Caitlin Pupich

Throughout the history of technology, new forms have led to many advancements. These include improvements in practices such as science, engineering, mathematics, architecture, and even art. Beyond the classic ideas of painting and drawing, new technology provides immense opportunity for artists. Stretching artwork into these advancements, especially the growth in digital abilities, provides a new type of communication between the artist and their viewers. On a large scale, people of art today realize a new type of potential in the ability for viewers to change and interact with their digital artwork.

Katherine Isbister works in the subtle and precise art of gaming research and creating content that connects socially to the audience. Throughout her work, her experience with the social sciences plays a huge role in the choices she makes in her design career. Essentially, she looks to human behavior and how humans work to determine what projects she will conduct within her designs and research. While she has worked in many games and continues by teaching gaming, digital media, and computer science and engineering at various colleges around the country, this essay will look at one of her artistic projects presented early on in gaming development: The SimGallery.

When the Sims game franchise was just beginning to take flight, the Sims Online was a large part of this community. Isbister was tasked with trying to bridge the gap between the virtual reality of the game and this reality. Furthermore, she wanted to make a link between the online gaming culture and the art culture. Often, the manipulation of images on a computer is considered far from art. Just as photography was once said to be “cheating” for a painter’s hand, using computers to work as the replacement for an artist’s hand was rarely associated with artistic skill. Because of this, the bridge between art and gaming early in the development of games was a vital element for both fields. While searching for a way to build this bridge, Isbister found an interactive solution to integrate these separate elements into one. Titled the SimGallery, she and her associates took the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is physically located in San Francisco, and made an interactive replica of the center in the Sims Online. This creates a world that can be visited both in the game and in real life. Furthermore, if you visit the physical location in San Francisco, there are stations that allow you to interact with the game. In this way, Isbister could create a direct link between the online gaming culture, the art culture, and the general public who may have stumbled upon either.

Image from the interactive art gallery from SimGallery from http://www.simgallery.net/sp.html

Influencing her decision in this work is her understanding of the creative processes involved in game creation. Realizing that there was already a large group of artists working in the creation of games, she tapped into their skills and collaborated with them to make this extensive reconstruction of the gallery. This pushed the perceived connection of artists and game designers to a new level. Furthermore, for those playing the game, they were now faced with the ability to experience the art culture of the arts center in their own realm of gaming. For those interested in art that were visiting the physical location of the gallery, they were also able to interact with this new online world that directly collided with their own. Essentially, the goal of Isbister’s art was to demonstrate the connective potential of games to through many mediums.

While Isbister looked to combine the advancing world of gaming and art, Rachel Rossin is utilizing the emerging software of virtual reality, or VR, to create her art. Now that companies have already worked to create a wide possibility for access to VR, ranging from the more accessible phone VR to Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, adopting this creative outlet as a medium for art only seems natural.

In her work “Man Mask”, Rossin integrates video games, VR, and art. Created from the landscapes of the game Call of Duty: Black Ops, she morphs the images into a meditative, interactive world for the viewers. She removes the violence of this first-person shooter game by making only shadows of the soldiers and putting a woman's voice that recites mantras that promote themes, such as peace and happiness, that may contradict the game itself. Her work is presented in a VR landscape that allows the viewer to move through the images freely by directing their gaze and moving their head. It is part of the “First Look” project, which provides VR art access to the public through a phone application. In this project, Rossin’s work was displayed with other artists who are pushing their creations towards the interactivity of VR. In this way, this application is making the merging of art and VR something that is widely available to the public.

A still shot from Rachel Rossin’s “Man Mask” from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/arts/design/virtual-reality-has-arrived-in-the-art-world-now-what.html.

Like many forms of art that emerged with new technology, such as photography, game art, and internet art, VR is a medium that holds the potential to become a huge element in art and digital media. For both Isbister and Rossin, one of the goals of their work is to bring together the idea of art and their new medium, which has not yet been associated with artistic talent. While video games are more largely considered an art form today because of efforts like Isbister’s, Rossin is working for the same goal in virtual reality. Although VR is being most widely used for gaming and art associated with this, the discovery of this new form of technology allows for large amounts of possibilities. Integrating interactive and immersive art into the early range of this technology’s popular functions will allow VR to become a large part of the art community as VR develops. In many ways, this strengthens the immersive goals that Isbister had between technology and art in her SimGallery.

