Collage + Remix Project Module - Week 2

2.1 Introduction Games AND Collage

Starting our exploration of visual aesthetics in games with collage is a bit of a leap forward over what I would consider more "foundational" concepts in visual art and design. Things like color, shape and form might be more widely applicable starting points across a range of artworks, however, I believe that collage and games have some really interesting areas of intersection, influence, artistic intention, and inspiration.

Discussing collage first also allows us to immediately begin working with images and exploring the ideas of aesthetics and visuals that come "pre-loaded" with meaning, which is one of the key focus areas for this course. Collage and the act of re-mix is rooted in cutting and combining the meanings of different media forms in order to create something new that still retains aspects of its original meaning and form. The technical production of collage - cutting and recombining existing media - also gives us a rich library to start working with in the "making" part of this topic in this week's studio project, which I have found is really helpful when working with digital tools and/or working on a creative project for a class for the first time. There are also many similarities - both visual and more conceptually - between many games and a collage-aesthetic, which we will begin to cover in this lecture content

2.2 Early Collage - Dada Roots and World War ONE

2D Collage is a technique with subversive roots that unfortunately tend to get lost with time and the proliferation of its visual aesthetic.

Visual collage was explored heavily by the Dadaist movement in Europe in the 1920s, and continued by the Surrealist movement in the mid 1920’s. This movement grew out of the reactions to the impact of WWI, as well as the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. European artists experienced first-hand the destruction and human costs resulting from industrialized warfare. WWI was the first major war that utilized things like machine guns, tanks, airplanes and chemical weapons. It was also the first war to be photographed extensively, and these visuals were widely shared via newspapers utilizing advancements in printing technology and distribution. This newly formed mass communication technology resulted in WWI having an even more widespread and global impact, since even people who did not witness the war across the UK and Europe still felt the social and psychological impacts.

Dadaism grew out of the social "rejection" of war as a product of "civilization" + "culture”. Many of these artists took components that symbolized this type of mainstream culture and technology - such as advertisements, newspaper clippings or other mass-produced images - physically cut them up, and then re-assembled them in ways that appeared non-sensical, unreasonable and/or abstract. From this perspective, the act of collage breaks down these symbols, and turns them into new symbols to express new meanings in the viewer’s imaginations. This viewer outcome is something similar to the interior game worlds that immerse players and transport them to a different reality.

“Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today with an illogical nonsense,” - Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia

“The beginnings of Dada…were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.”

-Tristan Tzara.

Collage Works by Hannah Hoch - 1920’s

Textual Collage

Textual Collage Works by Kurt Schwitters - 1920’s

Dadaists didn’t stop at images when developing collage aesthetics. They also worked with cutting and recombining textual images, advertisements, signage, and, eventually, narrative texts. This cutting and recombining of texts to create new stories and narratives is a {one of many} direct a pre-cursor to early interactive fiction and contemporary twine games.

One of the earliest "computer poems", House of Dust, was produced by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles in 1967, a movement that was directly inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism. The algorithm that generated the original poem {which inspired several installations}, shares many qualities as the system outlined by Tristan Tarza’s Dadaist artwork, How to Make a Dadaist Poem {below}.

How to Make a Dadaist Poem - Tristan Tarza, 1920

Take a newspaper.

Take some scissors.

Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.

Shake gently.

Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

The poem will resemble you.

And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

House of Dust - Alison Knowles, 1967

Sculptural Collage and the Birth of the Readymade

Dada also worked with collaging 3D objects, primarily by recombining found objects into new sculptural assemblages. Some artists did this at a smaller-scale level, but others, like Kurt Schwitters, built assemblages into fully interactive, 3D spaces. These works - which are very hard to archive and many of which have been lost to time - share a similar aesthetic and design to many contemporary games with abstract, more geometric worlds, and the "low-poly" aesthetic, as well as many earlier games from the 1990s that utilized 3D graphics for the first time and were therefore very limited in the game world that they could construct and communicate.

