Videogames and Art by Grethe Mitchell

Author:Grethe Mitchell [Clarke, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78320-131-0
Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Violencia Series (2006–2007)

So I wake up on a Saturday morning to hear heavy machine-gun fire from somewhere nearby. The stills camera decides to give up the ghost, so borrowing a video camera, I set out to find the army has taken over part of Stockholm: tanks, troops, APCs, playing cat and mouse amidst the Saturday afternoon pedestrians, the civilian cars and buses. (Bichard)

Art of Game: Art of War – parts 1–3/part 4b + part 4c (2006–2007)

In between Evidência #002 (The White Room) and Evidência #0003 (Inverse Forensics), I started work on the Violencia series. Whereas Evidência explored the metaphors and tropes of videogames, and the aesthetics, ethics and power relationships common in violent games, Violencia was a conceptual framework set up to explore the nature of fictionalised violence in contemporary culture, our need to consume fictionalised violence, and our relationship to institutionalised violence.

Art of Game: Art of War consists of two video works in five parts, using music by artist Edwin Morris. I took the footage in Stockholm in Spring 2006 during a two-day “war game” exercise by the Swedish army in the heart of the city, role-playing the part of a war zone cameraman. The first work (parts 1–3) is a full-format colour video work and has a documentary feel; the second (parts 4b and 4c) is a more ambiguous piece, having been shot on a mobile phone which gives it a more painterly and expressionistic feel – a feeling enhanced by presenting it in both black-and-white and colour versions on either side of a panel.

The two video works explore how representations of violence are constructed through contemporary entertainment and media and how we interpret them from our safe consumerist perspective. They blur the convergent discourses that inform them – the war movie, the war zone documentary, the news clip – overlaying them with questions of authenticity and complicity (particularly when the gaze of an outsider provokes performance and curiosity in those who play at war).

The scenes become very ambiguous. The footage could have come from Warsaw in 1940, the Middle East in the 70s, Bosnia in the 90s – it becomes very hard to place and I like that slippage. Whilst both works are fragmentary narratives, playing with documentary, media and cinematographic tropes, parts 4b and 4c are perhaps a more poignant reminder that whilst a 40 million krona war game was going on in my safe, middle-class neighbourhood, not so far away in the world people were waking up to real gunfire on that Saturday morning.

The experience of making the films was like being in a war correspondent simulation game: a meta-game to the Swedish army’s anti-terrorist war game on the streets of Stockholm – a game of “capture the flag” on a much grander and deadlier level.

As “real” conflict zones become more restrictive, press access more heavily orchestrated, I constructed an intrusive, voyeuristic commentary on the banality of warfare, the fine line that separated authoritarian control from abuse of power and the ease with which society is incorporated into the mechanisms of institutional violence.

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