This video, which promotes Samsung and Viceland's pairing to support VR,
explores the potentials of this new medium for entertainment

Nevertheless, these two artists went about their work with different ideas in mind. Isbister integrated real art to directly connect the user’s reality with this online reality. This, which is also the goal of her other projects and studies, is meant to create a strong and more positive emotional connection between the users and the game. In contrast, Rossin is working to make Virtual Reality a valid and important medium for art in modern society.

Even further, in her art Rossin is offering a commentary on games themselves. By creating a meditative journey with the landscape of the notoriously violent Call of Duty, she is emphasizing what games are most often used for today. Although the mantras and the firing guns of the game are drastically different, people often look to these contrasting practices for similar reasons of relieving stress and calming the mind. Due to factors such as these, gaming has become a large part of modern culture. Furthermore, by emphasizing the beauty in the landscapes for Call of Duty, Rossin is also reinforcing the artistic knowledge and skill that goes into the making of games.

Overall, both artists display the struggle for art to keep up with rapid innovation of technology that the world faces today. Even further, they are expanding the boundaries of human experience with art by digitizing their work. This allows the powerful dimension of interaction to be added to their art. Through the clear difference in the technological capabilities between Isbister’s and Rossin’s projects, it evident that human’s technological power is growing rapidly. Nevertheless, above all their work illustrates the fact that art is becoming a vital element of and commentary on this growth.

References

"About." Katherine Interface. 2016. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://www.katherineinterface.com/.

"Beyond the Frame: Storytelling in Virtual Reality." YouTube. March 28, 2016. Accessed May 12, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL5A1wYvhgw.

Farago, Jason. "Virtual Reality Has Arrived in the Art World. Now What?" The New York Times. February 03, 2017. Accessed May 11, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/arts/design/virtual-reality-has-arrived-in-the-art-world-now-what.html.

Gottschalk, Molly. "New App Finally Makes Virtual Reality Artworks Accessible to the Public ." Artsy. January 17, 2017. Accessed May 11, 2017. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-new-app-finally-virtual-reality-artworks-accessible-public.

Jansson, Mathias. "Interview: Katherine Isbister and the Art of The Sims." Gamescenes. July 1, 2011. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://www.gamescenes.org/2010/12/interview-katherine-ibister-.html.

Martin, Brett. “Should Bideogames Be Viewed as Art?” In. Videogames and Art 2007, edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2007.

"Projects: The SimGallery Project." SIMworks. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://www.simgallery.net/sp.html.

Caitlin Pupich

Artist Talk Paper

ART 245

Sean Caulfield

Living in Alberta, where the economy was largely driven by oil, the first works he showed us emphasized the environment he lived in. He would simply walk in the rural areas and then draw what he saw from memory. He varied his work later by studying early science in alchemy and combining them with the world today. His work, which comes in many forms such as silkscreens, woodcuts, and linocuts, reflect his mixture of the landscapes and science through linear structures connected by fantastical abstract formations.

Later, his art took a different direction when he collaborated with a poet and created a book in which they would simultaneously make drawings and poetry to match on the same concepts of industrialization and the environment. This led to another collaboration with his brother who worked in bioethics. Caulfield talked directly to stem cell researchers and began to realize that one of their greatest problems was the misinterpretation of their research in the media. Often, the media portrays this work in the most extreme senses of good and bad. Therefore, his final work, which was created with silkscreen and drawing, ended up using whimsical abstract shapes combined with a dark and brooding background and composition. This was meant to capture both the benefits and dangers and biotechnology. He continues to work on project collaborations that look at similar themes such as how science and technology can change society’s perceptions of the human body, and looking at how vaccines affect our world today. He also continues projects that look at the combination of the environment with modern society.

Overall, each of his works captures a whimsical yet threatening emotion that identifies the many odd combinations he encounters. These most often include his common ideas of ethics of science as well as the industrialization of the environment.