Photography, cinema and games

Read the required readings to write a reflective essay and address focus questions.

Focus questions:
• Refering to Jurgenson, reflect on how the idea of temporary photography sits with the fundamental purpose of photography technology
• Reflect on the Wilson reading and the concept of “unfinished TV”

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could
be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which
a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed
technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. .
– Walter Benjamin, “The WOrk of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, ” 1936.
Although the art of the future could take anyone of a number of directions, it seems
to me that, with the steady evolution of information processing techniques in our society,
an increasing amount of thought will be given to the aesthetic relationship between
ourselves and our computer environments – whether or not this relationship falls into
the scope of the fine arts …. As our involvement with electronic technology increases
.” the art experience may undergo a process of internalization where the constant
two-way exchange of information becomes a normative goal. ~ should rightfully
consider such a communication shift as an evolutionary step in aesthetic response.
-Jack Burnham, The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems, 1970.
The “archaeology” of videogame play and culture is emerging as a productive
focus for scholarship. As videogame history moves beyond what Huhtamo
calls its “chronicle era,” more researchers are trying to “broaden the historical
perspectives of digital games from the internal history of computing to the general
cultural history of modernity and modern media technologies,” to understand
the “rules, practices, conditions and functions governing the actual instances
of cultural events” (Suominen and Parikka). Huhtamo defines the project of
videogame archaeology as “the cultural and historical mapping of electronic gaming.
Its basic premise is at least seemingly simple: electronic games did not appear
out of nowhere; they have a cultural background that needs to be excavated.”
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5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 95
Rather than seeing video games as a self-contained cultural field with only an
internal, technological history, videogame archaeology instead connects games
with broader contexts and longer histories. Rather than offering linear accounts
of the medium’s development within the discourse of “upgrade culture” (Dovey
and Kennedy), videogame archaeology tries to understand video games as
enmeshed in wider cultural, economic, and technological changes.
There has already been significant and valuable work in this area, which
has two main thrusts. On the one hand, there is research that places video
games within the history of popular culture and popular amusements. Early
on in the history of game studies, Fuller and Jenkins connect the “spatial stories”
of platform games with popular travel writing. Darley ties video games
and other “new media genres” with the history of fairground amusements and
attractions. Huhtamo traces the connections between videogame play and the
entire modern history of slot-machine amusements, showing that video games
emerged into a preexisting matrix of venues, audience behaviors, and even
censorious official discourses. And a range of authors including Juul (2001,
2003) and Frasca insist on the continuities between video games and predigital
games. All of these archaeologies connecting games to other forms of
popular culture allow comparative studies of video games by drawing out
analogies between them and earlier or parallel forms of popular culture.
There is a second broad emphasis on the connections between videogame
technologies and the “military-entertainment complex” or the history of
human-computer interaction. Lowood and Lenoir show parallels between the
emergence of the video games and military simulation industries, and they
show too that personnel cross between video games and simulation industries.
Crogan reflects on the epistemology and phenomenology of real-time
strategy games, and he compares them with the board-based wargames that
they superseded. Lowood focuses on connections between Pong and the history
of computing. This tradition in videogame archaeology reminds its readers
of the close links between video games and the technological changes that
underwrite both the information economy and new forms of conflict.
This chapter aims to extend the range of videogame archaeology by considering
the relationship between the earliest video games and an artistic and
creative milieu that pertained throughout the West and beyond in the 1960s
and 1970s. The direct comparisons that are made between video games and
new media art may run counter to the sense, which can be detected in the
work of many artists and theorists, that video games are a problematic, reactionary
counterpoint to the critical work of new media artists. Charlotte Davies,
designer of important works of virtual art such as Osmose, is representative of
a tendency to rhetorically position games in opposition to new media art
when she writes:
The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
Commercial computer games approach interactivity as a means of empowering the
human subject through violence and aggression. These conventional approaches to
digital media reflect our culture’s Cartesian world-view, with its tendency to reduce
the world and its myriad of inhabitants to a “standing-reserve” for human consumption
[quoted in Shinkle].
In writing this chapter, I hope to show that because of their deep, mutual
involvement at their origins, there is no easy way to separate video games and
new media art, and that drawing sharp binary distinctions between early
games and new media art is less productive than seeing differences alongside
important resemblances. Early games and new media art embody a series of
shifting relationships with the technology and institutions of television, which
in the 1960s and early 1970s the focal period of this analysis were bound
in the model of mass broadcasting. This moves beyond Wolf’s noting of the
countercultural engagement of many early game designers in relation to the
abstract visuality of early video games. Apart from the happenstance of “hippie
programmers,” I hope to show that the earliest examples of new media
art and video game design were produced from similar impulses, which drew
on a series of related discourses in 1960s culture.
This chapter first discusses the early 1960s “TV works” ofNam June Paik.
It shows how the works were simultaneously a critique of the nexus of television
technology and the apparatus of broadcasting and an effort to create
“real-time” works that were open to viewer participation. Second, there is a
discussion of the context that informed Paik’s interventions. Both the artist
and these works lie at the crossroads of the Fluxus movement, early new media
art, conceptual art, and what Burnham (1978), and later Drucker, calls “postobjective”
art. Third, there is a tracing of the evolution of video games as a
viable commercial medium over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, which
looks at Ralph Baer’s efforts toward the Magnavox Odyssey, and Nolan Bushnell’s
attempts to market first Computer Space and then (successfully) Pong as
coin-operated (coin-op) arcade technologies. Throughout the account ofBaer
and Bushnell’s work, there are asides that compare it with Paik’s and relate it
to the context of “postobjective” practice. A concluding section makes the differences
and important similarities between all these efforts to make “Participation
TV” explicit. While this chapter at no stage suggests any explicit
mutual influences, it shows that both early new media artists and early game
designers articulated a desire to change broadcast television, created manipulable
televisual images, and incorporated “playfulness” in their contributions
in these areas.
5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 97
Nam June Paik and Participation TV
Beginning with his first television exhibition at Rolf Jahrling’s Galerie
Parnass in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, in March 1963, Nam June Paik,
who had been and was to be so involved in the reconfiguration of institutional
art, made his attempt to change the relationship between television
technology, images, and the viewer.
