#overdemonstrative

[rwf99]

Typing into my phone

They had me doing mazes today. Blocks colored autistic blue on a white field, she touches out a sequence and I touch it back, becomes difficult in the 6 or 7 block range. Forwards and backwards. Name every animal you can think of. This class tension , or I can feel in me the working class reflex to overdemonstrate amateur knowledge set , cartwheels for students of uchicago neuro lab.

Bearded dragon , seal, horseshoe crab , seahorse, deer, dog, cat, rabbit, hare, sea lion, owl, octopus, anglerfish, mantis, blue whale, killer whale, capybara, hamster, chipmunk, squirrel, beaver, ant, lion

One of them is wearing faded velvet shoes she’s had since middle school, “when am I going to get a new wardrobe”. She loves violent slasher movies that sublimate the Iraq war — Final Destination(s), Saw(s).

Thought of Morgan when presented with mazes. Marg too —- Minotaur.

[the-march-hair]

Enj and Courf.

It was pointed out to me that my Enj never “smiles” in a massive grinny overdemonstrative way, but I think he’s the kinda dude who is quitely happy and loudly angry. Partly why R thinks he hates him, Enj just isn’t a loudly happy human. Small careful smiles that make you melt, that’s his real smile.

Courf however... the more teeth in the smile the better.

[myfriendpokey]

content world

a fairly frequent if not in fact the ur-example of the "weird videogame" is what we could call the content delivery mechanism: a game using inherited, unadjusted and unproblematised stock fragments of gameplay (familiar systems like the mario games or being able to fire pellets) but which effectively reskins them to contain new and less generic resources - strange paintings or collage, musical experiments, found text. the art is the content, the game structure is the delivery mechanism, and there's consequently also some embarrassment around the way videogames so immediately unique can also be so conservative in this respect, in exactly the ways that they'd be expected to "use the medium" - an embarrassment which has tended to be warded off either through dismissal ("who cares, consider the total effect") or halfhearted moral critique ("it's... it's parody..."). and which is also expressed through the obvious challenge: why make it a game when those game elements are the most seemingly vestigial, why not choose a different and perhaps more suitable delivery mechanism? "more suitable", particularly, in the sense that the awkward manipulations that a videogame requires so often seem unsuited to the way visual art is read or music is listened to.

