THE AESTHETICS OF SLOW MACHINIMA (3 OF 4)

IN A NEW INSTALLMENT OF OUR ONGOING SERIES ON SLOW MACHINIMA, WE DISCUSS THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF "MEANINGFUL BOREDOM".

“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.” (John Cage)

“I like boring things.” (Andy Warhol)

In my last two posts, I wrote about the aesthetics of slow machinima, that is a certain formal trend in contemporary machinima can be seen as an act of cultural resistance to speed and acceleration. In the last few years, several authors have challenged the frantic pace of modern video games - and visual culture in general - by creating machinima that are spectacularly uneventful, often lengthy and glacially paced. I argued that slow machinima is the videogame equivalent of slow cinema, an expression indicating modern feature-length films that carry on the legacy of arthouse auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni and Chantal Akerman by offering minimal action, narrative development, and movement, often borrowing the aesthetics of photography and painting. If “static films offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion”, writes Justin Remes, static machinima are even more radical. If motion is essential to cinema in the same way that interactivity is crucial to the medium of video games, removing both interactivity and motion from a video game creates a visual artifact twice as removed from its “source”.

Interestingly, most static machinima are not completely static. Even in the case of Philip Solomon’s EMPIRE - in which a fixed shot of the Rotterdam Tower (a replica of the Empire State Building) in a virtual city reminiscent of New York dominates the frame for more than forty eight minutes - and much longer in other cases (1) - things do happen, constantly. In other words, although stasis is foregrounded, the scene does change in the background. Although motion and movement are toned down, they are not completely eradicated from the frame. Nonetheless, slow & static machinima blur the line between the visual arts and gaming, film and video art. It could be argued that Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho is to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho what slow/static machinima (Solomon's EMPIRE) is to the original video game (Grand Theft Auto IV).

After briefly sketching the aesthetics of slow machinima in my previous posts, I now wish to discuss a few phenomenological aspects. I am especially interested in the forms of spectatorship of these kinds of productions. Every time I screen slow/static machinima, I notice two kinds of reaction from the audience. One faction finds the images absorbing, mesmerizing, even hypnotic. A second group rejects them as boring, tedious, even excruciating. In the former, watching often leads to an epiphany: after a few minutes of confusion, bedazzlement, and surprise, the spectator develops a peculiar fascination for the work on display. This viewing position is akin to a religious experience, one in which the aura of the work of art manifests itself in its formal majesty. This aura, as Remes suggests, is often nothing else than the witnessing of time itself, an overpowering perception of what it is normally ignored, repressed, or distanced, i.e. consciousness itself.

A more common reaction consists in frustration, rejection, and stubborn resistance. The average spectator who equates video games to an interactive equivalent of what film critic Tom Gunning (2000) (via Sergei Eisenstein, 1998) has called “the cinema of attractions” is at loss when confronted with a video that looks like a game, but behaves like something else, a bizarre hybrid of a painting, photograph, and video installation. Slow/static machinima is usually dismissed as an experiment in boredom, or, worse, as a prank inflicted upon unsuspecting viewers.   

I believe there is a third way between veneration and rejection. Remes’ definition of “furniture films” aptly describes a mode of consumption situated halfway between the two dominant viewing positions. If veneration presupposes a deep attention and rejection implies complete distraction, one can imagine the cinematic equivalent of what Linda Stone (1998) called “continuous partial attention” (CPA), i.e. the process of paying simultaneous attention to a number of sources of incoming information, but at a superficial level. According to Stone, this fragmentary viewing experience is now prevalent in our culture. Similarly, Katherine Hayles (2007) distinguishes between “deep attention” and “hyper attention”. She writes:

Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.  

Remes calls Andy Warhol’s Empire the quintessential “furniture film”, that is, a cinematic work specifically designed to be viewed partially, distractedly. He writes:

By repudiating movement, Warhol creates films that do not demand close attention, so these works can be enjoyed in conjunction with other activities, such as conversing, eating, drinking, and dancing.

...Or texting, skimming photos and posts on a smartphone etc.

Remes suggests that Warhol's cinematic production can be compared to Erik Satie's musical inventions. Among other things, Satie invented the genre of furniture music (musique d’ameublement), i.e. music that does not require full attention, but becomes a kind of a spatial soundtrack, an aural background. A perfect example is his composition Vexations (1893).

