self-aware/ referencing, a self-referencing mythology.  

Thursday 8 August 2013

.fuck up the world

I know it's boring but it is worth being boring about, games are an art form. What else could they be? They are expressions of human creative skill. Imagination applied to a practical effort. A display of technical skill combined with an appropriately emotive aesthetic. Once more, they seek to represent human experience, even the most abstract of games. They have done from the very start. What else could they be doing? Games have been art long before video games made them unarguably so; Fluxus artists testing the audience, performance artists creating personal challenges, John Zorn's Cobra, Marina Abramovic's Rhythm10, Surrealism's parlour games.  

Actually the real interesting thing is probably that the artists of today are misled and have no social function anymore. Why are there no games about child trafficking, incest fantasy games? Or conversely why are there no games about benevolent politics or the function of honesty? This is partly a rhetorical question but there is also an idea of "Is the world ready for such and such". Why is that? I guess analogously there are, Pickmin springs to mind. 

Just as George Bernard Shaw once claimed that if something is funny then search it for deeper meaning, if a game is enjoyable then I propose similarly that deeper meaning can be derived. 

But there is still a coyness about being explicitly an artistic endevour. This is due to a pandering to the masses and, of course, if you pander to the masses then you clearly have no social function. Thus the role of the artist seems to have become an interesting one, the artist is there to fuck things up. 
Why does something need to have a social function? Is it possible to have zero social function? 

The Tale Of Mr Rabbit and his Animal Associates or The Tale of Why the White Rabbit Died

This is a game I'm working on with my online chum Nik Sudan
It's a game with very British sensibilities 
that brings together ideas of Middle England, British countryside 
and UK folk tales and music.
It's also a very crafty sort of game with hand made graphics; from modeling clay to
crepe paper to graphite sketches to water colours and a wee card house.