I have no idea how he did it, but Shane Hinton took a typically rambling, 1+ hour interview, and compacted it down to about 10 minutes without losing any of the central arguments. I really wish I had his editing talents. And his choice for an opening rant is pretty funny :-)
- Podcast: Playable Character
- Episode: 004: Invaders!, History, and Chip Music Controversy
- Interviewees: Douglas Edric Stanley, Trevor Owens, Marty Kraham a.k.a. TV Death Squad
- host: Shane Hinton
- Download: playablecharacter_004
- iTunes link: Playable Character
In the interview I go back over the whole Invaders! controversy, give some pretentious-art-&#@*%’s perspective for gamerz debating the whole art/game issue, and then tie that in somehow with Antonin Fourneau’s ENIAROF concept for a contemporary play festival. The transition might not be obvious, but it was in fact Eniarof that first recycled Invaders! and was the reason the piece actually got a second life. The Leipzig Games Convention version was in fact a very late iteration of the piece.
My interview is followed by an interesting essay by Trevor Owens from Play the Past about in-game terminals, and reconstructing (a) history from pseudo-documents in Fallout 3. I didn’t know Play the Past before, it looks like an interesting blog. For fairly obvious reasons, I ended up reading Rebooting Counterfactual History with JFK Reloaded and this interesting follow-up discussion which uncovers an irreverant necrophiliac comment buried in the WAD file of the game : A Revisionist History of JFK Reloaded (Decoded).
I was less impressed with the third story, but whatever. Apparently I missed a chiptune flame war. It would seem that my 8-bit subculture culture is incomplete.
Original Comments:
Fakey McFakeson
I’ve studied and viewed lots of modern art, so I’m not jumping to discredit this piece as anti-American or insensitive or bogus or trying to cash-in on emotions.
However, in my humble opinion it is simply BAD ART. I don’t enjoy it. It doesn’t push any boundaries. It’s not beautiful to look at. It might make me think, but so does any opinion piece I read in any newspaper ever. In other words, it doesn’t take much to make people think about an issue.
This is quite simply just a swing and a miss, and the fact that you (the artist) defend it so strongly is not surprising. The worse the artist, the harder they defend their artwork. A true artist wouldn’t vocally defend his art against critics - he would let it speak for itself as it is meant to do. If a work of art comes with a disclaimer that if you don’t like it then you’re a plebeian, then the viewer is no longer judging the art on its own merits, and the artist is overstepping his bounds and ruining his own artwork by explaining it.
American
This is a just a disgrace.
Douglas Edric Stanley
Actually, I don’t think I’ve really defended the piece all that much. And I certainly haven’t been showing it all that much, despite several requests. Sure, when people ask me to comment it, I sometimes do, but usually I don’t. For me, it is what it is. Take it or leave it — obviously you’ve already made your choice.
That said, I’ve been making art for some fifteen years and never once have I heard about making bad art other than this controversial piece. So while theoretically I could eventually accept your argument, the means, manner and context you use to discredit what we both agree is a fairly minor work of art lead me to think otherwise concerning your intentions (assumed or otherwise).