Post-genesem: Alien Flora

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It’s common practice in games to write up a “post-mortem” of a project after it has been completed. Here the launch of a game is treated as the death of the development project; the social life of the game as it is circulated in the wider world and played by people unknown to the developer is figured as a kind of after-life.

An alternative to the “post-mortem” was proposed by, I think, Anna Anthropy, who began to use the term “post-partum” instead; the release of a game is a birthing, its development a kind of pregnancy, the software beta a fetus whose basic characteristics are identifiable but whose body is still preparing for extrauterine life, under the care of its developer. It is a feminist intervention into games discourse that positions the developer as a caregiver and the game as a living being with an independent agency of its own after the developer lets it out into the world.

I’m calling this little writing exercise a post-genesem largely because I want to make a plant-related pun for a plant-related project. But I also want to explore the idea of writing an analysis of a process that has barely just begun. Plants are not given birth to, but plants and animals share in common a period of embryogenesis, during which cells divide and separate organs form. In humans embryogenesis, if successful, leads to the fetal stage, which eventually leads to birth, whereas in plants it leads to a period of dormancy that may or may not lead to further development. Development of the plant resumes if the seed finds itself in the right conditions to germinate. This might never happen; for example, some being could come along and consume the seed as it is, and get plenty of joy and nutrition from it in this embryonic form. In writing a post-genesem analysis, I hope to claim not to have finished something, but to have finished the seed of something that could keep growing, given the right conditions.

[caption id=“attachment_1983” align=“aligncenter” width=“727”] Image from Earthtongue, Eric Hornby: provided by artist[/caption]

Opportunity

1. A job opportunity at a major museum appeared and then swiftly evaporated in Autumn of 2015. The experience left me angry, frustrated and filled with self-doubt, but on the positive side, it reconnected me with my desire to curate and exhibit games. My habit is that when someone in authority blocks my path to doing something the legitimate way, I become determined to find a DIY path to some version of the same goal, rather than waiting for institutional approval that might never arrive (I suppose my lack of trust in authority might itself be a reason why I am forever freelancing, but that's a discussion for another day). So one thing I took away from the rather diminishing experience of being rejected for a job for which I seemed to be the perfect fit was the conviction that I would put together some sort of games exhibition in 2016.
2. Early in 2016 I joined a National Portfolio Organisation based in my hometown of Rotherham called ROAR, as part of my effort to get outside of the games sphere and instead to do games and digital work in the wider arts sphere. In April they sent an email round to members offering the short-term use of a gallery space as a studio, free of charge. Gallery space is often hard to come by at low cost, so I immediately snapped up this opportunity to try out exhibiting games in a non-games-related art space.

Means

1. The most obvious option -- as I understand it, the route normally taken by games festivals and the like -- would be to acquire a set of brand-new, fully-functional computers.  They might buy them, or receive them as an in-kind donation from a sponsor. This was out of the question for me, because I wasn't receiving outside funding for the project and was not expecting it to generate much income in the short term.
2. The next possibility was borrowing computers from people. This is what we did at Critical Proximity in order to be able to display the presentations. I had a couple of people come forward, but the computers weren't quite suitable, and my experience at Critical Proximity was that getting unfamiliar computers that belong to somebody else to play ball with your project can be quite challenging.
3. Another option was renting the computers for a week. I found a few rental companies that advertised weekly rates, but none of them filled me with much confidence in the way they presented their services, and many of them seemed to have a minimum loan term of much longer than a week or were actually a hire purchase scheme rather than a straightforward short-term equipment loan. The whole thing confused me enough that it put me off the idea.
4. The option I went with in the end was buying second-hand computers. This was a chaotic and time-consuming way to handle things, but it ended up being a bit of an art project in itself. The process put me in conversation with local community in surprising ways that constantly had me thinking about how people relate to technology and how technology pushes back. I ended up feeling like a carer for the computers I had bought, feeling responsible for them in a way I wouldn't have if they were loaned or bought brand new.

In total, between the second-hand computers and some cheap peripherals from Amazon (keyboards, mouses and an audio mixer) I spent just under 400 GBP on equipment. Since the show ended I’ve spent about another 50 GBP on some extra components for the little fleet of recycled call centre computers, which need upgrading in order to be fully effective display machines, and I am sure there will be more money to spend on this in the future. However, the advantage of using old computers is that their compatible components are now considered low value, so they are easy to get hold of cheaply.

I budgeted about 210 GBP total for fees to the artists whose games I was exhibiting; this is very low, but is in-line with the Paying Artists Initiative guidelines for a project that does not make any money and runs for two months, or a project that makes a middling amount of money and runs for three days. Even if I wasn’t able with this project to meaningfully contribute to the sustainability of someone’s artistic practice, it still seems important to establish the principle that I will not build up any sort of curatorial practice without paying creators.

Half of the artists offered to waive their fees as an in-kind donation, and one person donated 5 GBP through the Eventbrite page, giving me about 110 GBP in donations total. This brought the personal cost of the exhibition (not including my own work hours) down to 465 GBP.

