Serendipity has been defined as “the art of inventing by paying attention to what surprises and imagining a relevant interpretation”. This is exactly what happened to Swiss artist Pascal Greco when he dove into video games. Death Stranding (Kojima Productions and Sony) during the pandemic.
Pascal Greco started out as a filmmaker and branched out into architectural photography. He has worked a lot in the cities of Asia. He had planned a third trip to Iceland in March and April 2020 to continue the work started with the art book. Cliché No. (Jane & Jeremy) in 2013.
A new confinement in Switzerland has aborted the aesthetic tourism project. the gamer therefore invested the money from the trip in the purchase of a Nintendo Switch console, a PlayStation 4 and the game death strandingwhich takes place in the near future on the territory of the United States.
The impression of déjà vu felt when looking at the cover swelled from the first dives into the virtual showing a courier on a motorcycle in a natural landscape. The confined connoisseur recognized the Iceland captured by the game’s production teams to serve as an environment for a post-apocalyptic America.
The player then mistakenly pressed a button on his controller, triggering a screenshot. Serendipity operated immediately and Pascal Greco imagined a “relevant interpretation”.
“I had to be in Iceland and in fact, somewhere, I was there while being in my living room, says the artist joined in Geneva. I continued the game while being very attentive to the sets. I was fascinated to see how the designers had pushed the details. I could play for hours focused on the action while keeping an eye on the scenery to shoot images. »
In short, the artist invented “by paying attention”. Pascal Greco explored other features to adjust the depth of field of the still image, modify the saturation, eliminate the characters or choose a type of camera, including the Polaroid, his preferred format. The result was a book titled Seat(s)including 57 photos and an exhibition launched on June 17 in Geneva.
“The realism is stunning,” says Pascal Greco. Of course, some gossips might say that a screenshot, it’s not a photo. It would be wrong. There’s a lot more than just a screenshot. We really move in the virtual world and we choose parameters. Me, I framed my virtual images as I would have done on the spot in Iceland. »
Contemplation
This work belongs to a particular genre which bears several names (photo in-game, virtual photo…). Gamers have been taking screenshots and sharing their images online for two decades. All action game franchises now include a screenshot mode. The London Games Festival organized a competition and exhibition of virtual photographs taken from games in April.
“It’s a turnaround that I could not have predicted, recognizes Professor Carl Therrien, from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at UdeM, specialist in the history of video games. . Players who have playful, interactive and immersive challenges “regress” towards a more contemplative mode, ultimately a practice of virtual tourism. The virtual photo becomes like a parallel game: when you are tired of playing Grand Theft Auto, you can just walk around the virtual universe, take pictures and share them. »
This game is part of a list of the ten most (let’s say) Instagrammable virtual universes. However, Greco-style artistic appropriation signals something other than virtual tourism. The American Cory Arcangel (born in 1978) pioneered this practice with Super Mario Clouds (2002) which presents the sky, the clouds, but no other element of the classic decor, perhaps by hacking the chip. The Belgian Wim Delvoye has transposed freeze frames into bas-relief. The images provided by counter strike and Fortnite (2018) were carved with an electronic milling machine to fossilize, mineralize and immortalize digital snapshots.
These borrowings and quotations generate a lot of fundamental questions about the nature of art, the relationship to the real and the virtual, quotation, inspiration or copyright, but also about video games as art in their own right. . the game artor game art, includes all of the visual elements that ultimately make up the game, from characters to objects to urban or natural environments.
“We should not only dwell on recoveries by recognized visual artists who could make invisible the last two decades of institutional recognition of video games as art,” says the professor, pointing to the dozen games integrated at once in 2012 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Of course, like cinema, it’s a cultural industry and not everything has to be raised to the level of art. »
Specialists try to decant the game to its essence, to its purity. That of UdeM proposes to make it rather “the impure art par excellence, a symbiotic language of all the other arts, the art of intermediality par excellence”. It uses a definition from the exhibition catalog Videogames of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London presented just before the pandemic, making video games a total art, a Gesamtkunstwerk according to the German name of the XIXe century often applied to opera.
“Making games combines everything that is difficult about building infrastructure like bridges and everything that is difficult about composing an opera,” says the text of the museum catalog. Games are operas made with bridges. »
Bruno Gauthier Leblanc, artistic director for the game creator Eidos, has just created Guardians of the Galaxy, released in October. He explains that to create a virtual world, he usually draws on haute couture, sculpture or architecture. He never seeks to reproduce the “opera-bridges” that already exist in his world, but to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxyhe found references in the art and illustration of the 1990s using pioneering 3D programs, “very innocent, very simple”, he says, accepting the formula of a retro-digital style.
“Retrogaming”
Professor Therrien is also preparing for mid-September, at the crossroads of arts and sciences of his university, an exhibition entitled Retro-lucidity on the reuse of previous video game practices (the retrogaming), a big nostalgic throwback movement that’s very much in vogue right now.
“It is in this niche that video games dialogue the most with other media, such as photography and cinema,” he explains.
Grand Theft Auto draws heavily from the cinematic universe. Max Payne picks up the world of action cinema from Hong Kong. Red Dead Redemption is heavily inspired by westerns and offers in its second opus photo modes that existed at the end of the 19th centurye century.
“The game is really a place of intermediality”, sums up the professor, citing these examples. He also reminds us that cinema and television draw inspiration from this total art by offering looped narratives (Russian Dolls, Edge of Tomorrow), first-person narratives (The Russian Ark, Saul’s son) or even media coverage of video games (Elephant).
“I don’t want to be quoted saying that great cinematographic art imitates great video game art,” says the specialist. I note that in contemporary commercial logic, imitating the game in format and imagery becomes a marketing argument. »
The idea of creating for a total group art pleases the artistic director of Eidos. Yes, of course, his personal artistic touch is everywhere, but the sum seems to him much higher than his own contribution. “It’s a huge team effort,” he said. Some smaller games are developed by a single artist. But at Eidos, there can be 200 employees on a project. We all contribute and we all adapt. »
His team has just hired an architect who joins former photographers and film defectors. The parallel between the 10e and the 7e art also pleases him.
The initial idea for a new project most often comes from a creative director, a bit like a director. The concept is fleshed out to define spatiotemporal anchors and the narrative arc. The artistic director and his artists then create characters and sets, a “bible” of visual reference. All this clearing work requires about a year of production. “I don’t work in a vacuum,” explains Mr. Gauthier Leblanc. I am still in contact with the directors of the gameplay or levels. »
This community signature perhaps partly explains the attitude of the artistic director with regard to the appropriation and misappropriation by artists of the images of the games. His last great work of total art, Guardians of the Galaxyoffers the photographic function like the other games of Eidos for a few years.
“Drawing inspiration from our images to draw something new from them, I find that rewarding for my work,” he says. It’s a bit like when everyone starts photographing a new building signed by an architect. It is a proof of love and it is a practice that makes the original product even more known. »
So why not exploit this vein? Ubisoft had exhibited in 2010 in a Montreal gallery works on paper taken from the game Assassin’s Creed. There would certainly be a market for these images in a world where the most mundane digital creations can sell for fortunes. By the way, Pascal Greco does not sell the images of death stranding (except for an already exhausted draw which was used to finance a philanthropic activity).
The artistic director of Eidos saw the exploratory exhibition in the gallery (“it was brilliant”) and he admits that he would love to see works from his games in the gallery, specifying that the commercial aspect does not concern him . Linda Duchaussoy, director of communications and engagement at Eidos, answers frankly that there are no plans to commercially exploit derivatives of game images. “That’s not where we want to go,” she said laconically.