Vexations consists of a short theme in the bass whose four presentations are heard alternatingly unaccompanied and played with chords above. According to Satie, "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities". Vexations introduced a radical new way of listening to music. Likewise, Remes writes that films like Empire and Sleep “open up new ways of thinking about cinematic reception by inviting a series of distracted glances rather than a focused and comprehensive gaze.”

In a work like Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Deer Cam (2016), an AI controlled deer wanders through the city, causing havoc. Its actions are streamed live, 24/7, on an internet website set up by Watanabe himself. There are not narrative imperatives: the continuous, real-time streaming of random situations can hardly be called a “story”, therefore an inattentive viewer could not possibly miss a turning point, a significant twist, a resolution or a cliffhanger because these narrative techniques are completely absent. San Andreas Deer Cam is an example of furniture machinima not because it is slow, boring, and/or uneventful per se, but because the events, situations, and accidents it depicts do not create an intelligible, self-contained, and ultimately coherent narrative. When something exceeds the viewing resources of a spectator - both in on temporal and cognitive levels - it becomes pure noise. It becomes a piece of furniture. In this case, a piece of generative furniture, one that favors randomness to repetition. How can a work like San Andreas Deer Cam be approached? Describing Sleep in a 1963 interview, Warhol said “It’s a movie where you can come in at any time. And you can walk around and dance and sing…. It just starts, you know, like when people call up and say ‘What time does the movie start?’ you can just say ‘Any time.’ (quoted in Remes). The same applies to a machinima that can be looked at but not fully seen. Watanabe provides the viewer with an open window on an urban environment where a computer-controlled animal runs free. When it comes to watching San Andreas Deer Cam, there are no expectations, requirements or demands. The ideal set up of Watanabe's work would be a gallery space or a projection room where visitors come and go, constantly. San Andreas Deer Cam cannot be watched, but only experienced. 

Ashley Blackman, Freedom, HD Video, sound, color, 2016, 4' 48"

Ashley Blackman - a second year student at Falmouth University in the United Kingdom - turns his camera to the sky to film the glacial movement of clouds for almost ten minutes. The fact that this visual record is produced within the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout 4 makes this gesture of radical simplicity even more interesting. Blackman’s Clouds (2016) is significant not only because it perfectly exemplifies the contemplative, ruminative approach of slow machinima, but also because it engages in a conversation with several other video works, from Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) to Harun Farocki’s Parallel I (2012), not to mention conceptual pieces by the likes of Sol LeWitt.

Harun Farocki, Parallel I, 2012

The same could be said of another recent piece by Blackman, Freedom (2016), which is, simultaneously, a machinimic depiction of an American flag shot by a fixed camera and a homage to Jasper John’s seminal painting, produced between 1954 and 1955. The strength of Blackman's machinima lies in its stark simplicity and minimalism. Similarly to Watanabe’s San Andreas Deer Cam, Freedom can be accessed and abandoned at will. There is no clear beginning or definite end. Just flux. The viewing experience can coincide to the full duration of the work or be limited to a few minutes, even seconds. It can be devotional or partial, deep or hyper. One may wonder if such definitions as furniture machinima and its antithesis (immersive, video art) rely on intrinsic features of the work or rather on the specific attitude of the viewer. A viewer might find Clouds or Flag overwhelming in their utter banality while another could appreciate its bold originality and/or the artist's unconventional gesture. As Remes notes in discussing the possible reception of a slow, static film,

The goal is not to prescribe a certain mode of spectatorship but merely to draw attention to a dimension of static films (and of cinema more broadly) that is often overlooked: the way viewers can derive pleasure from components of a cinematic experience that have little to do with the film itself.

If we substitute the term “film” with “machinima”, the meaning of this statement does not change. As Remes concludes, “Warhol’s static films are interesting precisely because they are boring. Or, to put it another way, the content of Warhol’s films is often boring, but this is what makes the experience of watching them so potentially interesting.” Discussing the aesthetics of Tree Movie by Marc Low, June Nam Paik used the expression “meaningful boredom” (quoted in Friedman, 2009). Slow machinima, a hybrid form intersecting both experimental film, avant-garde practices, and video art, is deeply meaningful because it is often deliberately boring.
 

Matteo Bittanti

NOTES

(1) In 2008, Solomon's EMPIRE has been screened for 127 hours consecutively at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

REFERENCES

Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Montage of Attractions” and “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell, London: British Film Institute, 1998, pp. 29–34, 35–52.

Friedman, Ken . “Events and the Exquisite Corpse,” in The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game, ed. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 229–35.

Hayles, Katherine N. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”. Profession 2007, pp. 187–199 (13).

