Margarete Jahrmann
Max Moswitzer
A neo-luddite game console in retro glitter blue as exhibition artefact (ZKM) was the first common game artwork of Margarete Jahrmann(Zurich) and Max Moswitzer (Vienna). They structurally coupled well known game objects with surprising computer-game modifications.
LinX3D was an arts circuit bending of a live ASCII video-camera to a 3D shooter game and a science fiction story. The visual result approached constructivist imagery, art and language text aesthetics, applied to logfiles and logIn shells and very radical abstraction. This was achieved by extreme visual feedback algorithms applied to 3D games.
Live gigs with game engines became their specialities from 2001-03. Sound, Nybble Engine Movies (data-road-movies)and theory dance were put on the scene. Requisites for these concerts were laser sinthered print outs of the game´’abs ever-changing architectures, called objectiles (casino luxembourg 2003, OK center f. Gegenwartskunst OÖ’85 2002). The stage quality of games was tested. Its elements were the bodily presence of lecturers playing the modificated game engine Nybble-Engine as a audio-visual instrument, accompanied by a stage setup of oversized printouts of the “neo constructivist” game imagery. In 2004 the nybble-engine magazine appeared as glossy full colour magazine with DVD.
Modular lectures were enacted in the line of european mediafestivals from ars electronica (distinction in interactive arts 2003) to transmediale Berlin (2nd price of the software art award 2004).
The so called “anti-war-shooter” Nybble-Engine-ToolZ (developed in cooperation with the V2 lab Rotterdam, shown at MAMA Gallery Rotterdam at Deaf03) did
send massive amounts of anti war e-mails to president@whitehouse with each press on the shoot button in the game arts installation by unblameable arts visitors.
Game objects, standing as object for itself and no more as interface to something else, are the actual project by the formation. They are now appearing together with guest performers as band (Goape, cul-de-sac) in clubs or exhibitions. The “cabaret voltaire” styled game-instruments are playable objects, inbetween toys and new bachelor machines. The first series of GoApe chindogus was shown at the postmedial condition exhibtion, at Neue Galerie Graz 2005 and nouveaux objets cé’8elibataires at Arco Madrid 2006.
Due to intransparancy in used con-dividualities, alter-egos, names, labels and arts and game contextualisations by the artists, no specific theoretician or institution ever constantly included their work in their body of reference.
Margarete Jahrmann, Max Moswitzer
http://www.ludic-society.net
http://www.climax.at
http://linx3d.konsum.net
http://www.konsum.net
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Riding the ´’abpatabike: Ich spiele Leben
‘5fby Marguerite Charmante
Ich spiele mit der Zeit, ich hab genug davon.
Ich spiele mit der Macht, wer will das schon.
Ich spiele mit Musik, ich spiele jeden Ton, ich spiele Leben.
Hansi Lang (1984)
In a sloping spiral curve the historic ´’abpataphysical bike breaks into pieces. Instead of dumping it in the trash can of art history, it can be recycled and poetically circuit bent. As an absurd forerunner of the bi-cycle, the monowheel appears to represent in itself an icon for imaginary solutions. Number 6, the first paradigmatic prisoner trapped on an informatic island, is himself a bachelor and identified by the vé’8elocipè’8fde batch. The nouvelle socié’8eté’8e ludique investigates new bachelor machines again, but now these are over-clocked into living machines. The mise en scè’8fne of these play objects in life defines the line of ludics as a process of inquiry, as a game, a discipline based on arts real play and scholarship.
Riding the new monowheel with a firm grip but not thwarted in artistic passion helps to overcome the frame of the bike, the stiff ´’abcadre´’ab of the bicycle, which became the epiphenomenon of a simple model of a technical machine in time. Alfred Jarry (1898) was framing his mindset by the bike of the time. Now the jeune ´’abpataphysicienne rides a monowheel, organises her affiliates hells’ angel like in chapters and acts as penseuse maudite, as wicked severe thinker, a bon mot which Deleuze originally had attributed to Nietzsche (1965). This discourse-theoretical framing drives closer towards Nietzsche’s vibrant dictum of a ´’abgay science´’ab in playful formats as aphorisms and poetry, transferred to life in Real Gaming and Real Playing.
