FEATURED ARTISTS

THE AIR ON EITHER SIDE OF THE GLASS

Dr. Merlin Seller

What does it mean to paint a virtual landscape en plein air, “in the open air”? What is this ‘air’, and on which side of the glass? We tend to think of computer games as a series of interiors – arcades and living rooms; computer towers and black-box consoles; chunky cartridges and whirring drives; smokey internet cafes and fresh, digital server lobbies; violent sandboxes and virtual amphitheaters. Over the past two decades, however, games have grown, on both sides of the glass, to encompass sprawling virtual worlds which measure themselves in tens of kilometres squared, and markets which measure themselves in hundreds of billions of dollars. Teams of hundreds produce worlds that dwarf the imaginations of individuals, and in aggregate produce an industry which dwarfs film and music combined. Rather than dark confines, games provide scintillating continents and climates for the prospective artist, from Far Cry’s Montana Forests to Fallout’s post-apocalyptic Boston.

Games are both less and more than they seem. In the words of Jazz pianist and academic David Sudnow, they are glass ‘microworlds’ which we dance at and poke behind with buttons and wires (1983),  and they are also vast cabinets of curiosities - in the German ‘wonderkammer’ (‘chamber of wonders’) – virtual fantasies where even the sky poses no limit. Red dead Redemption 2, a game inspired by the mountainous horizons of Ansel Adams, offers a landscape of eighty square kilometres. No Man’s Sky offers a galaxy of eighty quadrillion stars. It is perhaps unsurprising, in light of these dimensions, that the attentive eyes and hands of landscape painters might be drawn to these bold new territories – but how should we account for these paintings as en plein air practice? What is the material and conceptual ‘open air’ in which such artists work?

To paint a rendered simulation from the other side of the glass, the artist has to dance and dream with the computer. Game Studies scholar Brendan Keogh describes games as a combination of real and virtual space - the material, tactile and visual play of bodies distributed behind and in front of the glass (2018) – and it is this active confabulation which our work gives expression to. Like primed canvas and stretched watercolour paper, screens are “places towards which the appreciative fingers, hand, and arm are aimed” (Sudnow, 1978), and working between palette and controller our group enact the physicality of both painting and gaming. Clifford Miller is interested in attending to “movement” and “life” of the landscape, and Connor Kenney frames his engagement with games as “moving/playing,” a dynamic becoming-with the game world. For all of us, our work is in part a continuation of our physical en plein air practice by other means. It involves exploration both similar to, and distinct from, finding a real world vantage to paint from, as well as walking and working against the grain of game logic and it’s pre-determined paths. Miller speaks of his practice in bodily terms as the embrace of “challenge,” “wandering” through the randomised wildernesses of Minecraft and No Man’s Sky, “suffering” through the vicissitudes of in-game death and impermanence. In a sense, an en game air painter is a digital and physical Flaneur poking at the margins of both real and virtual worlds.

We might situate these paintings in relation to Matisse and Bonnard’s window paintings, where the picture plane addresses the glass border between interior and exterior, or place them in correspondence with the earlier work of Nineteenth Century Impressionist flaneurs captivated by the new glass technologies of the original Parisian ‘arcades.’ Alternatively we might look to appropriation strategies used by Pop Artists remediating photography and comics through paint, such as Lichtenstein who produced a series of landscapes cropped from the background of comic book panels. 

In focusing the viewer’s interest on the periphery of a medium, the backdrop and the frame, Lichtenstein was an inspiration for my own work as an artist, and I remain interested in the margins of games in my research and practice – spaces we dwell in and contemplate but which were intended and designed to be passed through and passed over. Increasingly, however game spaces are being repurposed and lived in by whole communities, what the critic Matt Lees (2017) both positively and negatively describes as the unintentional housing projects appropriated by a precarious generation, and what the academic Henry Jenkins sees as the virtual replacement of public space and ‘the outdoors’ for an increasingly urban and privatised society (1998). Perhaps what our present historical moment calls for is a way of pausing and reflecting on virtual landscapes as dwelt places, as meaningfully and elaborately designed spaces in which we wander. And what is aesthetics if not the emotional practice of openness and attentiveness to our environment?

Aesthetically and stylistically, the Expressionist and Neo-Romantic work of early twentieth century artists – from the Group of Seven to the Scottish Colourists, and from Franklin Carmichael to Paul Nash – forms a common visual language for our collected works. The rich history of affective response to ‘place’ provides an opening for a contemplative response to our present, distributed postmodern subjectivity. Regardless of a place’s artifice, however, we might agree with Carmichael that: “A landscape clean and crisp in form and colour, rich in inspiration is all that an artist could wish for, begging to be used, and full of inherent possibilities...” Miller has spoken in this vein of his appreciation of Bob Ross, and we might point to Ross as the original ambassador of painting across the screen, as well as an early, visible practitioner of self-care and mindfulness who is currently experiencing a revival of interest through internet streaming. As an advocate of a calm aesthetic engagement with the landscape as artifice, slowing down to appreciate the incidental, there is an affective affinity here with our work.

The experience of standing still in a game landscape foregrounds both its beauty and its uncanny atmospherics. Our group shares a keen awareness of the different speeds and rhythms of game time with its artificially rapid cycling of weather and daylight. Kenney is motivated by an emotive response to the fleeting visual experience of ‘live’ gameplay – so much so that he experiments with modifications which slow down games to the rate of the real world – while for Miller the sound of the environment is equally important for grounding himself amid the swift cycles of virtual day and night. For my part, painting within these constraints is as much a playful activity as rule-governed gameplay itself. Like Kenney, I am interested in “magic moments” of spectacle to be found in games, and there is something disarmingly powerful in the act of slowing down – seeing a virtual world from an oblique angle. This potential within games – to be framed and experienced on different registers and in different contexts - is what the games scholar Darshana Jayemanne (2017) calls the ‘performative multiplicity’ of games, but which might be more evocatively described in the words of the Surrealist landscape painter Paul Nash (1949): “There are places, just as there are people and objects and works of art, whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment...”

As an exhibition, our collected works embody in paint the play of bodies across worlds. What is the ‘open air’ we breathe? En Game Air is a dynamic atmosphere which stretches across the digital and physical and combines the real and the virtual in the present moment. This is the air on either side of the glass.

Bibliography

Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H., 1998. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: gender and computer games, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Griffero, T., 2014. Atmospheres: Aesthetics of emotional spaces, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Hunkin, H., 1979. The Group of Seven : Canada's great landscape painters, Edinburgh: P. Harris.
Jayemanne, D., 2017. Performativity in Art, Literature, and Videogames, Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Keogh, B. 2018. A Play of Bodies: How we Perceive Videogames, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Peters Corbett, D. et al., 2002. The Geographies of Englishness : landscape and the national past, 1880-1940, London: Yale University Press.
Sudnow, D. 1983. Pilgrim in the Microworld, New York: Warner Books.

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