Remes, Justin. Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Stone, Linda. “Constant Partial Attention”, Linda Stone Website, 1998. URL: https://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention/

 

OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES

The Aesthetics of Slow Machinima 1

The Aesthetics of Slow Machinima 2



 

THE AESTHETICS OF SLOW MACHINIMA (2 of 4)

PRESS PAUSE: FROM SLOW MACHINIMA TO STATIC MACHINIMA. UNDERSTANDING PHILIP SOLOMON'S EMPIRE.

"It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw” (Don DeLillo, Point Omega) 

In my previous blog post, a week ago, I sketched out some of the ways machinima is evolving and I described what I am calling - with a nod to film theory and criticism - “slow machinima”. Although these productions do not form any kind of unified genre, school, or movement they do share several common traits. For example, they all appear to be generally indifferent or deliberately antagonistic to mainstream game audiences, and perhaps, to mainstream audiences in general. In their explicit refusal to adhere to the conventions of popular genres - e.g. comedy, sci-fi, and horror - a handful of directors have chosen to explore alternative visual strategies featuring long takes, sparse narrative, minimal camera movement, editing, and dialogue. These auteurs operate in the gray area separating cinema, animation, gaming, and performance art, contributing in their own way to blur the boundaries of each practice. I argued that this certain formal trend in contemporary machinima can be seen as an act of cultural resistance, a resistance to speed, frenzy, and acceleration. Finally, I clarified that, in terms of presentation, distribution, and circulation, slow machinima diverges from the dominant fandom productions insofar as these artifacts are not usually uploaded on popular video sharing websites such as YouTube or Vimeo, but mostly distributed through artworld channels. Slow machinima prefers dark projection rooms to bright smartphone screens, art galleries' white walls to laptops.

As I will explain in the next few weeks, slow machinima is not monolithic. There is slow machinima. There is also slower machinima: deceleration can be quite dramatic. Such is the case of Philip Solomon’s EMPIRE (2008-2012). To discuss this particular work, I am borrowing Justin Remes’s (2015) definition “cinema of stasis”, which he uses to refer to those “films in which stasis—not motion—is the default.” In his extended study of Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman, and Michael Snow, among others, Remes argues that static films occupy a special place in film history as they lie at the intersection of several different genres and media, e.g. painting and photography. As Remes writes, “Static films offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion.” He adds that “these films foreground stasis and consequently blur the lines between traditional visual art and motion pictures.” Additionally, these cinematic productions address Walter Benjamin’s observation about the screen vs. canvas dichotomy. In his most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (1936) Benjamin writes: “The painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it, he can give himself up to his train of associations. Before a film image, he cannot do so. No sooner has he seen it than it has already changed. It cannot be fixed on.” Static machinima, like its cinematic counterpart, defies conventional conceptions of video games, since, static machinima is, ostensibly, a video game without motion. As such, it has a photographic (or even painterly) nature, which in turn can accomodate a (more) contemplative viewing. But to argue that static machinima is a mere remediation of photography or painting is to ignore its formal complexity and reception modalities.

I would like to use Remes’s incisive analysis of Andy Warhol’s Empire as a starting point to discuss Philip Solomon’s EMPIRE, as the two works are overtly intertwined. Solomon’s EMPIRE is not quite a re-enactment but, rather, a replay of a seminal performance (1). On the night of July 25–26, 1964, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas filmed the Empire State Building using an Auricon camera. They shot from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building, and specifically from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation. The film was shot at 24 frames per second but is projected at 16 frames, so that, even though only about 6 hours and 36 minutes of film was made, the duration of the screening is about 8 hours and 5 minutes long. The resulting eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow-motion, black and white footage of this towering, phallic structure became known as Empire.

Almost half a century later, Solomon filmed the Rotterdam Tower, i.e. the skyscraper's virtual equivalent in Liberty City, the simulated metropolis of Grand Theft Auto IV. As Genevieve Yue (2012) wrote in Film Comment,

“EMPIRE” [...] amounts to a full day, passing through rain, sunset, night, and, come the following afternoon, the return of stormy weather.. [...] Perched on a skyscraper ledge, in an elaborate choreography of avatar, camera, and encoded “cheats,” Solomon allows us to gaze, as Warhol did, at the building across the way: “Rotterdam Tower,” or what is more recognizable as the Empire State Building."