In Zen for TV, Paik redefined television as a technology of rapt attention,
rather than a technology of distraction as it had hitherto, and has even hence,
been seen.! The work consists of a single, vertical white strip on the blank, dark
background of a television monitor, produced by distorting the television’s
monitor image with a magnet. It is a highly abstract, static image set within
the television set, a technology that is here reconceived as the basis for a new
kind of sculptural work, or as a new kind of frame for abstract pictorial works.
Its visual simplicity is the way the work reveals its own importance, though. It
announces that from this moment, as Cynthia Goodman puts it, “For Nam June
Paik, television was not simply an iconic presence, but a malleable medium.”
Zen for TV reimagines television as an object for meditation, whose visual output
was in this case given transcendent, religious connotations.
. The means by which Paik produced Zen for TV’s image a magnet on
top of the set revealed the televisual image as amenable to direct, local
action, and defined the screen as a pictorial surface for the artist. In an allusion
to the vertical “zips” which appeared in the work of mid-century abstract
artist Barnett Newman, from Onement I forward, Paik not only playfully
mocks the high seriousness of high Modernism, but also takes over some of
Newman’s purpose the reorientation of the artwork toward the establishment
of a closer relationship with the observer’s body, and the relocation of
the sublime in the products of human industry.2
From the same exhibition is a work that further sculpts the image produced
by direct manipulation of the electronic image, Magnet Tv. Like Zen
for TV, Magnet TV was produced by means of magnetic interference with a
television monitor image, however, this time the image produced was a more
complex and aestheticized abstraction: a spiraling, greenish nest of vector
lines. Though it is only accompanied by ambient sound, Tancin argues that
with this work, Paik
draws our attention to what had become a commonplace object by 1965: the television.
By displacing the television set from the living room to the art gallery, Paik
forces the public to separate the physical properties of the television from its content
and to evaluate the object for what it is: image and sound.
Magnet TV removes television from its customary venue of reception (the
home) and estranges it from its usual purpose (the reception of broadcasting).
98 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
As well as revealing television’s bare audiovisual properties, Magnet
TV underlines and extends Zen for TVs discovery of television as a
surface immanent to the artist’s localized practice and it shows that there
are even greater possibilities for manipulating the television image. By contrast
with Zen for TV’s depthless flat line, Magnet TV is far more complex
and sculptural.
Perhaps the most striking ofPaik’s television works from this exhibition
in 1963, particularly considered in relation to video games, is Participation
Tv. In this piece, a TV set’s visual output is not fixed; by speaking, yelling,
or singing into an attached microphone, the viewer is able to produce a variety
of abstract shapes on the screen. The technical means for this new mode
of image-making are a microphone and a sound frequency amplifier that
transforms and feeds the signals directly to the television’s cathode ray tube
and its steering coils to produce scattergun kinetic images. Its importance lies
not so much in these images themselves, however striking, but in the way
Paik incorporates them in a playful, participatory “real-time” work. Television
had long offered real-time or “live” images, and indeed most early television
broadcasting was transmitted live rather than recorded (Barnouw,
Jacobs).3 Few if any visitors to Jahrling’s gallery in 1963 would ever have been
able to directly manipulate electronic televisual images. For all its innovations,
Participation TVis a charmingly jury-rigged technology. It answers nicely to
the description Lowood would later give to Pong: it represents “a modest
investment in electronic components, a modified television set, and some ad
hoc wiring and parts” (2). But the results are astounding.
Participation TV is permanently unfinished, and rather than a realized
pictorial work, it is a playful structure that invites the viewer into certain kinds ,
of physical intimacy with itself, into performing and laboring within it. It
divides the gallery audience: there are still spectators separated from the work
as subjects from an object, but one by one the visitors who step up to the
microphone inhabit a new kind of productive spectatorship. This is a contrast
with the various kinds of separation between spectator and object that
had pertained in the experience of visual art, but resembles the bifurcated
model of videogames spectatorship offered by Newman, in which “the pleasures
of videogames are frequently enjoyed by those that commonsense might
encourage us to consider as non-players “onlookers” that exert no direct
control via the game controls.” Here, the technology of TV is not only defined
as something open to local pictorial activity, but also as a space for the cooperative
activity of audience and artist, the latter responsible for designing
structures of playful interaction. Even though the images produced by Paik’s
work are of interest, the questions we ask ourselves about them have less to
do with the use of color, line, and composition within the space of the frame, ,
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5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 99
less the kinds of questions we ask of a work that is separated from us as object
from subject, and more to do with the elegance of the relationship the artist
proposes between our bodies and pictorial space, the kinds of actions we can
take within this structure, and the quality of our pleasures of co-creation.
Paik put his innovations, and the immersion in the techniques of electrical
engineering that led to them, down to his discovery that television “was
made of electrons and protons. It made sense to me that 1 might as well use
protons and electrons directly.” He looked forward to “the day when the collaboration
of the artist and engineer will progress into the unification of the
artist and engineer into one person,” since the artist’s getting things made to
order missed the possibility for “precious errors,” and “I have found that the
by-product is often more valuable than the envisioned aim” (Kearns). This
idea of the union of artist and engineer foreshadows Grau’s conception of the
“media artist” who represents “a new kind of artist, who not only sounds out
the aesthetic potential of advanced methods of creating images … but also
specifically researches innovative forms of interaction and interface design”
(3), and Popper’s “virtual artist” who differs from traditional artists in pursuing
“techno-aesthetic creative commitments” (1).
In 1965, talking about the tendencies in his work of the early 1960s, and
looking forward to projects like Video Synthesizer, Paik said he wanted his own
interventions leading to something
which anyone could use in his own home, using his increased leisure to transform
his TV set from a passive pastime to active creation …. Communication means the
two-way communications. One-way communication is simply a notification … like
a draft call. TV has been a typical case of this non-communication and [the] mass
audience had only one freedom, that is to turn on or off the TV. … My obsession
with TV for the past 10 years has been, if I look back and think clearly, a steady
progression towards more differentiated participation by viewers [Kearns].