since i've worked on games like this i don't particularly want to defensively argue these ideas away - rather comparing them to own experiences i think suggests a basic difference in readings which could lead to less stark models than the form'n'contentbee divide. for me less interesting than the question of whether space funeral, say, "should be" a game is my own sense of deep aversion at the idea of it being anything else, and the strong sense of how totally insufferable those other forms would be: like a bad, embarrassingly overdemonstrative deviantart page in the early 00s style, or depending on your opinion of the game even more so than it is already, since the basic elements are not really too far off from a goofy old sprite comic (non sequitors, mspaint blood, etc). but if it doesn't tend to be read in that way i believe it's because all those signifiers become somehow less significant when implemented as part of a system, particularly a known, generic type system. they stop producing meaning in themselves; what were previously their most immediate elements become something like optional second attributes of the structural place they come to occupy in that system, and become fresh again through the contingency of this double meaning. this isn't meant to add some retroactive layer of meaningfulness to that game, but i think it explains why it "works" a little better than its component parts would suggest, and this possibly also hints at just why the content delivery model has continued to hang around as such a persistent (and frequently very effective) tool. the role of the game here is not just to passively reproduce content: it's more specifically to absorb and diminish the meaning of that content by displacing it into the black box of some underlying system. the overdetermination of art, the way each quality can so easily be mapped back to its place in the social system (mspaint->deviantart->mall goths or whatever), is dissipated to some measure as those qualities are assigned secondary roles in a new and more explicit one. and this interchangeable quality, the fact that one picture can be replaced by any other one without changing the structure in which it nestles, itself opens up a different kind of realm of experience - that of the product, infinitely reproducable and replaceable to the extent that its exact features and specificity become slightly blurred and uncertain, which trails associated levels of meaning (the mysterious mythologies of those cartoon animals on the cereal boxes) that can only, somewhat haplessly, drift in and out of view within this network of relations.to make this connection isn't necessarily to claim an explicit or even unconscious political or economic dimension to such works so much as it is to imply that this strange twilight world, of reproducing commodities which seem to drift out of the focus of any particular usage or attribute, is entwined within currently lived experience to the extent that even the most termitelike art practitioners will draw upon it in the effort to pull up and develop upon intriguing and non-ossified new experiences. consider the cavernous train stations of yume nikki, the buried fast food franchises of crypt worlds, the chattering and eerily self-contained looping animations of soft & cuddly playing out by themselves inside a vacuum, the administrative zones in jake clover games... the list could go on and i suspect i'm only picking the most obvious examples, but less telling than the distorted reflections of contemporary spaces here are the nature of those spaces, both familiar and alien - we live and move through them, but they're not "home", even if we know them better than places we call our homes. they're cold spaces, and a certain level of coldness seems to me a common factor in this type of videogame: no matter how individual and creative the art, music, worldview, etc, it comes to us through the void of the computer screen forever waiting for input. less interactivity as any form of self expression or actualisation than a kind of second-order utilisation of the conditions for that interactivity - the waiting screen, the mediation through controls and through the history of this consumer form - as a means of capturing, for a variety of spaces and experinces, something of the half-light quality of contemporary perception. the coldness that haunts game development, that emptiness that seems to absorb human energy without giving anything in return, shifts from the perpetual bane of computer games to their secret motor: no longer something to be pushed away through increasingly elaborate forms of player feedback it becomes the medium through which the imagination functions. the critique of such games as hamstrung by their own formal clumsiness into wasting their own potential - what beautiful paintings these could be if only they hadn't been fed into a platform game - now becomes instead an analysis of the way that this very wasted potential, this absence of warmth and this leeching of aura, becomes a condition of the new ways in which they're to be read.

obviously this is a line of thought which can be extended indefinitely and without discrimination, was that mysteriously purposeless mall from vice city really just a cry for help etc (ans: probably), and we can be wary of "justifying" such a breadth of different experiences and methods in this self-exculpatory way. but it does seem to me to bring these games a little closer to us in capturing a certain recurring note and mood, and to allow us to think about them as things other than inexplicably functional chimeras which dog behind the true syntheses of videogame history - to re-cast (or just to re-claim) them as part of an alternative tradition, where rather than the constant struggle in game development to give game systems the same warmth and significance of their content (the old question of how to make a dating sim that doesn't become an affection gauge manager) we have something closer to the inverse - one which would seek to inscribe various forms of thought and of content with the ambivalence and ambiguous character of the personal computer, of the train station, of our lives.

[j216]

overdemonstrative nonsolicitously by Jared Haer Tempests Unresistedness Study #color #picoftheday #trippy #love #design #paint #photooftheday #me

[get-that-face]

Day 14: The Joneses Have Amateur Theatricals

(filmed 19-20 December, 1908, in NY studio; released 18 February, 1909)              

I’ve had a hard time keeping up with “The Joneses” for this project--Griffith directed a number of short films featuring this dopey, middle-aged married couple after the first proved unexpectedly popular, but very few of them appear to be posted online anywhere for easy viewing. (”Mr. Jones at the Ball” and “Mrs. Jones Entertains” are two earlier shorts that I couldn’t find.) Fortunately, on the basis of this particular film, I don’t seem to be missing out on a whole lot. The essential plot is that the Joneses invite an amateur theatrical company to their house, but both husband and wife are overrun by a violent jealousy when they see each other acting out obviously fake romantic scenes with someone else. (Mr. Jones also manages to get some heavy drinking in with most of the male actors when he has a chance.)

Perhaps the most notable thing about the film is the difficulty it has in portraying “bad” acting, at a time when most acting appears (to 21st century eyes) to be very hammy and overdemonstrative. Take away the benefit of sound, and you’re basically left trying to depict people obviously reading their scripts, and moving slightly awkwardly into their dramatic postures.