The afore mentioned nouvelle ´’abpata-physicienne, Soeur Ubu, highlights a certain social life and mediated art sets as a game with a Real Gamer contrainte, a bondage. The concept of restraint is purloined from the group Oulipo, the legendary garage for potentates in literature, but as ouXpo in all other fields of life as well. Some ludic socialites appropriated the practice of the ouvroir in society chapters for self-determined lust-oriented´’abgamish´’ab work. To elude the illusionary and overcome the illusion of an all-life life-long playing society, the contrainte is not a limitation, but an intentionally chosen poetic rule of play in ´’abLudistik´’ab. Sticking to the mercurial thievishness as a massively Real Player authenticator obviously constitutes the first contrainte of the hereby entered distincted level of LS Real Plays. The second rule arrogates breaking the rules itself, a concept exemplarily exercised in GTA San Andreas as a seminal life model. To the ´’abpatabiker in GTA, the monowheel appears as the most desirable vehicle to be driven. Just as in standard real life it can be significantly more easily obtained by cheats. If following the hereby opened potential pata-spiral of retorsion thinking, where each step grounds the power of the next one, the rules of pure observation of games, as common in ludology and narratology, are broken in ludics like a stiff bike frame (Jarry’s cadre) in a race.
Sometimes stiffness is desired, as in certain moments in life or in the play with bachelor machines or in the focus of ´’abpataphysics on the production of texts and other objects of attention, although very playful ones, if you think of the low-techly appealing pataphon. But if the passion of Jesus is considered as an uphill bicycle race, each passion ride must be taken with a firm grip! The nouvelle ´’abpataphysicienne Rose Selavy takes white to play and win, du(cha)mps the atomic elements of the crashed ´’abpatabike finally for a self-sufficiently rotating monowheel, and then stitches glitches together on a ludic bread board. The ludic socialites of the known Ludic Society Chapter Vienna (Jahrmann/ Moswitzer/ Savicic), actually involved in a new series of objets cé’8elibataires, call their processing drawings and later also fully dressed and equipped printed circuit boards, ´’abpataboards.
“Playing for souls. No blood, no guts, no gore - emotionally full games.” (Christian Game Dev. Association, 2005) Expé’8erience PCB boards as “objet de jeu, de vie et d’art” stand for emotionally charged game (re)search. The parenthetically Fibonacci spiraled layouts of most of their conducting paths become a design element, an aesthetic merit, and cause potential glitches, which are merely empowered by flexible resistors, which can be played like a guitar! The play (=on stage as band) is a play in the living machine. Cul-de-sac, the dead end street can be exited by destroying laptop-music, as neo-luddite in an lud/dic act, by literally smashing the laptop instead of the guitar as stage performance. The live hot air on the self-etched circuit board allegorises the ride on the monowheel. The stage tool is still a chindogu h
(useless object), but starts to work more cé’8elibataire, acts more self-sufficient, rotates like a millwheel for music and makes the socialite even more attractive when playing with it. These are objets cé’8elibataires, sisters are doing it for themselves!
In “the logics of the imaginative” Roger Caillois (1973) suggests the mollusc as soft conception model, which is obviously an adequate frame of expé’8erience for the hereby proposed proceedings of ludics (Ludistik). The mollusc mood styled smooth new objets cé’8elibataires trigger electronic and ´’abpataphysic poetic glitches, as a followup series of the ludic society gamebased search artifacts of “GoApe-Chindogus”. Here glitch designed means that the processing drawings for the printed circuits boards are curved, twisted, twirled and spiraled, which is chique but abandoned in standard circuit board design, exactly because of possible electronic errors, called glitches for short. The spiral was not only the badge of Boris Vian, also on stage in Projex Pere Ubu concerts and at Oulipo meetings, it is also the PC layout for the LS objects referred to. The nouvelle societé’8e ludique is identified by the tin-plated circuit monowheel batch. If put on stage, it activates the Real Game and hands it over to each of us - the Real Players!
