ArtFutura tries to anticipate the future of art associated to the new technologies. From January 1990, the annual shows of ART FUTURA in Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville, have counted with the participation of artists and thinkers like William Gibson, Chris Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Moebius, Digital Domain, David Byrne, Chico MacMurtrie, Brian Eno, Javier Mariscal, Karl Sims, La Fura dels Baus, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Orlan, Laura Kikauka, IL&M, Stelarc, SRL, Arthur Kroker, Timothy Leary, Max More, and many others. Through virtual reality and artificial life, from robotics to virtual communities, a new shape of art is emerging. (http://www.artfutura.org/)

"Distributed Intelligence and Games Online" was the title of ArtFutura 2001 (October 25-28). Recent shows have been "The Internet Cyborg" (2000), "Virtual Leisure" (1999), "Second Skin" (1998), and the ambitiously titled "Future of the Future" in 1997. ArtFutura 2001 had all the elements of an important and timely reflection on video gaming; it was even sponsored by PlayStation. We are now nearly 30 years since Ralph Baer's famous "Pong" and nearly 25 years since Taito's classic "Space Invaders." Now with the ZX81s, Ataris, and Spectrums firmly in the bottom drawer of the '80s techies, we are faced with the online, interactive, real-time, all-singing, all-dancing, virtual reality games of "Tomb Raider," "Half-Life," "Final Fantasy" and so on. But let us not forget the hard-core gamers who continue to pioneer human creativity through their text-only MUD virtual worlds, subtly casting a disapproving eye upon the primitive game-players who need graphics to make things real. Their presence in exhibitions of future art is noticeable by its absence, in part because it is not visual, though herein lies the terrible limitation of visual art.

Undoubtedly, ArtFutura had some key supporters and some innovative artists contributing to its collections. However, sitting through its 12-year retrospective, I could not help feeling that I was not seeing anything new. The technologies have evolved, but the concepts have not. It is claimed on the ArtFutura site that its retrospective "pretends to pay tribute to the work of creators that, despite not being very known by the non-specialised audience, have influenced heavily on the development of aesthetics in the last decade."

Yet, there is no greater engagement than this with the realisation and understanding of video gaming's social significance, nor a contextualising of these lesser known artists with a broader outline of digital art. It is alluded to in some of their publicity literature, where they claim that, "Video games have not only become the most powerful entertainment industry. Their undeniable impact on the contemporary culture and their capacity to generate paradigms that later on are reproduced and recycled by other digital creation areas have consolidated this form of expression with a thirty-year history as a legitimate artistic medium in the commercial space."

Indeed, the video game section curator and ArtFutura veteran Javier Candeira aspired to reflect the state of the art. But whose version of art, except for his own, is shown in ArtFutura's video game section? Isn't the indelible consequence of digital art that it has no origin, no location, no essential and unique incarnation? We didn't need to go to the exhibition to see this art. Most of it is online in some form, allowing those who have missed it to create their own collection and be their own creator. Alternatively, for anyone who is interested in video games, they will have played most of those exhibited in ArtFutura, which posed more as a nostalgic video game arcade than a gallery collection.

Something more has to be said from the way in which a digital art collection is structured than is the case for a conventional art exhibition. Curator must become Creator. This final irony of the awkwardly situated machines is personified by the arrival of Stelarc-like Catalan performance artist Marcel-lí Antúnez, who promptly arrived for his presentation with a weighty desktop CPU tower under his arm. All he needed to have done was to tell us the address of his Web site or simply know his name so I could find it myself.

The only engagement with some of the significant cyber-theorists was found in the ArtFutura 12-year retrospective show, which touched on the ideas with interviews from the likes of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Kevin Kelly, Laurie Anderson, Eduardo Kac, and William Gibson. If only one of them had been present in the ArtFutura 2001 exhibition, then one might have found a little sympathy for their aspirations.

Was there nobody here who realised the social and philosophical significance of computer games? Nobody who wanted to take on attempting to engage with the cultural meanings of these technologies? Or was the collection a consequence of this realisation? Did Jamie Doombos, lead programmer of The Sims, not want to comment about how important Sim City and its derivatives had been in making video game history for video game players? The sales statistics alone, despite being impressive, do not give us any basis for knowing what made these games so special. Did he not see the final irony of people dislocating themselves from the monotony of real life to go spend it in some virtual, equally monotonous life? Perhaps film innovator 'Tomato' was being thoroughly insightful to use selections from Wittgenstein's Tractatus as one of its successful promotions. "7.0 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" and "4.1212 What can be shown, cannot be said" might have been the themes of an ArtFutura exhibition that intends to not burden its viewers with an interpreted discourse on its art. Though this is so very disappointing. As much as one dearly loves Wittgenstein's adherence to logic, there is more that can be discussed about video gaming.

One of the more interesting sections exhibited an integration of classic games from past years with marginally engaging discourses. For example, the 1978 Taito game Space Invaders was augmented by British artists www.thomson-craighead.net into a work titled "Trigger Happy." This adapted shoot-em-up entailed the player gunning down philosophical prose rather than little aliens and paragraphs such as, "the coming into being of the notion of 'author' constitutes the privileged moment of individuation with the hint of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today when we reconstruct the history of a concept, such categories seem relatively weak."

This was one of the stronger possibilities that might have gotten the art critic a little excited, but it did not really hit the mark. The prose was carefully chosen, though its allusion to Roland Barthes' death of the author theme seemed lost among other bland video games, most of which are too uninteresting to mention. The art was lost in a backdrop of games. It was only possible to gain an in-depth insight into "Trigger Happy" by closing down the game and exploring the unprotected files on the PC, which happened to include detailed explanations that had only been summarised in brief in its explanation on the wall. This information was not supposed to be found.

The exhibition did well to assert that game-players do have depth, history, tradition, nostalgic experiences and events, and that they have a strong community. As well, it put out messages on the incompleteness of the term 'gaming,' which is so unfortunately juxtaposed by the non-gamer with an alleged serious life. As its curator wrote, Laura Croft, the Tomb Raider heroine is, "a polygonal heroine who poses with different costumes in a fashion magazine, has her own chocolate bar, joins U2 in a world tour, stars in the book of a famed cult author (Douglas Coupland) and ends up being portrayed in the big scene by the Oscar-winning erotic myth Angelina Jolie."

Video games are increasingly creeping into real life, whereupon the distinction between them is rendered unintelligible. However, for a convention about the future of art, the art was far too sparse and the future was all too past or present. This new age is persuasive because it is confrontational, spectacular and creative, not because it is art. In the end, this is not a critique of ArtFutura, but of video games masquerading as art and on the art world's indulgence of this illusion. Art is not enough. I am tired of hearing the word real-time. I want something more than interactivity.

Copyright © 2002 Andy Miah. All Rights Reserved.