Thoughts on Brakhage and Anthropy Questions
Hello Everyone,
I really enjoyed the Stan Brakhage film last night. It was definitely a unique experience in terms of aesthetic experience. As I was mentioning last night, I found the first five or ten minutes somewhat jarring in an auditory sense due to the silence and my physical relationship to it, but I actually felt that the lack of sound proved to make the visuals more effective as a soundtrack would have possibly inadvertently shaped the experience in unintended ways, and additionally, it would have also resigned the work significantly to given period. I often cite Cage, but could help doing so once again last night, comparing the silence and visuals to his description of a visit to Harvard’s anachoric chamber, where the soundproof nature of the room led him to hear certain bodily functions. I felt that the ambient nature sonically and the Brakhage visuals definitely complemented each other in an almost mesmerizing fashion.
- I was rather impressed that Anthropy mentioned my favourite game as a child, Another World, which was essentially conceived, designed, and programmed by Eric Chahi. I felt that even though this game was originally released in 1992, it was perhaps a perfect example of why individual creative efforts can be much more impactful than large-scale impersonal ones. When Chahi designed the game, he stated that his aim was to move away from interactions based on merely attaining numerical scores, and engage the player to actually ‘feel.’ As a visual artist, he tried to evoke his own personal feelings of loneliness and isolation through mysterious surreal settings in a dark dystopian world that little is known about to the player. With this stated, his use of rotoscoping produced realism in movement, but he wanted the limited detail in polygon visuals to invoke inner imagination.
Another item that impressed me about this game was the amount of effort put into the soundtrack and sound effects which utilized everything from synthesized elements to samples of dot matrix printers. For anyone interested, here is a mini documentary featuring Chahi and the game’s music composer, Jean-François Freitas, discussing how they developed the project together (If you go to YouTube’s settings, you can also translate the commentary into English).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0gv2bV9ok4
Eric Chahi and Jean-François Freitas Documentary
With my description above, are successes such as Chahi’s a one-off, notably in our modern context? Can a single developer still work such as Chachi did and create something this personal that will have wide-ranging success, or is such individuality now an attribute relegated to small niche markets?
2. Anthropy described how greater diversity is needed in the development of gaming, which is commendable, but what is the best avenue to implement such a shift in very old entrenched practices? A number of years back when I wrote for an LGBTQ e-zine, I remember interviewing an artist that had been part of Girls Rock Camp, which is a program designed to empower young female musicians to engage in the male-dominated genre of rock music. She spoke quite positively of the experience. Would similar initiatives be effective in the world or programming to bring greater diversity in terms of gender and ethnicity?
3. Anthropy praises the ability of platforms such as YouTube to open the floodgates of artistic expression, which reminds me of Shirkey’s comparison I mentioned earlier which equates social media as a modern type of Gutenberg press. Some would argue that in any instance ‘voices and choices’ is a positive notion, but navigating through masses of low-quality content can also potentially dilute the ability of great projects to surface to their intended audiences. Is the modern ease of project distribution an inherently positive development, or should we have certain reservations about this unfettered ease of dissemination?
4. I like Anthropy’s emphasis on games telling stories, but I also question how much certain mass audiences value the art of storytelling, especially less generic narratives. At the risk of certain projects becoming incredibly esoteric in nature, should programmers attempt to strike a balance between individualism and accessibility, or is this a compromise which should be avoided in the ultimate pursuit of artistic integrity.