Nouveaux exercices de style, the new lessons in freestyle gaming are provided by the play of the new series of objets cé’8elibataires on stage as the climax of their use. Gaming that takes place in the banlieue as a strategy to appropriate the architecture of urban life is an example of this attitude. If style is an attitude (Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanys, 1961) then this can be claimed for the uninsured strolling workers and painters at the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge (which was once considered as one of the technical wonders of the potency of engineers), who were risking their life forced by monetary and survival demands, but presented and mediated as proud players, real gamers with nothing to lose, who enjoy the work and their exploitation and develop a competitive sport out of it by hanging in the wires of the bridge, as skywalkers without any safety net. Following Roger Caillois’ game classifications again, the competition is one of the oldest and most fundamental types of play. Ilinx, getting ill by the bodily experience, is the second fundamental one, and both types can be applied to the real gamers on the Brooklyn Bridge, to the le-parkour jumpers in the banlieues, to the car burners in the streets of Paris, Rotterdam, North Germany and GTA San Andreas.
In their conception as live tools for performances in club contexts the above mentioned objets cé’8elibataires can be compared to a playful Lebensmaschine= living machine in the sense of Christoph Schlingensief. When he presents the re-make of the historic theater-machine animatograph, he follows in its format works of avantgarde artists such as Lá’87zló’97 Moholy Nagy, who constructed with his light-space-modulator what were at first glance useless multi-layered spaces as stages for play in reality. From the ludics point of view this new animatograph intends to be a “graphical” glitch machine, which engraves texts into the scene play and its surrounding realities. This black boxed deus ex machina is an effort to liberate from the pure art forms, as the art form of (stage-)play. For this purpose a real play machine needs to be created, which the ludic socialite can compare to other play objects. The historic Animatograph from 1896 by Robert W. Paul was conceptionalized as a machine, projecting out of the illusionary play-worlds into the real-world stage.-
At the moment of their creation experimental machines of this kind were useless art projects, a sort of visual theremins playing with the promises of technologies. The synthesizer, the vocoder or the very convincing supersecretary voder of the 1940s Bell Laboratories were all such projectory objects of bachelors, which we would consider today as circuit bending machines. Especially the voder as a speech synthesizing object incorporates the direct use of the typewriter as listening aid (Rö’9aller 2005) and live audio tool, which replaces the often sexually connotated secretary. In an act of variantology, understood as relationship between norm and deviation, the ludic synthesizer will be driven by a spiral curved poetic objet cé’8elibataire. The vocoder made its way onto the stage of fiction technologies, especially with artists as George Clinton and Parliament, with Bootsy and Sun Ra, in short the afrofuturist fiction strain in music.
Another Real Player, the ordinary female switchboard operator, nowadays plays with micro circuit connections on stage. She demonstrates the continuation of avant-garde techniques as cut-up, collage and auto-matic writing (William S. Borroughs). To envision this live gig, please call up your mental images of Godard´’abs Alphaville (1964) or of the Anti-Pop Consor-tium´’abs Perpendicular/Vector clip (2002), where the switchboard girl is incorporated as an icon. “The girls who get the calls, the girls who get the rings, are those who are in the know (…when it comes to caring for their clothes).” Advertisement quoted by McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (1951). So the one who eludes the conception of the chess player Marcel Duchamp and his dark chocolate (German: Herrenschokolade) mill, is the self-proclaimed new mechanical bride, the charming Skype mistress who rides ´’abpataboards just by social engineering for a new game, for a new life!
The ludic society repository for game
based research artifacts
The GoApe project is another, an artistic research artefact and can be presented as a case study for ludics. The prototype of this open source game engine was developed in association with the artificial intelligence lab in Zurich and the University of Arts and Design Zurich, research and development department as institutional affiliation. The GoApe project is an artistic experimental system, which merges the real life development of a new open source engine, a software for AI-Simulation, with networked multiplayer gaming and extended game interfaces. The original conception of the game simulates a macacus apes primate society, compared to the dominance and hierarchy rules in open source societies. The latter became the authors general topic for the project called GoApe, which main element is a modular engine, that is based on embedded neural networks and exemplary cognitive science features. The simulation of a social system with autonomous agents stands in exchange with the development of the tool itself plus a zoo of hardware extensions. These hardware tools, feeding the engine back and forth, were first called hardbots, in reference to the software agents in games called bots. The change of the machines extension directly influences the software simulation representing a game society. This sustains concessions in the fields of the social recon-figurations of given apparatuses. With the growth of this engine and its implementation, the artists felt the need for an artcoded interface! GoApe Chindogus are designed as complexity-increasing objectiles (Nybble Engine, 2003) by artists and exhibited as examples in the art system. Chindogu is a term introduced by the Japanese writer Kawakami, referring to the real satire aspect of gadget industries. GoApe chindogus transfer this observation into the world of human computer interfaces, as a perverse precondition and absurd setting in the arts around computergames, i.e. permanently requested interfaces in postmedial arts to be exhibited. Per definition the series of GoApe chindogus are contingency solu-tions, as main objects of desire and interest, when connected to a PC as functioning but useless appa-ratuses to interface the GoApe game engine (www. GoApe-project.org). But although they exist and function technologically, GoApe chindogus destruct function and semantics for the merit of aesthetics, to joy in jeux in the manner of La gaya scienza (Friedrich Nietzsche), to prove the ludicrous prejudice of the serious human beast against all gay science.
