WEBVTT

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

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that the image behind me is a work of art.

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

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What about this other one?

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

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

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What happens if I show you a urinal?

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Here come the first doubts.

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It's not just any urinal.

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

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where all works of art
were to be accepted.

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And this one was left out.

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The other commissioners charged
with deciding what would be included

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left it aside.
Duchamp gave up.

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A conceptual, irreverent,
politically incorrect work of art.

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Because sometimes art
can be all these things too.

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What about this one?

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

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

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The faces are starting to change.

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A name with value.

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

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

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about commercial art
versus art of the elite. Why?

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Because art isn't always pretty.

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Art isn't always a canvas.

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

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

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

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it can horrify us, like Marina Abramovic

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and her 'Performances'
which seek to move us,

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which seek to comment, to tell a story;

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which are political, social
and at times religious declarations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Just like Duchamp in his day.

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Or like Warhol in his.

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

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who play video games 24/7

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and who know all the tricks in the book.

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No, this is something
that is happening worldwide.

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And which is being validated
by institutions:

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institutions of art and of technology;

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and museums, like the Smithsonian,

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which this year dedicated
a several-month long exhibition

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to the history of video gaming,

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the cultural influence of video gaming.

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

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went to the public themselves.

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

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It has a wing dedicated
solely to video games.

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From the first console up
to modern-day productions

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made by artists
who work with gaming devices.

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And why not festivals too?

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Like ARS Electronica,
a festival which takes place in Austria

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and which is characteristic
of art and technology.

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It has a category called Interactive Art

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

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Commercial video games,
independent video games,

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devices created by artists.

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These are all different ways
in which the video game

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can come to be considered as an art.

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

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

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because art is something unique to man.

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Art is a way
we have of expressing ourselves,

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of communicating,
of transmitting emotions.

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Art keeps on changing with the ages;

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with each society it uses different tools.

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Technology was inevitable in this century

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

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

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These people could be the next Warhols.

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They are the ones who walk among us.

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

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and time will tell
if we were right or wrong.

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

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which are probably not quite Mona Lisas,

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or Warhol's Brillo Boxes,

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

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

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The video game goes one step further,

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from the seventh art to the eighth.

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Now we have interactivity,

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something which some branches of art

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has been striving for since
it left the canvas.

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To remove the other
from the place of the observer,

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to hook them in,
to make them the protagonist.

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

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

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which could be outdone
by the more 'indie' ones

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but which has a lot going on
behind it all.

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

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departments dedicated to photography,

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to character design, to narrative.

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Here, Renaissance Italy
has been reconstructed.

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They worked with historians, architects,

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specialists in this era.

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

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

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on paintings from that period.

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

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

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where we are the ones
who travel through the story.

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We are the protagonists of this tale.

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And just like Hollywood
has a flipside like Cannes festival

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

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transmit another experience,
which have multiple meanings;

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video games have that too,

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with companies which present themselves
as purely artistic.

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

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

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This is its most recent work, Journey.

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The journey of the hero,
present in every narrative.

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Every book and every film
talks about this journey.

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Perhaps a journey unique to each player.

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

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

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

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

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You are the one
who walks among the verses.

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

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

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their own destiny,

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and who connects with us through sound.

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We don't have a familiar language,

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we can't chat, we just emit sounds.

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

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

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and we're left alone
to continue our journey.

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All fairly sensible up to here, it seems.

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

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

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Daniel Benmergui, Argentinian.
Works with narrative.

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How do we tell a story?

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

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He picked on the nobodies.

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This storyteller won
the Nuovo Award in the IGF,

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the Independent Games Festival, this year.

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The prize par excellence
for experimentation in a video game.

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

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In this case, Adam has to die.

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We have Adam and a tombstone.

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If we put Adam in the first frame

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

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

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

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the couple will break up.

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Our protragonist's decision is up to us:

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whether he will choose love or money.

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It's all experimentation.

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

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

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Art can have a strong message to convey.

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

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they went out into the streets to talk
about politics,

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to educate and make people
aware of what was happening.

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

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inspired by the events of September 11th.

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

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Civilians walking around,
and some of them are armed.

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

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

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Our first instinct is to kill the bad guy.

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But what happens is that we shoot

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and in the missile blast, there
will be casualties

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who did not have to be the ones to die.

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The civilians will gather to mourn
their dead relatives

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and they too will become terrorists.

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Violence breeds violence, it's simple.

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

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as becoming responsible
for these actions ourselves.

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

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to what is happening to us.

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Video gaming moving towards education,

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

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

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

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

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from our surroundings,
and a pair of earphones.

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We are at the bottom of the sea.

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Our mission is to escape
from the savage beasts

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which are pursuing us.

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Our resources are a joystick
and the sounds we hear.

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It's about the experience.

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At one point when art
came out of the canvas,

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it started to work with the body,
with emotions,

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with feelings and sensations;

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

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Creating movement,
appealing to other sensitivities.

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Marta Minujín is an icon over here,

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you'll probably have heard of 'Mayhem',

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

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It was a step beyond the visual.

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It meant entering into the experience
with your whole body.

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

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On top of this, new possibilities arise

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for people with sight problems,
for example.

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The idea is simply to start working

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with all these capacities we possess.

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Finally, Pain Station,
developed by artists.

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In their university graduation thesis

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

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

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to play table tennis on a tablet.

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The problem is that
for every ball we miss,

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for each shot we can't return,

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

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They get burned, they receive lashings.

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This game is on display
in the museum of Berlin

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as a contemporary development
of artists working with video games.

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

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But this is the idea,
to push the boundaries.

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

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are bringing back the value of games.

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Something which perhaps we had put aside,

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

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Games are for grown-ups too.

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Games can be serious.

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Games laid the foundations
for all cultures and societies.

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Games make us socialize,

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they make us connect with others.

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

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

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irreverent, provide new experiences,
open doors.

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That's what this is about.

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

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yearning for bygone ages and better times

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when we understood everything we saw.

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Not to be stuck
like Woody Allen's character

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in Midnight in Paris
dreaming about travelling through time.

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

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

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to change our viewpoint,
start seeing again.

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That there are
fundamental changes happening,

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

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

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I invite you all to return to play.

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(Applause)