[caption id=“attachment_1973” align=“alignnone” width=“1180”] Image from Orchids to Dusk, Pol Clarissou: screenshot taken by author[/caption]

Motivation

When thinking about the kind of games I wanted to focus on for this show, I was torn between exhibiting some of the esoteric digital art tools that I have enjoyed thinking about (e.g. Icosa and Super Sculptor) and exhibiting games about plants and fungi. I decided to go with the latter for two reasons:

1. My PhD research has brought me to thinking about the relationships between humans and nonhumans, with reference to theorists such as Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway who have written about fungi, mushrooms and ecologies. Focusing on this topic was an opportunity to think through these ideas in a less abstract way.
2. Digital art tools would make a great topic for a future exhibition in the same space, when I've learned more about how to do this sort of show effectively.

Strawberry cubes - full post

Earthtongue

erichermit.itch.io

Gardenarium

ko-op.itch.io

Orchids to Dusk - full post

Prune - full post

Lieve Oma

vltmn.itch.io

[caption id=“attachment_1984” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Image from Lieve Oma, Florian Veltman: provided by artist[/caption]

Outcome

I too was in conversation with the games and the machines, as I tried to work out what was going wrong and how to fix it. Doing this in the context of an art gallery feels different to just trying to get a computer to work in daily life, as it already feels like a display object. Trying to get a game to run on a low-end machine in Ubuntu while your mind is in art interpretation mode transforms troubleshooting into a kind of analytical enquiry about the materiality of computer games. By the end of the first day I had 3D games running on the recycled call centre machines, with beautiful audio, but with no textures.

I decided to continue displaying the games in this broken form and talk to visitors to the show about it. What resulted was a constant enquiry in conversation with artists from lots of different media about the nature of videogame creation and the kinds of poetry that can result from digital media. We also talked about stereotypes about games as a medium that is dominated by violence and misogyny – not my words, but those of someone else at ROAR who said she was once curious about videogames but was put off by the culture around them. I talked with a musician about trippiness and the difference between goal-oriented play and open-ended exploration, and the grey area between the two that he was experiencing as he became entranced by Strawberry Cubes. I saw several people of older generations who feel intimidated by technology become completely engrossed by the intuitive, meditative puzzles of Prune.

I talked with an 89-year-old painter about his frustration with the game’s simulation of autonomous tree growth – to him, a game that only allows you to prune the branches is pointless, because a technology should be facilitating more agency over the growth of a tree than you would have in real life, not reproducing the relationship between a tree and a human in real life. He brought out his sketchpad of trees, showing me how he likes to create them from observation and from his own imagination, and showed me his paintings of the natural landscape as he remembers it from his pre-war childhood. In digital art and in other media, we’re always in tension between realism and fantasy.

I’ll take just one example: Orchids to Dusk runs very slowly, and the player-character’s body does not load. This fundamentally alters the nature of your experience in two key ways: firstly, the pottering, excited little movements that the game is supposed to be based around are slowed to a meditative crawl; and secondly, there is no intimacy with the body, and instead the player is experiencing the world through a silent and invisible protagonist, imagining their own body in the space occupied by a shadow on the ground on the screen. All other aspects of the game are preserved perfectly, because of the low-poly, texture-less nature of the game’s art style. I would often navigate the camera into one of the planet’s beautiful gardens and let it automatically pan around, with the gorgeous soundscape making the gallery feel warm and restful.

I ended up feeling deeply affectionate towards the ten call centre graduands. I’m hoping that installing proper graphics cards rather than relying on on-board graphics (which sounds obvious now of course) will get their performance up to scratch for future shows and allow these little old workhorses to find a new life as art machines. The advantage of displaying alt-games is that typically they will run pretty well on a low-end machine. Earthtongue and Strawberry Cubes were trouble-free once I got Wine working correctly. So I can imagine these little machines that were rescued from the reject bin like the Raggydolls having a long life ahead of them as art display devices – if I can find more opportunities to exhibit games.

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What's next?

However, when I do have things working well from a technical standpoint, I would like to have much higher footfall. The final day, when everything was working perfectly and I simply sat in the gallery and did Critical Distance work, I felt quite lonely and wished that more people would come through and take a look at the display. So I will need to look for busier spaces, perhaps – though I do rather hate to say it – in Sheffield instead of Rotherham. Of course there is something particularly meaningful about doing this sort of thing in Rotherham, and there is a particular kind of support that people give you there that you don’t get somewhere like London. In Rotherham, nobody asks “is it really art though?” Nobody gives a shit about that kind of elitist gatekeeping because they have all experienced it themselves and have often simply come to do their work outside of the gates.

Another space issue I will be considering in future is whether or not children will be part of the audience; in particular, whether under-12s will be present. I had considered under-18s and concluded that nothing I was displaying was unsuitable, but I was a little caught off-guard when I found myself trying to explain Orchids to Dusk in front of a ten-year-old. Normally the topic of age-appropriate content is triggered by sex or violence, but with Orchids to Dusk the discomfort I felt was about the topic of death. I don’t want to put a parent in the position of suddenly having to explain what happens when we die or why people would choose to give up their own lives, particularly in the context of an exhibition where that isn’t one of the main themes.

I’m excited to have come into possession of this little mechanical fleet of labourers liberated from a call centre and put into the service of art. In the end, they became the focus of the show for me, and have become an art project in their own right. My hope is that they will tour lots of different gallery spaces in the coming years, becoming ever more fabulous as time goes on.