Need for Speed II - The ludic chapters programm and other search tales
“Need for Speed 2” allegorates as titel of a well known racing game the doubletwist of the ludic search program. On one side the release number “2” can be ludicly interpreted as an metaphor for the second nature of games as life models per se. 2ndly “2” stands for a reference to the epiphenomenon of (racing) games implemented after videogames in real life. The interesting point is the formal backlash on the way of how these games are performed in the area of computergames. The french le-parkour jumpers move like Super Mario over walls, and change their physical abilites and experiences by these activities. Real Players as for example the motorcycle speedrunners, filming their mad life-risking highspeed race over real highways with a camera in first person “Real Player” perspective. It shows the street as if “I”, the viewer were driving, shows the handlebars, but never the face of the driver, reproducing exactly those images known from game consoles. So the exchange goes in both directions, into the bodily action and into its aesthetic representation.
One of the best known unknown drivers is named Ghostrider. He is such an impersonator of racing games on highways in combination with an unknown identity, consisting assumably of a complete player team. So this epiphenomenon could be named as con-dividuality, or even better as Real Player.
The re/search focuses of the different Ludic Society chapters do not contribute directly to games studies, but elaborate experience based research by a variety of experimental games, first person methodologies, and various differing concepts of ergodic search, consisting of ergon and hodos, work and path (Aarseth 1997), so to speak real epistemic plays. The goal is to show an empathy with experimental anticipative research on conceptual art plays, live action roleplaying games, computer games in at least a bidirectional way, both as source and target. Its topics are playful social practices out of games in real space and extended gaming zones (Alberto Lacovoni 2004). It stresses the conceptual disjunction of game and play and its transgression into newly developed game structures for real life. Real Players incorporate a crucial role in the reconstruction of the rules of play as a vibrant element of todays ludic “Umwelt” (Uexkuell 1909).
The topic of Real Players, also considered as con-dividualities, as conceptual entities for arts and other purposes is linked to the etymological coincidence of the related terms ludus (=game), ludics (Ludistik) and luddism, (Maschinensturm). The forcibly desperate run of weavers on the new punchcard driven weaving machines (Joseph-Marie Jacquard, 1752-1834) at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 19th century in England, was led by an individual called General Ludd, as the newspapers were reporting, but: “The origin of ‘Ludd’ is unknown. There is no basis for the story put out by The Nottingham Review on 20 December 1811, that an apprentice named Ned Ludd once smashed a master´’absm machine near Leicester and hence gave his name to the action. It is more likely that the local Nottingham speech had an expression similar to the one in Cornwall, where sent all of a lud meant struck all of a heap, or smashed.” (Revolution and the quintessential naysayers to odious and intrusive technology)
General Ludd could be considered as first Real Player. In fact his identity was never clarified. His appearance as activist fictional con-dividuality could be compared to the progression of a game character, which can be used by anybody for certain purposes. A character is not necessarily defined by its faciality but by its possibilites of actions. So another face-less figure, El Sub Commandante Marcos, the masked south american Zappatist leader, who can never be killed or arrested because he is wearing the black racing mask (shure accompanied by a revolution-styled uniform cap) could join this chorus line of Real Players, investigated in ludics. That´’abs why he is an activist for indigenes as well as a DJ in a Berlin club.
Whereas General Ludd (and luddites, workers, who attacked machines, the bugbear of capitalism based on machine industrialization in 19th century England) was still the project of a blurred play, the ludically proven real life model El Subcommandante Marcos masked his facial identity and thus became the mask of a social player that anyone could use – the cultural terrorist, DJ and real life player.
