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Detachments, displacements? Dear corrado, bruce et all I would like to respond briefly to the last two posts. To me it seems interesting how from two different positions similar issues are addressed and dealt with. (crossing media; content production/consumption; chronotype/chronotope; (digital) literacy) I visited the Zero gamers exhibition in the festival lounge at 01zero-one last Friday and was quite fascinated to encounter video/game – artworks that for a non-gamer like me were absolutely interesting to “watch”. “Restricted” to being videos “only” the manipulated surfaces and structures of games became a site of criticality, both in terms of their particular aestheticisation as well as the cultures the games supposedly put forward. Most of the works in the show lived perfectly well without any literal inter-action, without being able to play the game. Indeed, the non-action (putting the spectator consciously in a spectatorship position) provided a ground for differently engaging with material that otherwise would have disappeared beneath the individual gestures triggering certain points in the game. To me, it was precisely the restriction that actually freed the work from a certain limit that an actual game might propose. Through this process of de-limiting a space emerged that was actually rather playful, critical, reflective of the media, and in some of the works, quite referential to former artistic articulations that –in different contexts- dealt with similar forms and methods of delineage. (e.g. the minimal tetris game, potentially referring to structuralist and conceptual work. Jodi’s loop structures and collage-types corrupting linear narrative. and so on) The desire to interact in a literal sense was re-placed by one might say rather “new imagery” the game-environment potentially contains by corrupting or subversing its own mechanism. Later I visited the exhibition Tha Click at E:vent http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/625. Beside of the seductive materialities Paper Rad creates (on screen, print, “knitted”, mounted, collaged), the work by Paul B. Davis, Cory Arcangel, Joe Beuckman [Beige] featured also interesting “inter-action” screen work, where for instance through shooting at imagery on the screen, the action is released. Another type of literal, physical engagement on part of the audience was a clear set of instruction laid out on the TV screen. As audience you are invited to for example type 1 or 2 on the keyboard to move further. The “simplistic” interface is a further “invite” for an audience to feel invited to actually inter-act, trigger the action. Referencing comic and pop culture, breaking codes and software, laws, etc. might also contribute to the “easy access” the work offers. This easy access (both technically and in terms of visual non-complexity reflecting the contemporary mediascape in ironical and subversive ways) I want to think of a potential to address “hot themes” in a playful, but also critical way. Visiting these shows reminded me also of an earlier work by Thomson & Craighead, Trigger Happy http://thomson-craighead.net/docs/thap.html, which I want to mention here. It seems interesting to me that this work effectively addresses both game-structures, aesthetics, and the “erasure of knowledge/discourse”. If there is a cross-over of media and cultures, then it also supposes that there are separate niches that precisely have to be niches in order to articulate their particularity. The artistic freedom and that of the audience????, that I think is often missed in technologically informed works is addressed in several of these works mentioned above in rather playful and also critical ways. The crossing might perhaps also allow more ‘free’ to return to “older” forms of representations such as video screen. Inter/action will not stop at this point??!! ver Sorry, only few collated notes and quick refs on a Sunday morning….