INTERVIEW: IP YUK-YIU
IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, IP YUK-YUI DISCUSSES HIS FASCINATION FOR CALL OF DUTY, HIS ADMIRATION FOR PHILIP SOLOMON, AND THE CREATION OF HIS STUNNING HONG KONG TRILOGY.
IP Yuk-Yiu is an experimental filmmaker, media artist, art educator, and independent curator. His works have been showcased extensively at international festivals including the European Media Art Festival, New York Film Festival in the “Views From the Avant-garde” program), Image Festival, FILE Festival, VideoBrasil, Transmediale, ISEA and more. He is the founder of the art.ware project, an independent curatorial initiative focusing on the promotion of new media art in Hong Kong. Yuk-Yiu has also lectured extensively on film, video and media art and has taught at Emerson College, Massachusetts College of Art and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Currently he is Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His recent works explore emergent and hybrid forms of cinema. Yuk-Yiu lives and works in Hong Kong.
IP Yuk-Yiu's Hong Kong trilogy is currently on display in the ASSEMBLAGE level of GAME VIDEO ART. A SURVEY.
This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.
GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?
My education background is in philosophy and cinema. I completed my graduate study in film production, focusing on experimental filmmaking.
GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?
To cite influences, artistic or otherwise, will be an endless task that results with a long list. But I will still try to name two. First I am always drawn to and inspired by popular media such as films and video games. Popular media are interesting prisms that refract our collective desires, fantasy, anxiety, fear, moral codes and more, which I find amazing. Second, for the recent machinima series, I think I am indebted to Phil Solomon. Phil Solomon is an artist whom I have admired since I was in college. His hand-processed films are some of the most poetic and beautiful personal works that I have ever seen. However I was quite puzzled and disappointed when he first released his machinima works (Crossroad, Rehearsals for Retirement), a series that he made with and for the late Mark LaPore (whom is also a great influence on me as my mentor) I just didn’t like them at the time. However, to cut a long story short, I think Phil is really ahead of the game. It really took me some time to see the true significance and beauty of the works. His use of video games is extremely personal, poetic and ingenious. Something I do not see often in other machinima works.
GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?
I am always interested in video games. But I didn’t explicitly incorporate video games as elements in my works until 2011. The reason for using video games in my works is simple: I am an avid gamer that perhaps spends a little bit too much time on playing video games. In other words, games play a significant part in my world and everyday life. Naturally they are obvious choices for me as artistic materials.
GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?
I use the Call of Duty games because they are the games that I play almost on a daily basis. I am fascinated by the landscapes inside the games. These virtual landscapes are things that one usually misses when one is engaged with the super fast-paced gameplay. However, if you pause the shooting for a while and focus on the landscapes behind, you will realize these landscapes are amazing tableaux that one can stare at for hours. For me, these landscapes entail a quality that I found more deadly than the first-person shootings as in the original games.
GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?
Video games are often viewed as simulation of reality. But sometimes I would rather see them as a kind of extended reality. Like other things or objects in the world, video games are artifacts that help to form and define what we may call reality. On this note, I think video games can be conceived less as a kind of symbolic parallel, but rather a direct extension of our everyday reality that warrants exploration and manipulation.
GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this artform?
I think the issue is not new and somewhat similar to the problems faced by other strands of appropriation art. In a world that is governed by big bucks and big corporations, artists sometimes have to take risks in their creative practices, which is not easy sometimes. Copyright is just one issue among many.
GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?
It really depends on what do we mean by “democratization” and “machinima”. Personally I tend to be suspicious and skeptical. I don’t believe in any technological determinist arguments that see socio-cultural effects as direct outcomes of certain technology or technological process.
GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?
I am not sure how video game aesthetics affect the impact of my work. For me video games are an integrated part of my everyday life that I usually don’t think of them separately as “concept” and “medium”. They are part of my world that seeks for my attention, observation and reflection.
GVA: How and why did you use Call of Duty to create Clouds Fall?
Like the previous two chapters in the trilogy: Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012) and The Plastic Garden (2013), Clouds Fall (2014) uses Call of Duty as its base materials. Clouds Fall is the most ambitious attempt in the trilogy since it incorporates and works with elements from almost the entire Call of Duty series (instead of focusing on just a single map which I did in the first two.) As I mentioned above, I use Call of Duty partly because it is a series that I am most familiar with and knowledgeable of. At the same time, I am interested in the cultural logic behind/beyond the obvious bloodsheds and gunfights of the games in the series.
GVA: What links the different parts of your trilogy? What do all these scenarios have in common?