Paik is critical here of the way television experiences had been framed and
organized to this point, and in particular the domestic consumption of broadcast
television, which was in the early 1960s the hegemonic use of that technology
(Spigel1992). By using television technology for a new purpose, Paik
is trying explicitly to critique the nexus between television as a technology
and the apparatus and institutions of broadcasting, which assumed and gathered
a mass audience, and which, as Spigel’s work shows, was so involved with
the “sub urbanization” of life in America and the capitalist West after the Second
World War. Television has been seen as crucial to the “mobile privatization,”
which allowed the great transformation that was sub urbanization
(Williams, Spigel1992, 2001). It resolved the contradiction between the isolating
privacy of suburban life and the continuing dependence of suburban
households on the cities they had evacuated. By providing a “window on the
100 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
world” (Spigel1992) and a small range of simultaneous broadcast experiences
for a dispersed population, television helped constitute the “imagined community”
that sustained social cohesion in the face of geographical fragmentation.
Paik’s identification of mass broadcasting with a Vietnam-era “draft
call” shows that his desire to vary the uses of television is bound up with a
challenge to consensus, authority, and suburban conformism that, he believed, .
were involved in broadcasting.
Whatever we might think of Paik’s position in the light of long-held
notions ofTY’s active audience (starting, perhaps with Fiske and Hartley),
or of warnings such as William Boddy’s about the tendency to feminize and
passivize the television audience in the promotion of new media, his clear
intention is to change and vary the uses of television by fragmenting the publicity
of broadcasting, and to construct systems of interaction within which
the audience could take their place as co-creators.
Paik’s work in and of itself did not translate into a wholesale transformation
of the uses of television, and they never fed directly into any massmarket
domestic media technology. Indeed, beyond a few avant-garde
television broadcasts, Paik’s work, including his television work, was notably
confined to the public spaces of galleries and theaters. As McCarthy notes,
television has always been in part a public medium, and, indeed, continues
to function in regulating public space. Nevertheless, it is striking that Paik’s
ambition to turn television to new uses even though he envisions his work
as an effort to change a domestic medium requires him to bring television’s
new possibilities into public view. What Popper calls the “anti television stance”
(22) of Paik and other video artists had less of a direct effect on mass media
consumption patterns than it did on the emergence of new kinds of artistic
practices in public galleries and, later, the Internet. But the technological
developments, redefinitions of the idea of the artwork, and broader underlying
structural changes that informed Paik’s work and its production of new
possibilities for television, outlined below, resonated beyond the gallery.
Paik’s Context: ”Post-objective” Art, Fluxus, Art and
Technology and “System Aesthetics”
Paik’s work with Participation TVwas elegant and original, but it arose
at a specific conjuncture in the history of twentieth-century visual culture in
which a broad range of engineers, artists, and a number of people who combined
the interests and skills of both were enthusiastically engaging in areas
of interactivity, mass culture, and then-emerging digital and electronic technologies.
This conjuncture was part of deeper changes, including a broader
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5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 101
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desire to turn television to new uses, and to make interactive, real-time works.
It overlapped with the emergence of the earliest video games.
In particular, Paik’s work can be set alongside what Johanna Drucker
calls “postformalist” or “antiformalist” tendencies in art from the 1960s and
1970s, particularly the work of his colleagues in the Fluxus movement and
theorists of these movements, such as Jack Burnham. Understanding this context
for Paik’s TV works can help us further our understanding of its relationship
with early video games, as well as opening the intriguing possibility
that where such movements in avant-garde practice gave way to the hegemony
of conceptual art in the galleries (Gere), some of their objectives, enthusiasms,
and tendencies persisted in early videogame design.
Movements like Fluxus and ”Art and technology” were important formative
influences on Paik’s work. As Drucker puts it, in the 1960s and 1970s,
A serious rethinking of the very idea of “art” appeared on the edge of radical transformation
…. Experience-based rather than object-based work sprang up in one
location after another …. The concepts of interactivity, algorithmic processes and
networked conditions were not fully distilled as principles of digital art until
recently, but their broad outlines were apparent by the 1970s [40].
Like many other recent historians (Manovich, Grau, Gere), Drucker sees
important precursors not only to the new media art of the 1990s and after,
but also to the entire landscape of “network culture” and the “network society”
(Castells) in the avant-garde work of the 1960s and 1970s. Historians of
the “information economy” trace many fundamental structural changes in
the capitalist mode of production to the period the 1960s and 1970s when
postformalist art was taking shape, when the postwar economic system collapsed,
and when Western economies became more geared to the production
of “immaterial” goods such as services and information.4 As we shall see, these
transformations were not lost on artists or theorists working at the time. Postformalist
tendencies were, for a time in the 1960s and 1970s, present in a
range of artworks engaged with technology, the possibilities of offering viewers
a new, participatory place in the artwork, and the construction of systems
rather than objects. This idea of the artwork as a set of conditions that lies
in wait for the audience’s intervention, and which is only determined by way
of that intervention, is increasingly familiar in scholarly and critical approaches
to new media art, and art more generally.
Art historians credit Paik as a central figure in the Fluxus movement
(Popper, Smith, Drucker). As a network, Fluxus was active from the late
1950s, most visible in the 1960s and 1970s, and formally has never ceased to
exist. At least rhetorically, the movement is less about its individual members
than about certain crucial ideas and methods (Smith). These central ideas
include “first, the primacy of the event (or act), with a correlated concern for
102 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
participation, and second, a centrality of information exchange, modeling
and education” (Smith 122). A more specific account of Fluxus’s underlying
principles is given by Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, who has written an intellectual
history ofFluxus, “Forty Years ofFluxlls,” and edited the Fluxus Reader.
Friedman sees Fluxus as having been a “laboratory” in which
The research program .. , is characterized by twelve ideas: globalism; the unity of
art and life; intermedia; experimentalism; chance; playfulness; simplicity; implicativeness;
exemplativism; specificity; presence in time; and musicality [2002].
For Friedman, these principles underlie the whole variety of Fluxus’s
output, from performances to musical compositions to later experiments with
forms such as mail art.
