Video Games in the Age of Electronic Hyper-Production

What can we accomplish by combining old forms into new configurations?

This is part two of my ongoing series about the relationship of video games to art. Part one is here. To be continued next week!

Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, famously argued that objects of art, with the advent of film, lost the aura of being the direct, unique, and original products of an artist. By following templates, music and film pushed art into a mode of mechanized reproduction; the original became just a model for the production of copies, sometimes called simulacra.

Benjamin’s point is that in becoming reproducible objects, capable of being appropriated into the Fordist engines of capitalism (envision factories churning out millions of copies of music albums or films to satisfy the burgeoning gusto of consumers), objets d’art lose a certain immaterial quality that exists only in material works that are unrepeatable and irreproducible. These simulacra cease to be invested with the spirit of their creators.

I suppose you could say there’s a certain religiosity to this idea, the invocation of spirits imbuing art with an ethereal glow and what not. Despite this, I will likewise attest to the simple evidence that a carving made by a human displays the marks, lines and expressions of that person’s vitality embedded into the material substrate of the medium. The result of this is a quality altogether distinct from a carbon copy sculpture shaped according to computer algorithms, made flawlessly and without a hint of variation, by a machine.

This whole debate is very old, by now. A great many of 20th century artists acted in response to Benjamin’s implicit conservatism. Why should art be original? Why shouldn’t there be reproductive levels of separation between the creator and the product? Why shouldn’t art be made entirely compatible with the logic of consumer demand? And of course anyone can point to the very real category of ‘original’ art produced for the very rich, and claim that the reproducible nature of today’s art has vastly increased its accessibility to the common people. And they’d be entirely right.

These popularist objections notwithstanding, something is tangibly absent from art that lends itself to continuous reproduction. The mark of individuality, if you will. But as we come to types of art that exhibit increasing complexity, as in massive Hollywood film productions, and the latest blockbuster video games (some of which have staff in the hundreds and are the products of multiple design studios collaborating with extremely high levels of organization), the question of individual authenticity becomes somewhat, well, moot. Almost laughable.

How could a video game like God of War III, whose credit roll takes a minor epoch to run through (easily rivalling film in this respect), ever have been the work of one artist, or the brain child of a single megalomaniacal subjectivity – an auteur. Auteurs are simply impossible in big budget video games. These projects are simply too vastly complex to bear the visible stamp of just one person’s vision. Just look at what happened to 3D Realms, when an auteur attempting to control the entire process of game development is given virtually limitless cash and dollops of praise: simply put, disaster results. If Benjamin’s aura can be rediscovered somewhere, it is not along this path.

In seeing Kick-Ass recently in theatres, I realized that something incredible had happened. Almost as interesting as the film itself (from a critical point of view) were the trailers preceding it. Not surprisingly, they exhibited a predictable assortment of conventional film tropes. Each one was totally generic. You had the “I Married a Spy” movie, the “Classic Horror Remake,” the “Genetically Engineered Alien” movie, and the requisite star-studded action feature with various over-the-hill celebrities reprising historical roles. I have for a while now suspected that in each major studio there exists a sacred binder that contains pages of script templates, a certain number of which are deployed each year, and then cycled through. The thematic and structural unoriginality of Hollywood has become so transparent that virtually all mainstream films these days exhibit some degree of embarrassed self-referentiality: an apologetic nod to the has-been, “already-done” nature of a depleted industry.

Then along came Kick-Ass, which broke a great number of tropes, expectations, and structures, while at the same time employing a vast number of tried-and-true archetypes and plot forms in a dizzying display of inventive re-configuration. In a sense, Kick-Ass is manifestly unoriginal: it is comprised of a plethora of tiny unoriginalities, innumerable unanticipated configurations and combinations of old forms that conspire to produce something fundamentally novel. One example to make the point: the protagonist girl fulfills the prototypical anti-hero established by Tarantino and Scorcese, the former specifically contributing an updated violent heroine model, where Scorcese added the self-destructive, nothing-to-lose, pathologically insane construct, both of which are condensed into the character of Hit-Girl, herself referencing the vengeful pre-pubescent girl, a la Hard Candy. It is breathless, complex, overwhelmingly post-modern art.

The reconfigurations are endless. Kick-Ass exemplifies the transformations contemporary artistic media are undergoing. If post-modernism is the breaking down of old structures, then perhaps we are witnessing a new movement of art, dare I say (I cringe even as I write this) a post-post-modernity operating at a deep level of abstraction and structure. The so-called aura Benjamin mournfully declared gone and deceased has, in a sense, returned in the tapestries of multivalent form, the jury-rigged and complex new structures that result from imaginative combinatorial practices of reconfigured elements.

Contemporary, electronic art has attained a level of tremendous, unprecedented complexity. Games these days can perhaps be described as multi-media projects of installation art (the computer is their site) involving perhaps hundreds of artists and contributors with a broad range of technical and aesthetic abilities. They are built on the backs of countless past achievements in design, conceptual architecture, group organization, and programming, and are only growing more and more complex with time. How can these entities exhibit anything even remotely original? How can games, in their quintessential reproducibility, insofar as they are becoming expressions of pure non-physical information, express an aura of authenticity, originality, or whatever ineffable qualities coincide with Benjamin’s artistic predecessors (sculptures, unique paintings, live musical performances, and so on)?

I will submit as a hypothesis, and one positively ripe for contention, that a new type of aura can be located in structural novelty. When abstraction is the prevailing form, and variation occurs on a level of conceptualization below the surface, and experiential only on the level of design and intellection, then aura becomes an intangible, theoretical quality. The aura of art in the age of electronic hyper-production is the commentary of a work on the history of its progeniture – the story of its creation; Aura becomes expressed through a beautiful modification in the lineage of structure and a deviation from the demands of form. It is defiance of cliché and a refusal to be entirely complicit with the determining forces of history. It is the irrepressible human spirit discovering possibilities for innovation in the most formalized, structuralized, and engineered systems. The aura is alive as the iconoclastic ghost in the machine.