..intro [MEIAC at ARCO 2001]

The "des-juego/de-game" project actually came about in response to an invitation extended to the Badajoz Museum by Antonio Franco Domínguez, director of the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC), for it to take part in the 1991 Madrid Art Fair.

Continuing the work I’ve done for the MEIAC in developing its “Galeria Virtual” (the first digital art program created in an Iberian museum), "des-juego/de-game" emerges as a strong investment in one of the issues that is perhaps the most current one in digital art. In other words, the relationship between art, computer technology and computer games.

I invited JODI, a team formed by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, to participate in this initiative. Visiting them in Barcelona, we chatted about the current artistic scene, discussing artists with interesting game projects. Later we broached on the present state of their well-known production CTRL-SPACE and the strategy needed to present it in Madrid. A darkened room, with their backs to the audience, and 4 white iMacs DV linked by an Airport network, enabling four spectators/players to try out 3 levels in deconstructing Quake, the famous computer game. I am pretty sure it is going to be one of the ARCO 2001’s surprises.

Later on I invited two other artists, Catalonia’s Joan Leandre and Mexico’s Fran Ilich, to come on board as well. What binds these artists, in the MEIAC space planned for ARCO, is their relationship, simultaneously a deconstructive and parodying one, with the world of computer games.

Joan Leandre (a.k.a. retroYou) grabs hold of digital material to deconstruct motor-racing simulators, producing psychedelic transformations in the digital worlds designed by the creators of the original platforms. As she herself says:

"[retroyou r/c Paradise] y [retroyou r/c Me]
stem from modifications carried out by the serial project of [estímulos retroYou].

These belong to the [Entretenimiento Paraiso] module and are actually modified prototypes of different technological platforms for entertainment purposes.
[Retroyou r/c Paradise] is the reflection of a Saturday at some
radio-controlled car races. The atmosphere is good and everything appears to be normal: where are the modified coordinates to be found and what
happened in the folder the previous day [retroRC]? Perhaps the tutorial [retroYou r/C Me] provides us with some answers and raises some new questions, for example: how to drive our vehicle_stop so we can tackle the dark horizon{?}, at what point does the modification become a backward process{?} and also what are the best strategies for designing future prototypes{?}. -.::::"

If, however, the two previous projects may appear to be somewhat formalistic when viewed at a glance or by someone less versed in the peculiarities of the digital universe (with some naive protagonists even confusing them with Nam June Paik’s analogical era "video scratch"), the Fran Ilich project, on the contrary, looks distinctly like a neo-dadaistic agit-prop piece of work put out unexpectedly by an American cartoon studio. It puts me in mind of Road Runner, created by Chuck Jones in 1948... Despite the humor that characterizes it, this work conveys a more complex program of art and politics, geared according to hacking rules: observation, study, and non-destructive understanding... of the invisible worlds of illegal immigration. As, incidentally, Luis Humberto Rosales and Fran Ilich have written on the subject:

"In 1997 in Europe, during an event called "documenta X", the idea was born of creating a festival consisting of an encampment where artists could demonstrate their discontent about the way in which "illegal" immigrants are treated on the German/Polish border. This encampment called "kein mensch ist illegal" (no human being is illegal), was put in place in 1998. Despite various attempts by the police to cancel and sabotage the event, cyber culture personalities, artists, musicians, human-rights activists, and sympathizers managed to organize marches, speeches, concerts, and workshops.

Three years have elapsed since "documenta X" and "kein mensch ist illegal" were first organized. Since then they have developed enormously. They now exist in more than one place. Encampments have since been set up on various EU borders with the old communist bloc, where immigrants are subjected to a lot of abuse and mistreatment. A third encampment is to be organized this year, but with a difference. This time "kein mensch ist illegal" will be on the US border, in the city of Tijuana Mx to be exact. It is actually considered by many as the most "physical and intensive" border.

Organized by Laboratorios Cinemátik, a media-mix group, promoting cyber culture and electronic music, "kein mensch ist illegal" will be known as "Borderhack!". The intention being to hack down the border, besides performing reverse engineering, to understand its structure and find out how it works."

My interest in the Web and in the so-called "media art", "new media" and "net art" began way back in 1994, when, somewhat fed up with post-conceptual circumvolutions and with various allergies to the cynicism that clothes the implosion process of pre-digital “avant-garders” like a toxic cape, I decided to look into the world of computerization, the world of new technologies, and new themes that, rapidly, draw the curiosity of the most refined intellectual: computer games, Manga, Internet, Virtual Reality, omnipresent computing, interactivity, genetic engineering, images of violence, super-eroticism and immortality.

It was a year in which I embarked on a learning curve called Aula do Risco, born of which I began digging into the practicality of developing strategies to make creative use of the new technologies. Out of that resolution, the following ideas and projects were born: Museu Virtual (1995) and Parque Museu Virtual (presented and sponsored by MEIAC); S3A (a virtual sea world inhabited by two intelligent agents {dolphins} presented at EXPO '98); Quadrum New Media (an experimental extension of the historic and avant-garde Galeria Quadrum, inaugurated in Lisbon on November 23, 1973); MEIAC’s Galeria Virtual (2000); art & technology conferences, etc.

The des-juego/de-game project grew out of the enthusiasm that the JODI team, in the wake of my inviting them to the first Badajoz Art & Technology Seminar (2000), aroused in me. I then set off on a solid artistic route, traveling the ubiquitous worlds of computing. Artistic creativity and esthetic acts of virtuosity had been at the service of computing for some time. Right from the onset in fact. Evident in the imagination and design of the user-friendly interfaces all of us use today to handle complex operating systems and software applications. And, even in the extraordinary effort of computational creativity and intelligence put into the mind-boggling advances made in modulation and 3D animation or in the creation of computer games. What was missing, however, before the appearance of the JODI, Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson, Eddo Stern, Joan Leandre and Fran Ilich, or of online projects at opensorcery.net/ and summonstosurrender.com/ sites, was an actual awareness of techno-art anchored in the historic heritage and criticism of contemporary art itself. That analytical art that, little by little, was transformed into a veritable meta-art: quintessential critic and humorist of the West’s cultural self-awareness (acquired through a long, subjective and intellectually sophisticated process).

Long gone the time when technology was a kind of refuge for bad artists! Thanks to the pioneering work of institutions such as Cal Arts, the School of Visual Arts, ZKM, and the Walker Art Center, among others, contemporary art finally start to undergo a new and deep transformation. Regurgitating styles and past decades in an inevitable spiral of revivalist degradation, it managed to pave the way for today’s art...
But if all that appears to be logical and even inevitable, that's not to say that some institutional resistance remains with regard to fully accepting the incorporation of the new media into the so-called territory of contemporary art. An invisible fractal still separates the museums, art galleries, critics, and artists of the 20th century from the museums, art galleries, critics and artists of the 21st century. This fractal goes by various names: Web, Net, media art, cyber art, new media. We simply call it the “fractal of art and technology”.

The des-juego/de-game project and site that, in the wake of ARCO, will continue on its reconnoitering travels with a well-defined creative mission, is aimed at all those artists infected by the virus of digitalization, networking, and the fractal multiplication of possible worlds. We’re launching another spaceship into the digital galaxy. May the Force be with us!

António Cerveira Pinto