Several of these principles can be usefully considered in relation to Paik’s
TV works (and, later in this chapter, in relation to video games). The first
idea, of the unity of art and life, underpins Fluxus’s attempt to demystify the
art object, the figure of the artist, and the system of art itself. There is a
resemblance here between Fluxus and contemporary developments such as Pop
Art, which attempt to efface or question the distinctions between art and
commercial culture. The boundaries between the auratic art object and the
everyday outputs of mass consumer culture are confused by Zen for TV’s
combination of painterly visual abstraction and a sacred reference, on the one
hand, and Paik’s playful technique and use of television on the other. With
Participation TV; there is a deliberate confusion between acts of artistic creation
and the participatory acts of the artwork’s audience. Moreover, in Paik’s
practice there is an integration of engineering practice and aesthetic imagemaking.
Participation TVfulfils the criterion of intermedia, mixing real-time
•
sound, real-time vision, an electronic visual technique, and the “found object”
of the television set itself. Zen for TV and Participation TV alike embrace simplicity,
for which “Another term … is elegance. In mathematics or science, an
elegant idea is that idea which expresses the fullest possible series of meanings
in the most concentrated possible statement” (Friedman 2002). Zen for
TV’s density of reference (to religion, Modernism, popular culture), its indication
of the possibilities for new uses of television, its conceptual daring in
staking out a new area of artistic practice, and its beauty are all remarkable
in a work produced with such a simple expedient. And though Participation
TV’s apparent simplicity belies Paik’s immersion in electronics prior to making
the artwork, it introduces real-time electronic images, electronically mediated
interactions, and a simultaneous critique and extension of the uses of
television.
The fact that all of this is so clearly legible in these works may be because
of their exemplativism, the Fluxus antidote to what they saw as the Gnostic
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5. ”Participation TV” (Wilson) 103
complexities of art criticism, “[which] is the quality of a work exemplifying
the theory and meaning ofits construction” (Friedman 2002). The meanings
of these works are not concealed in depth, and require no specialized critical
knowledge to understand, but they are revealed clearly in the titles, on the
surfaces, and crucially in the use of the works. With Participation TV; meaning,
as in Wittgenstein’s view oflanguage, seems to overlap extensively with
use (2001).
Perhaps most important of all the Fluxus principles underlying Paik’s TV
works is that of playfulness. Friedman describes the function of this idea in
Fluxus artworks: “Playfulness has been part of Fluxus since the beginning.
Part of the concept of playfulness has been represented by terms such as jokes,
games, puzzles and gags” (2002). This playfulness was more than just a rejection
of the fetishization of art objects and artistic practice that led to the
“rigidities of conception, form and style” (Friedman 2002) that the Fluxus
artists saw as characteristic of the late Modernist consensus they were reacting
against. In positive terms it was seen as a new mode of comprehension
within their artworks, which were not just “gags”:
Play comprehends far more than humor. There is the play of ideas, the playfulness
of free experimentation, the playfulness of free association and the play of paradigm
shifting that are as common to scientific experiment as to pranks (Friedman
2002). ~.
Playfulness, which interacts with the values of simplicity, the unity of art and
life, and participation, is visible in the inclusiveness of individual Fluxus
works, and of the movement as a whole:
Of the multitude of directions and ideas that Fluxus has explored, the most significant
one is that it models a way of being creative that offers a communal, participatory
and open-ended alternative to the traditional forms and functions of
art-making …. By rejecting both the romanticized frames of art as visionary and the
modernist notions of art as professional and exclusionary practice, Fluxus returns
to a simpler engagement open to all …. In this way, art becomes a social act, because
of its participatory nature, and transformative as well, because of this very same
inclusionary stance. Although this open, often seemingly uncritical and playful
aspect of Fluxus is sometimes dismissed as insignificant or lacking a serious motivation,
it is of fundamental import for a collective, collaborative and global-based
mentality [Smith 123].
The playfulness of the television works can be seen in terms of Paik’s own
relationship with his materials, and in his willingness to experiment with television.
Participation TV extends playfulness to the viewing audience this
is a work whose playfulness is explicitly social and inclusive, comprehensible
not through initiation into the professional secrets of late Modernism but
through experiential play. In terms of the distinction between paidea (roughly:
104 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
play) and ludus (roughly: game), originating in the work of Caillois, and so
important to early debates in video game studies, Paik and Fluxus’s versions
of play are firmly in the former category. This is not rule-bound, competitive
play, but open-ended experimentation on Paik’s part, or in the case of
Participation TV, an invitation to the audience to engage in similarly open
playful experiences.
This “rethinking” of the nature and possibilities of the artwork as experience
was dubbed “postformalism” by a late 1960s artist and theorist, Jack
Burnham, and the description is taken up by Drucker when she observes that:
The critical vocabulary of postformalism is sprinkled with terms and phrases that
call attention to this change from object-based to process-oriented work. The earIier-
twentieth-century notion of the “languages of art,” for instance, was replaced
by reference to “systems.” “Processes” became more significant than mere “objects.”
And the vocabulary of “operations” or “procedures” appears in work with and without
technological components, as if the linguistic phraseology of a technological
mode were the new lingua franca of conception and production. An overall emphasis
on dynamic manipulation of knowledge (again, “the idea is a machine that
makes art”) replaces the long-standing legacy of “resistance in material” as the condition
for a work’s coming into being in form [48].
Rather than the objective artwork emerging from the artist’s heroic struggle
with tneir materials, artists now put in place processes, procedures, and relationships.
This informs a range of contemporary art:
The moment of the work’s intended mutability through the user’s input represents
a paradigm change in artistic production. Artists now provide a certain framework
for action and define the esthetic parameters within which the user can operate;
the work itself is a variable [pfaffenbichler 2004].
The object disappears: it is no more than a “variable” and “mutable” element
within the framework that determines its parameters and the parameters of
users’ actions upon it. The artist is no longer a producer of finished objects,
but a producer of affordances, constraints, and fields of action.