Remes argues that Warhol’s main goal in filming Empire was “to see time go by.” I experienced something similar at a screening of Solomon’s EMPIRE in New York circa 2012. In his monograph on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 sci-fi film Stalker, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, Geoff Dyer (2012), observes that "every second [of Antonioni’s L’avventura] lasted a minute, every minute lasted an hour". Something similar can be said of Philip Solomon’s EMPIRE: although his homage lasts 48 minutes vs. the 485 minutes of the “original” it feels equally long and gloriously “uneventful”. After all, in the world of Grand Theft Auto, a minute of gameplay corresponds to one hour in the real world. In other words, although the duration of Solomon’s EMPIRE is significantly shorter than Warhol’s Empire, the viewing experience is no less disconcerting for 21st century audiences with extremely limited attention span, prone to smartphone-driven distractions, and generally terrified of ruminative, meditative situations. The real subject of Solomon's film is not "action", but time. As Remes explains, “The spectator of a film like [Warhol’s] Empire witnesses movement: not the movement of the building on the screen but the movement of time itself.” He adds:

By foregrounding stasis, films like Empire actually make the spectator more aware of the movement of time and consciousness, neither of which can be apprehended in the same way when one is absorbed in the movement of a cinematic image.

Since time is invisible and intangible, to watch Empire is to become conscious of time as it is being perceived by our consciousness: “Although Warhol’s Empire State Building is essentially immutable, my conscious experience of it is not”. Here consciousness is to be understood not only as a psychological process, but also in political terms. Think of the notion of “false consciousness”, an expression used by Marxist thinkers to describe the way in which material, ideological, and institutional processes in capitalist societies mislead members of the proletariat and other class agents. Unsurprisingly, Remes wonders if Empire could be considered a profoundly subversive film:

Is Warhol’s goal to counter the capitalistic equation “Time equals money” by offering a space in which time can be observed, felt, and reflected upon rather than hurriedly “spent”? (Remes)

If Remes's hypothesis is correct, can the same be argued in the case of Solomon’s EMPIRE? That is: by slowing down the pace of a game to (almost) zero, is Solomon rejecting the game's categorical imperative, i.e. to acquire enormous amounts of wealth, as fast as possible, by any means necessary? And if Grand Theft Auto represents the medium of the video game, is Solomon rejecting the ideology of gaming in its entirety? I would like to clarify that by "games" I do not mean a form of electronic escapism that is particularly popular among teenagers of advanced societies. I am referring to games as a metaphor, as an organizing principle, as a dominating narrative. My frame of reference is Michel Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, especially where he writes about the rhetoric of the marketplace as a "game": 

Both for the state and for individuals, the economy must be a game: a set of regulated activities ... in which the rules are not decisions which someone takes for others. It is a set of rules which determine the way in which each must play a game whose outcome is not known by anyone.

One must remember that the ideology of gaming - with its algorithms, programmed behaviors, and bots - today functions as the Operating System (OS) of society. Thus, to reject gaming is to reject techno-driven, neoliberalism, whose "heroes" - Wall Street traders - are much more criminal and ultimately violent than the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto. In fact, their nefarious acts have a broader, wider, deeper and more tangible impact than Bellic's. Wall Street traders are not only more dangerous than the game's criminals, but also invulnerable, since no matter how much damage, trouble, and pain they inflict on society, they will never prosecuted as their actions are protected, justified, and endorsed by the very governments that are supposed to regulate their conduct in the first place. Consider these passages from Douglas Rushkoff’s (2016) most recent book, Throwing Rocks At the Google Bus, which compare algorithmic trading to an ever accelerating, self-destructive game between non-human agents:

[Wall Street] is a game being played between algorithms exploiting the trading protocols. It has nothing to do with providing capital to growing companies, and everything to do with extracting value from the investment economy by undermining the very premise of open markets. It is gaming the system. For the trader, the massive amounts of data and processing capabilities unleashed by digital technology are important only insofar as they offer new ways of strategizing moves in the game. Those who play in this space, from individual technical traders to the operators of algorithmic programs, feel they have gotten into the very core of the game—the rule writing itself. The stock market—already an abstraction of commerce—was swallowed by its own abstraction. Indeed, the more that algorithms dominate the marketplace, the more the market begins to take on the properties of a dynamic system. It’s no longer a marketplace driven directly by supply and demand, business conditions, or commodity prices. Rather, prices, flows, and volatility are determined by the trading going on among all the algorithms. Each algorithm is a feedback loop, taking an action, observing the resulting conditions, and taking another action after that. Again, and again, and again. It’s an iterative process, in which the algorithms adjust themselves and their activity on every loop, responding less to the news on the ground than to one another. [...]