“Everyone is El Sub!”
ludic society traces
Inside the postmedial exhibition space, a museum show-case, an antique vitrine from the Hofmobilien Depot Vienna, provokes disapprobation! The vitrine evokes the reception situation of a cultural-historical museum. It disturbs the clear thinking lines and connections between an architecturally guided parcours through former media-art-works, which allege to emancipate from the dark cave of intermediality. As objet trouvé’8e its impudent voluptuous shape contradicts the line of projections in dark rooms. The museum’s vitrine needs a spotlight! Its
high glossy glass top unpleasantly mirrors its surroundings, becomes a looking glass for objects and the observers of apparently technical objects which have come together in its abdomen. The baroque legs of the presentation shelf are an instability factor, a rocaille link to the retorsion spirals shown inside, the crafty self-etched circuit boards made of beautiful stylish black, specially ordered circuit board material and decorative, electricity- and signal- conducting copper. The presentation set-up couples the LCD screen for the game videoclip with the museum object vitrine. Its readymade character is a glitch, a provoked distortion of conservatorial decisions of not yet framed media and art positions.
The baroque museum vitrine with rotating rocaille mussel legs historicises contemporary game worlds. In the display case the ludic society magazine is exhibited as ludic society fanzine next to the useless gameplay interface objects GoApe chindogus. All the objects are placed on red velvet. The ´’abpatastyled circuit boards aesthetic contains elements of a bourgeois bohemian artisanship. As bijoux they are self-sufficient, yet they are also sound-playing performance hammers, in other words nouvelles machines cé’8elibataires, new bachelor machines. In the vitrine arrangement they are accompanied by some naked circuit boards without any functional technical elements, but with an ISBN number and barcode, demonstrating their objectiveness as a new format for text publications. They appear as system immanent explanation, similar to a Perl poetry work, at the same time readable when executed as technical object but also working when just lying in a vitrine and not activated: as language and as parole!
Banlieues, the suburbs in France and elsewhere are not built for living but for playing, either with cars or bikes or with your own body as a game character. The artificial freedom of interpretation allows the artist as ludic socialite to add some props (adding properties, props for short, to characters is a common practice in massively multi-player games) to the analog video documentaries of the le-parkours jumpers in banlieues:
1) a game status bar, indicating the play level
2) the massive re-pixelation of analog material, to give
the look of a c64 game to the parcour real life clip.
Craziness, obsession, and individual style are indispensable features, both of the covered parcour scene and of the producing artists, who are constructors and collectors of the displayed ludic traces.
The president@whitehouse.gov Shooter and Enlightenment as Mass Deception
The line above makes reference to Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay ‘The Culture Industry’, which when extended to include current IT industries, needs to address the production of computer games. Unlike TV news broadcasting, the users of computer games have little difficulty in distinguishing between the creation of real as opposed to illusory worlds in that games are clearly labeled as such. But on the side of the game producers we can observe that, the propaganda of consumer games lulls players into accepting ideological conditions, in such a way that the design and story of ’shoot them up’ games necessitates the ‘war against terrorism.’ Here it is especially interesting that the praxis of ‘total conversion’, so-called TCs in gamer’s lingo, was made popular with a game about terrorism (Counter-Strike based on Half Life), which can be seen by its content and its representation as a celebration of the political forces of the leading nations. The gameplay is centralised around fighting between terrorists and counter-terrorists. Its goals are disarming bombs or rescuing hostages, and all weaponry is modelled on existing arms - including the design, the specific use, and sound effects. But total conversions of games can also produce a critical position, as seen in a number of so called game arts applications as in the case of nybble-engine-toolZ. By shooting anti-war emails to president@whitehouse.gov, action clearly expresses a sense of agency that transgresses the defined boundaries of a gaming environment. Other actions include triggering online processes, such as massive pings or traceroutes to crucial government servers. All these actions happen in ‘the real world’ and not in the ’sim’ world of a game. All the outgoing signals are counted and transferred to other servers and this can be seen as an example of a public online demonstration tool. I would call this a ‘Real Game’.
The total conversion, coming from a praxis of modification and ‘crack’ of consumer games, is a work which cannot be directly commercialised, because of its difficult legal situation between proprietary code and non-proprietary code, because it is just in the middle between affirmation and critique. This is valid for ’software art’ or ‘game art’ in general, but especially for this work, that serves as anchorpoint here.