The notion of systemic artworks, first proposed by art theorist Jack Burnham
in 1968 in “System Esthetics,” is one that makes room for a flexible discussion
of the relationship between players/viewers, technologies, and the
audiovisual spaces created in work such as Paik’s, and which, further, can
inform our discussion of video games. Burnham compared the new orientation
toward systems to a Kuhnian paradigm-shift in the sciences. He insisted
on its close relationships to the changes he already saw emerging in the West’s
capitalist economies, where the management of systems and information was
. increasingly important, and the production of tangible goods was relatively
less important. These changes in the artwork were reflective of broad changes
in society as a whole: “We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a
5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 105
systems-oriented culture. Here, change emanates not from things, but from the
way things are done” (Burnham 1978: 160). According to Burnham, systemic
practices are focused on the “creation of stable, on-going relationships between
organic and non organic systems”; he identified these with the military-industrial
development of systems analysis, claiming that the aesthetic impulse
must, as technology progresses, “identify itself with the means of research and
production” (162). He identifies informing trends in twentieth-century art
whereby Marcel Duchamp and others showed that “art does not reside in
material entities, but in relations between people and the components of their
environment” (162). He sees art freed from the production of objects as an
art that can take its place in a variety of contexts.
This opens the way for considering the artwork as a system of relationships,
and as a process or a set of possibilities rather than as a fixed object.
For Charlie Gere, Burnham’s work amounts to a reconception of art that provides
the basis for an understanding of creative practice as no longer focused
on the production of self-sufficient objects, conceptually removed from the
stream of time, to a view of art as “software.” A similar conception of artistic
practice as software a product of design by the artist that allows the user
certain actions and behaviors recurs in Lev Manovich’s recent notion of
information design and information behavior as “post-media” aesthetic cat-
• egones.
The context of a broad postformalism, which saw the aim of artists as
the production of processes, procedures, relationships, and mutable fields that
registered users’ configurative practices of the principles of the Fluxus movement
and of theories of “systemic artworks” such as Burnham’s, can all be
used to frame Paik’s TV works. Further, these concepts are also useful in
understanding and analyzing the development and aesthetics of the earliest,
commercially available video games which, though they appear subsequent
to Paik’s works, have a history that stretches back beyond Paik’s first exhibition,
giving further evidence of the breadth of the aesthetic ambition to create
systemic works that left a participatory place for the user or viewer.
Ralph Baer, Television and the Third Spot
A decade before Paik’s work appeared, an engineer named Ralph Baer
began working on his own problem, which bore close resemblances to Paik’s
and whose ambitions Baer articulated in similar ways, but whose outcomes
had important differences. At a time when television, as a channel of broadcasting,
was making its most forceful contribution as a vector of “mobile privatization,”
and operating so centrally in the postwar reconfiguration of the
106 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
American (sub)urban landscape (Spigel 2001), Baer, like Paik, was trying to
develop a means for fragmenting the publicity and simultaneity embedded
in TV’s hegemonic uses, its institutional frameworks, and its address. In the
early 1950s, Haer worked with Loral, then a small electronics company. His
chief engineer put Baer and a colleague to work on designing a home television
set, with the instruction to make it “the best TV set in the world” (Baer).
Baer immediately suggested building games into the sets. His idea was rejected
by his supervisor, and he was only able to devote serious time and resources
to it from 1966, when he himself was a chief engineer at military contractor
Sanders Associates. In the meantime, though, Baer recalls that:
I had frequently been thinking about ways to use a TV set for something other
than watching standard broadcasts. There were about 40 million TV sets in the
USA alone at that time, to say nothing of those many more millions of sets in the
rest of the world. They were literally begging to be used for something other than
watching commercial television broadcasts!
Here, Baer’s intimate knowledge of television electronics and his scientific and
creative ambitions caused him to conceive of TV and its domestic presence
in a way that is tantalizingly similar to Paik’s. For both, television was not so
much a fixed medium as it was a ready-made technological infrastructure,
which might allow an ecology of varying uses, the insertion of parallel and
parasitic technologies, and a plurality of relationships with its screen. Though
they have this view of television in common, it is worth noting that Baer’s
expression of this view is far less critical than Paik’s: he wants these games to
be an addition or supplement to broadcasting, rather than aiming to replace
television for a radical purpose. Varying television’s uses is less a political or
critical project than an engineering challenge.
For Baer, the transformation is defined primarily as a technical problem,
but Oliver Grau’s reminder to us is important here: that where the “media
artist” is concerned, scientific and aesthetic problems are difficult to unpick,
and we need to remind ourselves of Paik’s electronics learning curve leading
to his early TV works and Baer’s struggle with the aesthetics of play, detailed
below. However Baer conceived his practice, it was his work rather than Paik’s
that more directly led to a wholesale variation in the uses of television. His
self-conception as more “engineer” than “artist” allowed him to consider the
articulation of his work with the institutions and apparatuses of consumer
culture mass production, mass distribution, and retailing that would
deliver it into ordinary households.
From 1966, Baer’s notes show him mapping out ideas for a “range oflow
cost data entry devices which can be used by an operator to communicate
with a monochrome or color TV set of a standard, commercial, unmodified
type.” This is strikingly similar to what Paik achieves in Participation Tv, but
1.,
•
1- -I • –
5. ”Participation TV” (Wilson) 107
Baer’s ambition has subtle differences in its direction. He considers different
possible means of connecting games machines with television: different kinds
of games (”Action games … Board skill games … Artistic games ‘” Instructional
games … Board chance games … Card games … Sports games … ” [Baer]),
with different kinds, and different levels, of interaction. Importantly, what is
implied in his plans is a retention of television’s capacities as a representational
medium, a consideration to which we will return.
There was a long period in which Baer and engineers under his supervision
tinkered with the problems of “TV games.” Working initially with
valve-state electronics, he worked on devices that would produce manipulable
television images. His experiments with controllers and transmission
yielded one moveable spot, then two, and his first game, Fox and Hounds,
which worked on the principle of tag. Ongoing involvement by engineers
like Bill Rusch led to the concept of a “third spot”:
[which] was born sometime in October or November [1967]; unlike the two manually
controlled spots we had been using so far, this spot was to be machine-controlled.
Bill Rusch came up with the idea of making that spot into a “ball” so that
we could play some sort of ball game with it. We batted around ideas of how we
could implement games such as Ping-Pong, Hockey, Football and other sports
games. I am not sure that we recognized that we had crossed a watershed but that’s
what it amounted to [Baer].
