Matteo Bittanti: What role does machinima occupy in the current visual landscape? And how did it change overtime?
Isabelle Arvers: I find the evolution of machinima very interesting. Machinima emerged exactly two decades ago within the so-called "hard core" game scene. For several years, it only circulated online. Subsequently, it started to be featured in dedicated festivals and in special programs of major film retrospectives. After 2006, machinima transcended the game culture scene and became a recurrent presence both within the film sphere and the Artworld.
In 2011, I curated a survey show within a larger digital art exhibition and approximately 60% of the artists involved were not gamers at all, but called themselves "film directors". For them, machinima was simply an accessible, inexpensive way to make 3D movies and to express themselves in cinematic terms. In other words, they were making "digital movies". Meanwhile, machinima was mostly ignored by the artworld until 2010, but it became a thing with the rise of the post-internet movement that considered games as contemporary artifacts worthy of critical examination.
In the post-internet scenario, machinima began to inhabit the artworld: it was not an unwelcome guest any longer. It became a staple in biennales and exhibitions. A handful of art galleries now regularly represent artists who make machinima and artworks influenced by 3D graphics, computer animation, and the web. It all began with Miltos Manetas, but artists like Cory Arcangel, Jon Rafman, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy have really blurred the lines between games, machinima, and contemporary art. Interestingly, when machinima entered the artworld, it lost its political edge and became pure aesthetics. Nowadays, young artists use games images, websites or animation as a raw material to produce installations, paintings or video works.
I am happy to say that thanks to the machinima workshops I gave in both Fine Arts and Game Design schools in France, several students who never thought about using machinima to make art have incorporated this techniques in their work. This is particularly exciting because several different contexts - technology, art, cinema, gaming - are now talking to each other in novel ways. I think machinima has now become part of a broader visual landscape than the avant-garde or the so-called underground of the Nineties. Machinima is also related to mash-up culture because of its hybrid nature. It is a mix of collage and reappropriation—indeed the concept itself is a mashup, as it conflates cinema and video games. So, besides the post-internet movement, machinima now belongs to a wider visualscape that includes the DJ and the VJ scene, video clips, remix, and more. Machinima is part of a mix of disciplines, cultures, and practices that, hopefully, will give rise to interesting, not-yet-identified cultural objects.
ISABELLE ARVERS (b. 1972) is a French media art curator, critic and author, specializing in video and computer games, web animation, digital cinema, retrogaming, chiptune music, and machinima. She curated several exhibitions in France and internationally on the relationship between art, video games, and politics including the seminal Gizmoland the Video Cuts (Centre Pompidou, 2001), the Gaming Room at PLAYTIME(Villette Numérique, Paris, 2002), Tour of the Web (Centre Pompidou, 2003), featuring Vuk Cosic and Miltos Manetas among others, Digital Salon. Games and Cinema (Maison Populaire, Montreuil, 2011), GAME HEROES(Alcazar, Marseille, 2011) and several editions of GAMERZ (Aix-en-Provence, France). She also promotes free and open source culture as well as indie games and art games. A graduate of the Institute of Political Studies in Aix-en-Provence and a Postgraduate Diploma in Cultural Project Management of the Paris 8 University, Isabelle Arvers has been researching and working with new media since 1993. A prolific writer, her critical essays have been included in several catalogs, anthologies, and books. Arvers lives and works in Marseille.