We are not witnessing momentary crises in the capitalization of business; we are watching a high-stakes video game among the nonhuman players of the wealthiest investment houses. At best, we humans are carried along for the ride. The economy is less a place to create value than a system to game. Hell, everyone in finance and banking is already gaming the system, extracting money from what used to be the simple capitalization of business ventures. Why not create business ventures that game the gamers at their own game? (emphasis added)

In Solomon's EMPIRE, Liberty City/New York, the world’s financial center, the city that never sleeps, a place in constant motion, is slowed down until it reaches a quasi-standstill. The accelerated circulation of images is slowed down. The flow of capital is frozen. By creating a rather uneventful scene - although events do take place (2) - Solomon forces the viewer to see better, to see more, to pay close attention to what's happening (and not happening) in the frame.

In short, to feel time, not as money, but as time in itself.

PREVIOUSLY: THE AESTHETICS OF SLOW MACHINIMA (1 of 4)

 

NOTES

(1) As I wrote elsewhere (COLL.EO, 2015), a replay “is not meant to dematerialize the “original” artistic experience, but to reframe and recontextualize it.” Additionally, a “replay does not strive for historical accuracy either. Its function is not to affirm the past, but rather to question the hic et nunc by re-staging events, situations, and conditions.”

(2) As curator Chris Stults (2008) wrote in a text accompanying a screening of Empire at the Wexner Center for the Arts:

While it leaves the “action” of GTA far below, there are a dazzling number of events that occur continually that create  sensation somewhere between meditation and entertainment. Whether it’s shifting color gradations or subtleties of lighting or the expressionist blurs of rain on “lens” or debris wafting in the path of airplane flight patterns, there is always something to hold the eye while awakening the mind. “EMPIRE” celebrates and subverts the basic operating systems of the game so much that a revision of the game’s title seems in order. Let’s call it Grand Zen Auto.

REFERENCES

Benjamin Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" in The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media, Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Eds); Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 19 - 54.

COLL.EO. Arthur Rimbaud in Liberty City, San Francisco: Concrete Press, 2015.

DeLillo, Don. Point Omega, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2010.

Dyer, Geoff. Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, New York: Canongate, 2012.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchel, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Remes, James. Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis. Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. New York & London: Penguin, 2016.

Stults, Chris. “EMPIRE” (Phil Solomon, 2008)", Wexner Center for the Arts.  

Yue, Genevieve. "Views from the Avant-Garde: Invisible Cities", Film Comment, October 17, 2012.

THE AESTHETICS OF SLOW MACHINIMA (1 of 4)

FROM SLOW CINEMA TO SLOW MACHINIMA

“I’ve always liked to watch people play video games. Or to watch video games as cinema. So when you start watching video games as cinema and you start considering them cinema… It becomes so unlike anything you’ve seen in cinema that it’s kinda interesting.”

(Cory Arcangel, 2011)

In his “State of Cinema” address at the 46th San Francisco Film Festival, French critic Michel Ciment (2003) described the emergence of a new cinematic style, “a cinema of slowness, of contemplation”. One year later, British critic Jonathan Romney coined the now popular expression “Slow Cinema” in a review to indicate those films that deliberately reject the narrative and aesthetic conventions of mainstream productions (1). Practitioners of slow cinema prefer a more contemplative, reflective, ruminative, and meditative approach to filmmaking to the frantic action, sensorial over stimulation, and asinine narratives of most Hollywood productions.

     Slow cinema emphasizes long takes and extended durations. Observational in nature, it uses subdued visual techniques and minimal narrative strategies. As Ira Jaffe (2014) writes in Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action, “The plot and dialogue in slow movies often gravitate towards stillness and death, and tend, in any case, to be minimal, indeterminate and unresolved” (p. 23). According to David Campany (2007) slow films began as an avant-garde practice (consider, for instance, the Situationists) and represented a counterpoint to the “mass distraction” of advertising, television, and popular culture. Today, slow cinema is an umbrella term under which one can find contemporary arthouse and experimental film directors such as Lav Diaz, Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Ben Rivers, Carlos Reygadas, Bela Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, Kelly Reichardt and many more.