By the end of1967 Baer had built and tested prototypes, including one for a
light gun that could be used in play, and one for the “ping pong” game, and
by 1968 had filed patents, which were finally issued in 1971 for a “Television
gaming and training apparatus.” The “ping-pong” game was developed with
engineers at Sanders Associates, demonstrated in 1967 before Baer’s patents
were filed, and by 1968 was incorporated in a “complete switch-programmable
video game unit capable of playing ping-pong, volley-ball, football, gun
games and using colored, transparent overlays as backgrounds” (Baer). Baer
modified this design further to create the “brown box,” which was the “first
fully-programmable, multi-player video game unit.” This was displayed to
American television manufacturers in 1968, picked up and dropped by RCA,
and finally accepted for manufacture by Magnavox in 19l;’1 (Baer, Winter). In
the prototype, and in the eventual commercial release, player movement, and
the range of actions the player’s avatar could take in the visual world of the
game was produced and limited by a range of controllers a dial and the light
gun. Baer’s essential design was to be issued as the Magnavox Odyssey in
1972. It toured trade shows with the “Magnavox profit caravan” in 1972, and
this is how Nolan Bushnell came to play it, and sign the firm’s guestbook at
the Airport Marina Hotel in Burlingame, California (Baer).
Like Paik, Baer’s efforts involve an immersion in electronics, an effort
108 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
‘.~
‘,i• ,•
” ,
•
,
to turn the television screen to new purposes, and the desire to create a “post- ..
objective” work using television technology, in the sense that his efforts are
directed at the production of a system of interaction rather than pictorial
works with a comparable level of sophistication to those of broadcasting. Like
the postobjective artworks discussed by Drucker and Gere above, processes,
systems, and frameworks for action are the goal of practice. The significance
of the “third spot” was not so much in its minimal enrichment of the screen
image, but in its bringing about a more satisfactory relationship between the
image and the behavior of users in relationship with it. This is not a finished,
objective work, like a broadcast television program, that viewers can watch
and interpret but not change. This is a new form of “information design,”
which has as its primary goal a new form of “information behavior” in relation
to television (Manovich). In this sense, we can think about Baer’s work
in relation to the movement toward postobjective creative practice in the
1960s and 1970s.
Baer did not talk about his work in precisely the same way as Paik, but
we can see the early Odyssey games as embodying some of the Fluxus principles
that explicitly inform Paik’s TV works. Baer’s games are “intermedia”
in the sense that they combine electronic images, transparent overlays, and
games themselves in a new kind of cultural product. It offers a “unity of art
and life” in the sense that just as Paik and Fluxus look to dismantle the barriers
between art and audience, and offer televisual images as something the
audience might act upon. Baer dearly expresses a desire to give the technology
of television over to local uses, and thus at least implicitly is prepared to
complicate the centralized apparatus of broadcasting. (Certainly, the ongoing
consequences of Baer’s work including the global videogames industry
have played their part in the formation of what has been called the “post
broadcast age” [Wark]). The work is certainly, centrally “playful,” but there
are important differences with the quality of playfulness we find in Participation
Tv. This can be seen in the way that Baer does not stop with Fox and
Hounds. Baer’s goal is not the institution of unstructured paidea play, but the
construction of a structured ludus game, on the dimension of agon, or competitive
play, and in retrospect Baer identifies the construction of a viable
form of agonistic playas the moment of success. A collaboratively produced
image is enough for Paik in designing Participation TV; Baer considers his
team’s key achievement to be the organization of a viable form of competi-
• •• • tlon In InteractIOn.
Also, importantly, there are differences in the function ofimages in Baer’s
and Paik’s work. Paik’s images can be enjoyed on several levels we can appreciate
Zen for TV’s allusion to high modernism; Magnet TV’s beauty and complexity;
Participation TV’s relationship to the human voice. But none of these
•
5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 109
images are truly representational, and indeed only exist as the surface evidence
of a conceptual transformation of television’s possibilities. Though Zen for TV
alludes to Barnett Newman and religion, the image is there as a bare sign of the
manipulability of television by the artist. The variable image in Participation TV
is no more than a variable that demonstrates the application of the conceptual
title: though the abstract images produced have their own pleasures, they do not
represent anything except the results of participation. To paraphrase Galloway,
the images here are no more than interaction made visible. But in Baer’s games,
images and play are thought about by analogy with existing games, and part of
Baer’s satisfaction with the “third spot” is due to the game’s approximation of
tennis; there is a newfound capacity for representing something in the world. This
representational ambition informed the journey made by Nolan Bushnell to producing
the first commercially successful videogame, Pong.
Nolan Bushnell: Computer Space to Pong
Nolan Bushnell’s newly formed Atari released Pong in 1972. Its of tenremarked
commercial success followed the failure of Bushnell’s attempt to port
Spacewar! designed by Steve Russell and others for MIT’s PDP-1 mainframe
computer from 1961 to a cheaper, more accessible arcade format in the form
of Computer Space. 5 The port was simplified, for example, there were no gravity
effects as in the mainframe version, but was perhaps not straightforward
enough to make it the popular success that Pong would be. Whereas the later
game would simply require players to move their avatar on a single axis of
movement in order to meet the oncoming “ball,” the description of Computer
Space’s gameplay on its Killer List of Video games listing gives some indication
as to what the first players were faced with:
The rocket ship controlled by the player can be maneuvered through space using rotational
buttons and a thrust button. The fire button is used to make the rocket ship
fire missiles. When the two enemy flying saucers attack, they will fire missiles at the
rocket ship. The player must have the rocket ship fire missiles at the flying saucers to
destroy them. The object of the game is for the player to have the rocket ship to destroy
the flying saucers more times than the flying saucers can destroy the rocket ship, the
player must also try to have the rocket ship outscore the flying saucers in order to get
extended play in hyperspace. If the player attains hyperspace the playfield will turn
from black to white and feature a vision of daylight in outer space. The game will end
if the flying saucers outscore the player’s rocket ship and time has expired.6
In retrospect, Bushnell recalled the problems with Computer Space:
You had to read the instructions before you could play, people didn’t want to read
instructions. To be successful, I had to come up with a game people already knew
how to play; something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play [Winter].
