MACHINIMA CINEMA @ ØSTRE HUS FOR LYDKUNST

Machinima – a portmanteau of machine and cinema – is a term used to describe the process of using real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. It’s a practice that has existed for as long as in-game recording has been possible, the first generally attributed work being United Ranger Films’ Diary of a Camper – a minute-and-a-half long fan-film made within first-person shooter Quake (1996) – though some claim examples that pre-date it. Miltos Manetas’ Miracle, for instance – shot using flight-simulator F/A-18 Hornet (1993) – was made in the same year. Both of these films use their source material in different ways, to different ends; and while one of them was exhibited on the wall of a major gallery, the other was released online for free as a downloadable demo-file.

Parallel to this, artists have adopted the method, making films within videogame environments that, as a rule, take a more critical position – offering reflections on the medium and its mechanics; how games work; and what they can show, or fail to. Besides the aforementioned Miltos Manetas – whose series Videos After Videogames (1996-2002) extracts idle moments from games including Super Mario 64 (1996) and Tomb Raider (1996) and situates them as standalone works of video art – artist Cory Arcangel has long seen the artistic potential of videogames.

These sort of experiments sit adjacent to a wider tradition within artist’s machinima, the idea of ‘game interventions’, a videogame version of performance art that sees artists interacting directly with game worlds and their players in order to make statements or provocations. Georgie Roxby Smith is an artist who regularly makes work in this mode, much of which explores game violence, exposing how regularly it is gendered. Her jarringly fatalistic intervention 99 Problems [WASTED] (2014) sees a semi-clothed female avatar repeatedly and ritualistically killing herself within the world of Grand Theft Auto V, the surrounding non-playable-characters barely registering a response as she blows her brains out beside them. Each death is an empty death, and results in an automatic respawn.

Other films link war-game violence with real-world realities. Josh Bricker’s Post-Newtonianism (2010) features two channels. One shows a video released by WikiLeaks of US attack helicopter footage from Iraq, the aircraft’s pilots audible on the soundtrack as they fire upon civilians. The other displays similar imagery from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2007). As audio from both sources mixes across the two frames, the origin of its source becomes indeterminable, the two videos increasingly indistinguishable from each other. Videogame representations rarely achieve verisimilitude, but here, the distortion of the real-world footage renders both depictions equally unreal, showing how easily we are desensitised to images and the meanings behind them.

Claire L Evans’s Modern Warfare (2010) is set within the airport level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), controversial at the time of release for allowing the player to partake in a terrorist attack and slay non-combatants. In her film, Evans chooses to attack no one, turning her character’s assault rifle on the various video monitors that scatter the airport. By diverting the game design’s intended play-path and instead wreaking destruction on the screen-apparatus, the film seems to almost be destroying itself, the game’s first-person avatar – only ever seen as a pair of hands grasping a gun-barrel – trying to escape from the confines of his existence by breaking the rules of the creation within which he is trapped.

An equally unsettled expression of the player’s relation to (or rather, alienation from) their avatars is in Alex Hovet’s Counter-Charge (2016), which takes the semi-explicit oddity Leisure Suit Larry III (1989) as its source. In this dreamlike, delusory film, the eponymous character wanders the game’s tropical environments, frustrated in his attempts to pursue the subject of his attentions by a remixed game-world that seems to resists his goal at every turn. As Hovet explores the game’s peculiar gender dynamics, his role as controller of the Larry character seems to be in a battle against his own innate, relentlessly libidinal drives. The game’s strange text dialogues falter when faced with an unexpected female player with an agency of her own.