Matteo Bittanti: Within the field of Game Studies, machinima is usually associated to online fandom, hacking, and modding practices. In other words, machinima is firmly located within the context of game culture. For other critics, machinima constitutes a kind of experimental filmmaking, and, as such, it’s something that should be projected onto a screen, in a dark room, and experienced collectively, offline, possibly in a festival setting. Finally, others consider machinima a genre of video art which is often displayed as a video installation in a White Cube space. You are a prolific writer, an accomplished artist, and an indefatigable curator: What is your personal take on machinima? Can these different notions of machinima coexist and/or inform each other or are they mutually exclusive? Do you use the term “machinima” or do you find it too limiting, as in too video game-centric?
Clint Enns: I don't have much investment in the term machinima, but why shouldn't it exist in multiple contexts? I am personally interested in works that experiment with video games as a medium and in works that treat video games as a form of found footage. It could be argued that Craig Baldwin's 16mm film Wild Gunman from 1978 is one of the earliest examples of machinima (he uses footage from the 1974 game Wild Gunman which made use of a light gun and a 16mm projection). I think you could also argue that Stephanie Barber's 2005 total power: dead dead dead, a 16mm film in which an arcade game, a snack machine and a television engage in a dialogue, is a form of machinima. However, I doubt either of these works are included in the Machinima Archive.