110 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
We can put Bushriell’s articulation of the problem he faced alongside Paik’s
or Baer’s: he sees using television as the basis of a new form of playas more
engineering problem than critical project, but there is also a decidedly entrepreneurial,
commercial edge to his ambitions. Nevertheless, he found his way
through some aesthetic problems that had to do with visualization and the
range of information behaviors required of players. Beyond Bushnell’s own
retrospective assessment, Lowood remarks that the idea that Computer Space
was too complex for its players is a consensus judgment in videogame history
(11), but that this needs to be qualified by the technical and design achievements
that Computer Space did embody, and which were carried forward into
the later success of Pong, and arcade gameplay:
These assessments of Computer Space as a failure miss its significance for the
videogame as a technological ,artifact. It provided more than a learning experience.
Computer Space established a design philosophy and general technical configuration
for arcade consoles and reduced the laboratory-based computer game to the
stable format that would launch the videogame as a consumer product. When
. Bushnell noted years later that his “engineering friends loved” Computer Space,
even if “the typical guy in the bar” was completely baffled, it is easy to hear echoes
of this appreciation in assessments of his technical achievement from engineers,
designers and operators [Lowood 11-12].
This “technical configuration” included the placement of a television screen
at the heart of a commercial coin-op videogame system, within a cabinet,
and the grasping of the possible analogies between computer games and
. older coin-op amusements. Lowood offers an example of the technical
achievements in Computer Space that would continue to inform subsequent
videogame design. Bushnell’s technical solution to the problem of overburdening
a CPU with refreshing an entire screen every time a single On-screen
object moved was to control each individual game element with a dedicated
• tranSistor:
Bushnell’s rockets were essentially hardwired bit-maps that could be moved
around the screen independently of the background, a crucial innovation that made
it possible to produce screen images efficiently …. The design concept would
become part of Atari’s shared knowledge …. Bushnell’s patch solution later became
a staple of game machines and home computers in .the form of “sprites” [Lowood
1] .
Notwithstanding its achievements in arriving at a basic format for arcade play,
and in making crucial technical gains that would be taken forward into the
design of Pong, as a game, Computer Space undoubtedly deterred player
engagement because of its complexity. At a time when “computer literacy” was
the preserve of engineering faculties, it asked players to learn and understand
at Once a wide range of information and information behavior, including new
5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 111
kinds of images, and a complex way of enacting relationships with images.
The problem of how to attract players beyond the engineering community
to engage with a new medium was solved only with the much simpler Pong.
Perhaps Bushnell’s inspiration for the solution to his central problem
did come from his visit to Magnavox’s “profit caravan” where he saw a demonstration
of the Odyssey; Bushnell admits attending the show but claims to
have been unimpressed by Baer’s efforts. Pongwas released several months after
the Odyssey, but it thoroughly eclipsed what even Baer describes as his
machine’s “modest” sales. Successful legal action was brought by Magnavox
on Atari in 1973 (Winter). By this time, though, Atari had entrenched itself
as market leader, and although the Odyssey sold well, it is Pong that is remembered
as the first computerized tennis game, and the first successful video
game to reach a broad market.
As noted by Lowood, Pongs success is usually put down to its relative
simplicity by comparison with Computer Space (Winter, Herman, and Cohen).
The simplicity of the game is not only in its simple imperatives, but also in
the instructions and the character of the images and their movement in space.
By contrast with Computer Space, Pongs instructions were almost absurdly simple:
“Avoid missing ball for high score.” Given that there is no “ball,” but
only a blocky sprite rebounding around the screen, we could see these instructions
as being as much a fictional framing device as an outline of imperatives.
The physical interface was equally uncomplicated. A continuous dial
controlled movement of the player’s block avatar on a single, vertical axis.
Unlike Computer Space, there were no “expressive acts” (Galloway) such as
firing, and the player was only required to engage in movement-actions. A
two-player game with no computer-controlled avatars the game allowed
players to participate in a very straightforward contest in on-screen space, and
the adversarial nature of the contest was reflected in the neat, symmetrical
composition of the screen. Squire and Jenkins’s doctrine of video games as
the “art of contested space” is spelled out very clearly by the game to players:
the game’s written instructions and the visual composition of the game’s world
allow the “rules” to emerge easily, to the extent that we might see those rules
as being realized representationally. The contestual nature of the game is
clearly legible, in a way that, using the vocabulary of Fluxus, we might call
exemplative. Whereas Computer Space “required instructions,” Pong visualized
its rules.
The ease with which players were able to understand the required information
behaviors in relation to the game was shown when a prototype was
installed in Andy Capp’s tavern:
One of [them] inserted a quarter. There was a beep. The game had begun. They
watched dumbfoundedly as the ball appeared alternately on one side of the screen
112 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
and then disappeared on the other. Each time it did the score changed. The score
was tied at 3-3 when one player tried the knob controlling the paddle at his end
of the screen. The score was 5-4, his favor, when his paddle made contact with
the ball. There was a beautifully resonant “pong” sound, and the ball bounced back
to the other side of the screen. 6-4. At 8-4 the second player figured out how to
use his paddle. They had their first brief volley just before the score was 11-5 and
the game was over. Seven quarters later they were having extended volleys, and the
constant pong noise was attracting the curiosity of others at the bar. Before closing,
everybody in the bar had played the game [Cohen 29].
Where Computer Space’s structure was complex enough to resist the player’s
entrance with a range of behaviors and instructions that needed to be understood,
Pong presented a system in which the relationship between the playing
body and screen images, mediated by the simple dial interface, was such
that players were quickly able to attend to it, and quickly able, too, to derive
pleasure from competitive play. And already, in Cohen’s description, it is
interesting to note that, just as Paik’s works implied a bifurcated audience,
on Pongs first night the audience is divided between players and spectators,
as in Newman’s analysis of the complex videogame audience. In this case,
viewers are not attracted by the kind of rich technological spectacle that characterizes
contemporary games, and the audiovisual style of Pong is a long way
from the mimetic audiovisuality of television. The spectacle here is a new form
of agonistic play, witnessing a new form of technological representation. In
this sense, perhaps, Pong shares at least one aspect of the “aesthetic of attractions”
that Gunning insists underpins early cinema: its attraction lies partly
in “its ability to show something” not only new (52), namely, electronically
generated images, but also in its ability to show something as manipulable
and subject to agonistic play.
