Playful art | Maria Luján Oulton | TEDxRíodelaPlata

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.
Maria Luján Oulton approaches videogames as new artistic expressions that hide a design, aesthetics and a purpose, and that communicate concepts. Her motivation may be found in her own words: “I find emotion in art, the goose bumps, the amazement or even the disgust one a piece of art is a true creation of the spirit.”

I'd like to ask you
to raise your hand if you believe

that the image behind me is a work of art.

There's not much room for doubt, is there?

What about this other one?

It could impress us more or less,
depending on our aesthetic tastes,

but nobody will be horrified by the sight
of a Mondrian in a museum.

What happens if I show you a urinal?

Here come the first doubts.

It's not just any urinal.

'Fountain', presented by Duchamp
for entry into an art exhibition

where all works of art
were to be accepted.

And this one was left out.

The other commissioners charged
with deciding what would be included

left it aside.
Duchamp gave up.

A conceptual, irreverent,
politically incorrect work of art.

Because sometimes art
can be all these things too.

What about this one?

A box of washing powder,
and not even a real one. A replica.

But what if I told you it's a Warhol?

The faces are starting to change.

A name with value.

Another work of art,
a 20th-century avant-garde icon.

In this case, art which talks to us
about what is happening,

about commercial art
versus art of the elite. Why?

Because art isn't always pretty.

Art isn't always a canvas.

In fact, in its origins art
was much more than that.

Art was a ritual.
Art was politics, it was communication.

That's why art can sometimes be fleeting,
it can be brutal,

it can horrify us, like Marina Abramovic

and her 'Performances'
which seek to move us,

which seek to comment, to tell a story;

which are political, social
and at times religious declarations.

Or art can team up with science
and create a rabbit like Alba,

a fluorescent rabbit who sparked debate
over whether her true 'parent'

was the artist Eduardo Kac
or the laboratory which commissioned her.

Is this a breakthrough?
Is it a work of art?

With this in mind, who would say
that a picture like this could be art?

That maybe video gaming
is one of the new avant-garde art forms.

Just like Duchamp in his day.

Or like Warhol in his.

And it's not me who's saying this,
nor a group of fanaticized geeks

who play video games 24/7

and who know all the tricks in the book.

No, this is something
that is happening worldwide.

And which is being validated
by institutions:

institutions of art and of technology;

and museums, like the Smithsonian,

which this year dedicated
a several-month long exhibition

to the history of video gaming,

the cultural influence of video gaming.

The decision of which works
were to be included in the exhibition

went to the public themselves.

Or, for example, a museum of technology
like the one in Berlin.

It has a wing dedicated
solely to video games.

From the first console up
to modern-day productions

made by artists
who work with gaming devices.

And why not festivals too?

Like ARS Electronica,
a festival which takes place in Austria

and which is characteristic
of art and technology.

It has a category called Interactive Art

which for a while has been assigning
awards to video games.

Commercial video games,
independent video games,

devices created by artists.

These are all different ways
in which the video game

can come to be considered as an art.

I'm not saying that all of them
are art, but some are.

And it happens,
and it was inevitable that it would happen

because art is something unique to man.

Art is a way
we have of expressing ourselves,

of communicating,
of transmitting emotions.

Art keeps on changing with the ages;

with each society it uses different tools.

Technology was inevitable in this century

and video gaming
is one of the many faces it can assume.

And these are some
of the many faces behind these creations.

These people could be the next Warhols.

They are the ones who walk among us.

We are the ones who will say:
"Yes, this could be art", or "No",

and time will tell
if we were right or wrong.

I suggest we take a quick look
at six examples of video games

which are probably not quite Mona Lisas,

or Warhol's Brillo Boxes,

but which are paving
the way for what is to come.

Perhaps the easiest art form
to liken it to is cinema.

The video game goes one step further,

from the seventh art to the eighth.

Now we have interactivity,

something which some branches of art

has been striving for since
it left the canvas.

To remove the other
from the place of the observer,

to hook them in,
to make them the protagonist.

By its very nature, video gaming
has all of this.

Take Assassin's Creed, for example:
a 'mainstream' video game

which could be outdone
by the more 'indie' ones

but which has a lot going on
behind it all.

It took three years of work,
500 people developing it,

departments dedicated to photography,

to character design, to narrative.

Here, Renaissance Italy
has been reconstructed.

They worked with historians, architects,

specialists in this era.

It's the only method we have today
to explore these places.

A while ago there was an exhibition
in the Museum of Decorative Art

on paintings from that period.

Line after interminable line
waiting for a glance into that time.

It's the same thing here.
We're being taken along for a journey

where we are the ones
who travel through the story.

We are the protagonists of this tale.

And just like Hollywood
has a flipside like Cannes festival

or Berlin's Golden Bear, with entries
which try to tell another story,

transmit another experience,
which have multiple meanings;

video games have that too,

with companies which present themselves
as purely artistic.

This is the case with That Game Company,
a Californian enterprise

which says it develops video games
which are like interactive poems.

This is its most recent work, Journey.

The journey of the hero,
present in every narrative.