      I would like to argue that slow cinema is not limited to the film medium. There’s a growing category of game-based video productions that consciously or indirectly emulate the aesthetics of slow cinema and, in some cases, of what Justin Remes (2015) has called “cinema of stasis”. Like its cinematic counterpart, “slow machinima” is an international effort, fiercely independent, and deliberately adversarial to the dominant paradigm. Slow machinima productions are generally indifferent or deliberately antagonistic to mainstream game audiences, and perhaps, to mainstream audiences in general. In a sense, this "certain formal trend" in contemporary machinima can be seen as an indictment of video games’ ongoing cretinization of society. In their explicit refusal to adhere to the conventions of popular genres - e.g. comedy, sci-fi, and horror - a handful of directors have chosen to explore alternative visual strategies featuring long takes, sparse narrative, minimal camera movement, editing, and dialogue. These auteurs operate in the interstices separating cinema, animation, gaming, and performance art, contributing in their own way to blur the boundaries of each practice. Their work is situated within a recognized artistic language that transcends the confines of video games and rejects the bombastic visuals, fast rhythms, and frequent allusions to the fiction worlds upon which they are based. In many ways, slow machinima is a gesture of coordinated resistance to contemporary game culture and its testosterone-driven aesthetics, hype cycles, and overt misogyny. It also rejects digital culture’s emphasis on child-like visual titillation, constant distraction, and pervasive narcissism. Additionally, slow machinima often embraces games’ in-built visual obsolescence, rather than adhering to the imperative of photorealism. Above all, slow machinima tests viewers’ patience skills. Its expected - or desired - viewing position presupposes endurance: the pace of many productions can be described as “glacial”, the camera often lingers on “non happening” situations, and the overall visual iconography is generally austere or explicitly devoid of games’ visual clichés.

        The expression slow machinima may appear baffling, or even pretentious. In its rejection of gaming instant gratification, slow machinima chronicles the spaces and times of inactivity and “in-betweenness” of mainstream productions, those sparse moments of tranquility of otherwise fast and furious “triple AAA titles” or “franchises”, as the marketing types - and, by osmosis, the average game journalist - call them. If most video games can be situated in the accelerationist paradigm - itself a manifestation of capitalism’ obsession for growth, speed, and grotesque excess - slow machinima invokes a more reflective, attentive, and introspective viewing experience. As Lutz Koepnick (2014) writes in On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary:

Our attention spans shrink toward zero because we have to make too many decisions within ever shorter windows of time. Cell phones, handheld computers, and ubiquitous screening devices urge us to be always on and produce instantaneous responses, yet we no longer take the time to contemplate an image, develop a profound thought, traverse a gorgeous landscape, play a game, or follow the intensity of some emotion. (p. 12)

Slow machinima can be seen as alternative to a constant flow of interruptions, inane updates, and juvenile distractions. In terms of presentation, distribution, and circulation, slow machinima diverge from fandom productions insofar as they are not usually distributed on popular video sharing websites such as YouTube or Vimeo, but in the artworld circuits. Slow machinima prefers projection rooms to smartphone screens, art galleries’ video installation to laptops. As such, the profile of their audience rarely overlap with that of the “gamer”. Although machinima and slow machinima engage with the same material, that is, video games, they rely on radically different contexts and markets.

     Over the next few weeks, I will share a few thoughts about the emergence of what I am calling slow machinima and how it has been consciously and/or unconsciously embraced by a variety of practitioners. These posts will focus especially - but not exclusively - on the works on display at GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY and included in the collateral events (screenings).  

Matteo Bittanti

 

READ PART TWO HERE

NOTES

1. Interestingly, as Romney was conceptualizing slow cinema, media artist Cory Arcangel modified a copy of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System to prolong its duration. In Arcangel’s version, "It takes about 8 hours for the blocks to fall in one complete game. At the same time, it is still possible to move them left and right, it just takes minutes for them to drop one pixel down on the screen. It’s totally maddening!" (Arcangel, 2004). In a sense, Super Slow Tetris (2004) can be considered the videogame equivalent of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho.

 

REFERENCES

Arcangel, Cory. "Super Slow Tetris", Cory Arcangel, 2004. URL: http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/2004-003-super-slow-tetris (Last accessed: April 11, 2016)

Arcangel, Cory. "Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools: Various Self Playing Bowling Games, 2011", Whitney Museum of American Art. Uploaded on Aug 9, 2011. URL: tinyurl.com/zda5gbk (Last accessed: April 11, 2016)

Campany, David. The Cinematic (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007.

Ciment, Michel. “Michel Ciment. The State of Cinema”, Unspoken Cinema, 2003. URL: http://unspokencinema.blogspot.it/2006/10/state-of-cinema-m-ciment.html (Last accessed: April 14, 2016).

Jaffe, Ira. Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action, London: Wallflower Press, 2014.

Koepnick, Lutz, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Remes, Justin. Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.