By comparison with Computer Space, it is striking that Pong adds very
little to the image of Zen for Tv. Pongs abstraction of tennis is of such rigor
as to constitute the zero degree of representation. It seems to confirm Wolf’s
argument that the abstraction of early video games is a means by which players
are “taught” about the nature of the new medium. But it is representation
nevertheless, and, taking Jarvinen’s framework for analyzing audiovisual style
in early video games forward, it is less “abstract” than “caricatural” it is an
extremely schematic representational audiovisual environment rather than
one, like Paik’s (or that of Qix or Tetris) that eschews representation. Perhaps
it is the balance found in Pong between representational ambition and the
necessity to initiate players into new kinds of information behavior that marks
its success as videogames’ first “killer app.”
, ,
5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 113
Conclusion: Archaeology and Pong as Killer App
The expansion of video game archaeology can enrich our understandings
of gameplay, of the successes and achievements of game designers, and
the consequent transformations of media technologies and institutions. That
Paik never really achieved his goal of a critical renovation of television, and
that Baer and Bushnell were able to initiate a new industry that transformed
our relationship with television as a technology, can be understood in terms
of an archaeological analysis.
Despite Paik’s wonderfully elegant institution of postobjective artworks
with television at their heart, he was prevented perhaps by his critical position,
and his “anti-television” stance, from offering his works as a mass-market
technology. For all of Fluxus’s desire to take art into the world, the
institutional framework for his TV works remained the art gallery and his
methods remained artisanal, so the audience for these works was significantly
smaller than television’s mass audience.
The “modest success” of the Odyssey beside Pong has been explained by
Baer in terms of the confusion and incompetence of Magnavox and retailers
in marketing the machine, but the positioning of all of these efforts in relation
to the technology and institutions of television in the archaeology that
this piece has carried out suggests a different possibility. Given that broadcasting
was, as Paik, Spigel (1992), and Williams suggest, a crucial component
of the postwar social order, any technology that threatened to break the
nexus between broadcasting and television could be seen as a change with
broad ramifications. Winston, in his history of media technologies, suggests
that new technologies are subject to a law of suppression of radical potential:
societies tend toward conservatism, and new technologies that threaten elements
of the status quo are problematic, and often take time to gain acceptance
and to become institutionalized. Given that Williams’s social history of
gaming shows that, notwithstanding some successful consoles, it was not until
the late 1980s that consoles came to reliably outstrip arcades as a source of
revenues for the videogames industry, it could be concluded that Baer’s
machine, and succeeding consoles, represented too disturbing a change to
domestic media consumption.
Bushnell, on the other hand, opted initially for the placement of games
in public space, where, as Huhtamo shows, a range of venues, established
patterns of consumption and reception, and an economic model of sales and
distribution were already in place, ahead of the arrival of arcade games. Huhtamo’s
archaeology demonstrates that for a long period video games and arcade
machines could be seen side by side in arcades, bars, and other venues,
comfortably coexisting, accepting the same coins, and offering analogous
114 The Pleasures of Computer Gaming
human-machine relationships. Winston claims that media technologies are
usually taken up because they fulfill a “social need”: in this case, the coin-op
industry’s hunger for technological novelty. Rather than changing domestic
media consumption, at least initially, Bushnell was more concerned to incorporate
the technology of television into a new form of coin-op play, which,
though inspired by his experiences with advanced computer technologies,
was also informed by his understanding of that industry. Pongs status as a
“killer app” was in part secured by the cultural and economic framework into
which it was introduced.
However, all three can be seen as manifestations of a common desire to
turn television to new uses, to encourage new kinds of information behavior
in relation to screen images; Paik, Baer, and Bushnell alike conceived of television
as not merely a receiver of broadcast content, but in terms of its new
potentiality as the center of postobjective, systemic works. Though Paik’s
work is abstract and Baer and Bushnell’s representational, and though Participation
TV offers open-ended play whereas the game designers’ works are
structured by agonistic competition, all imagine television transformed, in a
new relationship with its audience. The framework within which Burnham
and subsequent historians understood the changes in the nature of art in the
period that overlaps with the video game designers’ work can be fruitful in
understanding games and art, and a present where real-time interaction has
come to “underpin the whole apparatus of communication and data-processing
by which our contemporary techno-culture operates” (Gere 1). From this
point of view, we can begin to understand the relationship between games
and art with frameworks that transcend simple oppositions.
Notes
1. See, for example, Ellis.
2. See Wilson for a fuller account of the relationship between the work of Newman
and Paik.
3. Ivan Sutherland’s PhD incorporating Sketchpad, the first graphical user interface
(GUI) for computers, was published in 1963, and the technology allowed the production
of on-screen line drawings of considerable complexity, but these efforts were directed at
monitors attached to large, mainframe computers.
4. See, for example, Cohen, and Castells.
5. See, for example, Burnham 2001, Cohen, and Winter.
6. A mastery of a number of rules, various functionalities and behaviors of on-screen
objects, and a range of narrative events were all part and parcel of playing this game. The
game demanded that the players learn to use different kinds of controllers, both for the
“move-acts,” which “change the position or orientation of the game environment” and
“expressive acts,” which “exert an expressive desire outward from the player to objects in
the world” (Galloway 22-23). To move in Computer Space, the player must understand
,,,
·
5. “Participation TV” (Wilson) 115
the interplay of directional and thrust controllers, and the relationship between their actions
and an unfamiliar on-screen object. Expressively, the player must understand the requirement
to target and fire at other objects. Added to this was a mise-en-scene which was
arguably richer than any other videogame between it and Space Invaders, featuring a background
of stars and several differently-shaped objects (the rocketship, the flying saucer,
the projectiles). A two-player version introduce further complications, with players controlling
differently-shaped craft with varying capabilities.
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Gameography
Computer Space, Nutting Associates 1971.
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Space Invaders, Taito, 1978.
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Tetris, Atari, 1988.
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