Every book and every film
talks about this journey.

Perhaps a journey unique to each player.

We wake up in the desert,
alone in the vast emptiness

with nobody to keep us company,
and a light to follow.

In Journey, the meaning
will be different for every player.

You enter into a painting,
you enter into a poem.

You are the one
who walks among the verses.

And sometimes another character appears,
which is someone who is online

at that precise moment,
who is undertaking their own journey,

their own destiny,

and who connects with us through sound.

We don't have a familiar language,

we can't chat, we just emit sounds.

We sing, we communicate,
we keep each other company.

And when the other player disappears,
he takes away a little token...

and we're left alone
to continue our journey.

All fairly sensible up to here, it seems.

It's aesthetic, we understand it.
It's not so crazy.

But what happens if we get
just a little more experimental?

Daniel Benmergui, Argentinian.
Works with narrative.

How do we tell a story?

In this instance, he takes up the theories
of the Russian constructivists.

He picked on the nobodies.

This storyteller won
the Nuovo Award in the IGF,

the Independent Games Festival, this year.

The prize par excellence
for experimentation in a video game.

In a comic-strip style,
he sets out a storytelling for us.

In this case, Adam has to die.

We have Adam and a tombstone.

If we put Adam in the first frame

and the tombstone in the second,
Adam goes 'kaput'.

Sometimes it is inspired by cinema,
such as Indecent Proposal, for example

Here we have a happy couple,
but if we add a treasure chest,

the couple will break up.

Our protragonist's decision is up to us:

whether he will choose love or money.

It's all experimentation.

It may or may not seem like art,
we'll see, but it is happening.

And art, as we said before,
can also be political.

Art can have a strong message to convey.

At one point, muralists in Mexico
went out into the streets;

they went out into the streets to talk
about politics,

to educate and make people
aware of what was happening.

Here, Gonzalo Frasca from Uruguay
presents us with September 12th,

inspired by the events of September 11th.

He puts us in a random town
in the Middle East.

Civilians walking around,
and some of them are armed.

A telescopic sight, and no objectives.
There are no rules.

It's down to us to decide what to do.

Our first instinct is to kill the bad guy.

But what happens is that we shoot

and in the missile blast, there
will be casualties

who did not have to be the ones to die.

The civilians will gather to mourn
their dead relatives

and they too will become terrorists.

Violence breeds violence, it's simple.

But being told this is not the same
as being fully aware,

as becoming responsible
for these actions ourselves.

'Serious games', games
which are related to social reality,

to what is happening to us.

Video gaming moving towards education,

video gaming as a tool to connect us
with the younger ones,

who are practically born
with joysticks in their hands these days.

Or, an experimental video game
developed in this case by a musician.

Deep Sea, a diving suit,
a gas mask which isolates us completely

from our surroundings,
and a pair of earphones.

We are at the bottom of the sea.

Our mission is to escape
from the savage beasts

which are pursuing us.

Our resources are a joystick
and the sounds we hear.

It's about the experience.

At one point when art
came out of the canvas,

it started to work with the body,
with emotions,

with feelings and sensations;

the 'performances' and the 'happenings'
began to appear.

Creating movement,
appealing to other sensitivities.

Marta Minujín is an icon over here,

you'll probably have heard of 'Mayhem',

where you would walk through
a kind of scenario where things happen.

It was a step beyond the visual.

It meant entering into the experience
with your whole body.

But we were still witnesses.
Here, we are protagonists.

On top of this, new possibilities arise

for people with sight problems,
for example.

The idea is simply to start working

with all these capacities we possess.

Finally, Pain Station,
developed by artists.

In their university graduation thesis

they come back to Pong,
one of the first video games.

A game of ping-pong.
You have your hands ready

to play table tennis on a tablet.

The problem is that
for every ball we miss,

for each shot we can't return,

the second hand placed on the board
will receive a punishment.

They get burned, they receive lashings.

This game is on display
in the museum of Berlin

as a contemporary development
of artists working with video games.

At the limits of what is ethical,
the limits of gaming, the limits of art.

But this is the idea,
to push the boundaries.

And it is important to bear in mind
that all of these proposals

are bringing back the value of games.

Something which perhaps we had put aside,

which we thought was for children,
but isn't for children.

Games are for grown-ups too.

Games can be serious.

Games laid the foundations
for all cultures and societies.

Games make us socialize,

they make us connect with others.

And games, on the artistic side,
can take certain liberties.

They can explore, they can experiment,
they can be risky,

irreverent, provide new experiences,
open doors.

That's what this is about.

To be attentive, not to sit tight
in our comfort zones,

yearning for bygone ages and better times

when we understood everything we saw.

Not to be stuck
like Woody Allen's character

in Midnight in Paris
dreaming about travelling through time.

Realizing that all around us,
change is starting to happen,

that it's up to us to wake up
this internal curiosity,

to change our viewpoint,
start seeing again.

That there are
fundamental changes happening,

that video games are one
of the possible new faces of this change.

And perhaps this is an easy way
to come closer to this idea.

I invite you all to return to play.

(Applause)