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Video games, training hypermedia, and military simulators are often
invoked as the ancestors of interactive art, and are the reference points
for many people's first experiences of these works. These military and
commercial forms are very important in und erstanding the culture in which
these artworks have come into existence, as they are clearly an expression
of its imaginary, too; and the availability of these technologies to
artists, in time, is highly significant. But they are, for me, a
reference onl y in deciphering the larger language of the culture drift.
Within a practice of making art, which is what these works intend to be,
the commercial and military forms should not be mistaken as the only, or
the primary, contextual landmarks.
But it is not simply a matter of taking a neo-Modernist stance by saying
"art is about art", or as Ad Reinhardt said, "Art is art and everything
else is everything else". Our media culture has become too complex for
that, economics can only see the roman tic as the x-ray of his skeleton.
In a rush to derive relevance from connecting to more widespread cultural
forms of the imaginary, like entertainment, there is nothing to be gained
by reflexively taking an equally stale and ahistorical anti-art position
and declaring the means by which other artists have approached similar
questions to be irrelevant. The accelerating fragmentation of everyday
life, with media itself as the propellant, makes focus difficult. So,
once in a while, I think it is interesti ng to draw a line connecting some
of these dots, and regard the picture that emerges, rather than discussing
the endless number of possible ways the dots might be connected, or which
dots are to be connected, or if there ever were any dots... So the pictu
re I will trace out is not a linear historical timeline, not a
cause-and-effect chain, but a moving spotlight which illuminates some of
my own points of reference.
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