Videogames & the two avant-gardes

Presented at Art History of Games Symposium on February 5, 2010 in the High Museum of Art’s Rich Auditorium on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center, in midtown Atlanta.Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Remediation (1999), with Richard Grusin; and Windows and Mirrors (2003), with Diane Gromala. With Professor Blair MacIntyre and the AEL at Georgia Tech, he is helping to build Augmented Reality (AR) and mobile technology systems for games and to stage dramatic and narrative experiences for entertainment and informal education.Brian Schrank is a videogame artist and PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His theoretical research maps how art history, especially the 20th century avant-garde, can inform our understanding of videogames as a social and artistic medium. His practical research “affordance mines” or explores the limits of what videogame technologies and players alike are capable of doing. He currently works in the Augmented Environments Lab where he prototypes augmented reality games for Cartoon Network and Motorola. He holds a B.F.A. from the Atlanta College of Art (now assimilated into SCAD) and a Masters of Entertainment Technology from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.Runtime: 50:09 minutesThe term "avant-garde games" keeps appearing in the game community, but uses of the term vary wildly. What is lacking is an awareness of the history of the avant-garde in the 20th century. Our strategy is to map today’s most creative and unusual videogames and gamemakers against that history. There are many avant-gardes, each with its artistic-cultural agenda, but we can distinguish two main groups: the formal and the political. Applying this division to videogames, we can see how the formal avant-garde explores the essence of the videogame medium (e.g. action, procedurality, story) and that the political avant-garde challenges or critiques technoculture through the videogame form