Matteo Bittanti: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first when developing a new project, the concept or the medium?
Bob Bicknell-Knight: I feel that art works using the aesthetics of video games sometimes cloud the overall concept, allowing the viewer to simply focus on the animation of a video piece rather than considering what it’s actually about, dismissing it as ‘just about video games’ and only observing the ‘first layer’ of the work. I also think that using video games themselves for art in things like machinima have previously been looked at with disdain in the art world because of their seemingly ‘easy’ creation. Obviously this isn’t the case. Fortunately, this attitude towards video game artwork is slowly becoming obsolete, with more people becoming interested in this type of artwork as the video game industry continues to grow and flourish. My work always begins with the concept. I never set out to make a video or a sculpture as this would restrict me to those specific mediums when creating the work. When thinking about this question, I think of Ryan Gander, an artist without a medium whose work always begins with an idea, who then finds the medium best fitting to the initial thought, rather than being constrained by a material or technique that he’s learned over a number of years.
Matteo Bittanti: Can you describe the creative process behind the production of Simulated Ignorance?
Bob Bicknell-Knight: A lot of my work begins with extensive research via the internet, from reading online articles to watching YouTube videos. At the time of this particular work’s creation, I’d been looking into the misguided activist Jack Thompson, a figurehead in various campaigns to ban violent video games with the argument that teenagers use them as ‘murder simulators’ to rehearse their violent plans. I knew that I wanted to make a piece of work about the preconceptions that people have about video games from watching ill-informed news articles. It also transpired that during this bout of research I’d been playing Grand Theft Auto 5, simply exploring the world, and as my time with the game progressed I began to get bored of endlessly shooting at things and decided to do what most people do at some point when playing an iteration of the GTA series; simply drive around the virtual world as if it were real life, sticking to the ‘rules of the road’. After a while I realised that the action of driving around in GTA was relatable enough to both the ‘gamer’ and ‘non-gamer’ and could form the basis of an interesting connection between the ideas surrounding violent video games that I’d been exploring in my research, with a game world that was incredibly appropriate to the subject matter.