The most obvious link is, of course, the video game series Call of Duty, which forms the base materials for the trilogy. But I think there is something more subtle and important that connects the three works together beyond this obvious fact, which has something to do more with my thinking and approach in treating the games in my works. Many people might consider the trilogy as a series of found media or appropriation work that deals critically with cultural representations of popular media via video games, which of course it is. For instance, in Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, I am interested in exploring how popular media represents Hong Kong; while in The Plastic Garden, I want to restage the dark symbolism of the atomic age that got imprinted in our public imaginary via popular culture. However, beyond all these interesting and complex issues that have to do with our signifying and representational systems, I am equally interested in staring at the blanks of the virtual skies and its surrounding landscapes inside the games, and derive pleasures and inspirations from them. Therefore I also consider the trilogy as a sort of observational work. When I made this series of works, I often considered myself as a flâneur and a filmmaker navigating and shooting in a (virtual) world. Just like when I made my camera films or photographic-based works, I am confronting and observing an environment and its unfolding. In this sense, I feel this series of work is as much about observation and documentation as it is about cultural representation via media appropriation. I think this is what united the three works together in the series for me.
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INTERVIEW: PALLE TORSSON
IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, SWEDISH ARTIST PALLE TORSSON TALKS ABOUT DOOM, THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, AND THE INEVITABLE FALL OF HUMANKIND.
Palle Torsson's Free Fall is curently on display in the GLITCH level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.
This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.
GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?
Palle Torsson: I received a Master of Visual Arts in 1998 from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. As part of my education, I interned at White Columns Gallery in New York in 1996 and I was an exchange student at Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin in 1995. Prior to Graduate school, I studied the History of Ideas, Aesthetics, and Philosophy at Uppsala University. Several years later, I pursued a higher vocational track in Agile Web Development and Programming.
GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?
Palle Torsson: Concretism, Surrealism, Dadaism, The Situationists, The Spectacle, Tactical Media, Guerrilla Girls, Kraftwerk, Public Enemy, Twin Peaks, The Internet, www, IRC, The demo scene, Richard Stallman, The Piracy Bureau, Hacker ethics, Occupy, Donna Haraway, Alan Turing, Python, Raspberry Pi, and Mika Rottenberg.
GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?
Palle Torsson: That would be 1995. Doom started it all. This game allowed artists to create expressive works by using an alternative set of tools and a different iconography. It basically spawned an autonomous sphere of action within - or outside - the established art world.
GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?
Palle Torsson: Video games have the potential to operate as an autonomous playground and a space to address such questions as the logic of systems, the matrix, network boundaries, functional objects, algorithmical worlds, and the tension between user immersiveness and control. I think their aesthetic possibilities point to an agency of interaction that has a certain theatrical potential, that is, a narrative-performative potential. This means that video games could, potentially, revolutionize society. Alas, in most cases, they simply promote dull, commercial stereotypes. This failure is related to market-driven imperatives that favor quantity over quality, crass profit over ideas. Something that cast a shadow of the real nature of things. That being said, what is done in the commercial context is often fantastic, open to interpretation, and can always be hacked and transformed into alternative forms of expression. The interstices between exploration and mutation are my true passion. This grey area is where I conduct my key investigations and experimentations.
GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?
Palle Torsson: The user can take control over the possibilities of reality. To think about reality as a simulation and vice versa can become a powerful tool to change the ontology of things and/or activate all its hermeneutic possibilities. My work is situated on the edge between reality and simulation and it addresses the elliptical nature of seeing.
GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this art form?
Palle Torsson: I think fair use should be expanded beyond copyright because it is more compatible with the logical digital networked: let’s face it, we live in a modification culture in flux. Thus, remixing art should not be simply a way to create additional layers of property. The paradox is nothing more than the side effect of intellectual property’s abstract nature. To make the ecology of mutations possible, the commons must be expanded to include a space of difference. In short, the opposite of stereotypes.
GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?
Palle Torsson: I think machinima exemplify how digital tools in general have democratized the art making process but how they also created new situations of stalling that must be overcome. For current generations, machinima has become an important expressive tool that is close at hand, connected to identity-making processes, and parody.
GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?
Palle Torsson: The medium is the message in many respects. I like the specific qualities of video games and how the medium shines through between 2D and 3D graphics, for instance in texture mapping. I guess the medium comes first, in most cases, and becomes a starting point to be actualized. Wherever there is a Pong, whenever a certain affordance of creativity occurs, a vision becomes clear.
GVA: In your artwork Free Fall how and why do you use this particular video game?
Palle Torsson: I have been working with several different game engines through the years. The reason why I choose the game editor to Half-Life 2 is purely technical: I needed a game editor with a large height axis, z-axis, to produce an extended falling of the bodies. To prolong the falling I used a “teleporter” in the middle of the game sequence. The first-person view is needed to move to another section and the fall is prolonged.
GVA: In your opinion, is Free Fall a metaphorical reflection about the condition of a directionless society?
Palle Torsson: I think it can be seen as a metaphor of many things. For instance, of the perpetual free fall of our societies, stock markets, and the specific ecology that we inhabit. Moreover, this work alludes to the super structures which we may ascertain and recognize, but act like black boxes upon which we have little or no agency. When the act of seeing becomes a game, a destructive entertainment activity slowly drains the world. The rabbit hole ends in a flat line.
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