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For my generation (say, 18-34, demographically speaking, particularly males), early video games are source of intense nostalgia and affection. The lurid, eyeball-searing color and bizarre cartoon logic of those games suggest an era of fruitful experimentation in a medium that had yet to establish conventions. Possibly, the industry had yet to be professionalized; game-design was still more closely linked to programming than graphic design, and a geek whimsy like Pacman could somehow become a cultural sensation; who else knew what video games were supposed be? |
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Focused, Forward – Elwyn Palmerton
For my generation (say, 18-34, demographically speaking, particularly males), early video games are source of intense nostalgia and affection. The lurid, eyeball-searing color and bizarre cartoon logic of those games suggest an era of fruitful experimentation in a medium that had yet to establish conventions. Possibly, the industry had yet to be professionalized; game-design was still more closely linked to programming than graphic design, and a geek whimsy like Pacman could somehow become a cultural sensation; who else knew what video games were supposed be?
It’s this material—our reflexive nostalgic reactions to the obsolete technologies of our youth—which Michael Bell-Smith mines and retools. Not every piece was great; an arty looking photo-collage was a little too precious, a suite of smaller videos Sparkler Set looks sort of like screen-savers (or meta-screen-savers?), and Birds Over the Whitehouse is compelling but relies too much on its title to reveal meaning. Still, the rest of his videos are incisive, critical and ambitious, as well as betraying a love of their retro materials to rival that of Cory Arcangel’s kitschier, hacker appropriation art. They’re also more interesting to me than Paul Chan’s abstruse, allusive cartoons. At any rate, I wouldn’t expect anyone over 35 to care deeply about this work, but the best pieces here can change the way you think about these forms.
In Up and Away, Bell-Smith plays on the layered backgrounds of third-person perspective scrolling games, but rotates this formal structure by 90 degrees. Overlapping plains of blocky, pixilated landscapes slide down the screen in a veritable parade of hokey genre settings: a moonscape, clouds, a haunted castle on a hill, bucolic fields, a highway, etc… By following this simple schema, he’s crafted a kinetic space that is rigorous, irrational and invented.
In Lev Manovich’s book The Language of New Media, he argues that new media, particularly videogames—where interactivity requires seamless continuity—are characterized by a lack of montage. Where he’s wrong is with regard to the discontinuous jump-cuts which occur between levels, where the dopamine rush of level attainment coincides with new graphical novelties (the next level). A montage effect occurs here, and the medium is momentarily fore-grounded to the functional necessity of world-immersion for game play. It’s our adolescent brain chemical response to this effect (ephemeral novelty) which defines the appeal of videogames—and which this piece exploits. Bell-Smith produces an accelerated version of this effect: each layer presents the shock of a new level in concentrated form but the pacing deliberately frustrates the tendency to contemplate them nostalgically or to immerse oneself into them. This formal device induces a skeptical distance from the medium and a reflective attitude toward the aesthetics, nostalgia and sources of these retro styles.
As the show’s title, “Focused, Forward,” suggests, Bell-Smith doesn’t want us languishing in the past. In Some Houses Have Pools, a bubbly, flat white cloud floats over an aerial view of a monotonous Levittown-esque suburbia, an endless grid of identical houses save for color and a Boolean “pool” variable. As the cloud looms into the frame, it obscures the view before encompassing the screen in pure white luminescence. The loopy, circular logic linking subject matter with material functions similarly to Tom Friedman’s work—managing to be self-referential without being merely about itself.
The largest and best piece here, Continue, depicts a caped figure standing on the roof of a house sunken in a tapestry of oscillating, scrolling patterns of abstracted water against a setting sun. The title refers to the conventional narrative function of such a tableau: as a backdrop for the menu option "continue," which appears after the character dies. The figure on the roof, a generic boy-superhero, wears a red cape, which flaps herky-jerky in discrete, perceptible frames. The sun flares intermittently, encompassing the frame in a dissolve to white, which recedes rather than revealing a new scene because, of course, there is no "continue" button after you die in real life. The accompanying music complements this scene with an evocative, plaintive air. It sounds familiar and typical but less tinny or insipid than the genre would typically allow. By updating the music’s fidelity but not its synthesizer aesthetic, Bell-Smith spawns a wormhole between digital escapism and the real world. It’s sad and mesmerizing, conflating childhood experiences of media with adult ones, fantasy with reality, and asking probing questions about video games, nostalgia and mediated experience.