Kurt Schwitters: "Out of parsimony I took whatever I found to do this…One can even shout with refuse, and this is what I did, nailing and gluing it together.”

Assemblage Sculptures by Kurt Schwitters - 1920’s

Remixing 3D objects was also adapted by Marcel Duchamp in the development of his readymade objects - objects that, when recombined, defied their intended function and produced new meanings while still retaining some of the original meanings. Duchamp is well known for many different art works like this, including the infamous “Fountain” urinal (although this sculpture’s authorship has recently been disputed). This idea of using found objects in sculpture has expanded far beyond these Dadaist roots, and is something still being explored and taken in new directions by contemporary artists.

Readymades by Marcel Duchamp

2.3 Collage and the Political, Remix as action

The Dadaist movement was followed closely by the Surrealists, another group of artists producing artworks that were in many ways also informed by the events of a war, this time WW2. While Dadaism was more anarchist in its direct deconstruction of political and social structures through images, text and sculpture, Surrealism critiqued these same elements with the complete rejection of rational thought, the idea being that perhaps if people could learn to imagine, dream and create in new ways, then these atrocities would cease to exist.

I think these early approaches to radical art making are interesting to view in context with later collage works that are also very political and/or social. What was at first implied more conceptually or as a physical technique in the cutting and reconstitution of images, later began to incorporate more recognizable texts, images and symbolic juxtapositions. Was this because the viewer and technology was changing, and what was once a shocking technique did not deliver the same impact? Or did this change occur as the technique spread and more and more artists brought their own ideas and styles to the practice of collage, not to mention their own personal experiences that were different from those of the Dadaists and Surrealists.

Some of the images below contain challenging images and content - in these examples, these images are being used explicitly by artists who are challenging their iconography, content and/or what they symbolize. Many of the artists adopting and working with these images are doing so from a standpoint of deconstruction or reclaiming and have a connection with, relationship to, and understanding of them that might involve a specific personal experience, how the artist identifies, or what different communities the artist might belong to.

Martha Rosler

Enrique Chagoya

Lorna Simpson

Banksy

2.4 Contemporary Collage

Below are more examples of contemporary collage, including some collage produced with digital tools. Similar to how the early collage artists above were cutting words and images from printed newspapers and advertisements, contemporary artists can used digital tools to do the same thing with digitized media. Digital mages, text, sounds, music, speeches, videos, movies, tv shows, video games and even computer programs / algorithms can be recombined to create something new. Digital tools and processes make this technique more diverse and expansive, however, the core idea - the breakdown of the "original", the critique of the mainstream remains the same.

Nikkolas Smith

Smith applies traditional collage concepts of cutting and recombining to make work that produces a range of final visual outcomes while working with the same overall collage aesthetics. These collaged artworks result in a range of final overall aesthetics. Below are examples of his collage work, showing how this process can be about creating spaces for new possibilities, some that critically challenge oppressive structures and others that humorously deviate from conventional expectations.

Ruben Marquez

Lola Dupree

2.5 Games + Interactive Media As Collage

Below are some digitally based installations and digitally driven mechanical sculptures that work with collage and transformation. While they utilize digital and/or mechanical technology, they still relate directly to early Dadaist collage works in how they use cutting, recombining and/or transformation. This is a through-line that we will explore even further within games.

Mirror Morpher - Kyle MacDonald

Emoter - Tim Hawkinson

Games can be viewed as "collages" themselves. As we have seen in the above examples, collages involve the cutting and recombination of visuals, or the re-layering of visuals. This is something that physically happens in many types of games as part of the game play, where a player focus is to "cut" or "break through" the play-space to make progress, such as Tetris or Dig-Dug, or to extract materials to create new aspects of the game-world - such as Minecraft. Games with procedurally generated levels like Hades utilize a form of "automatic" collage, and games working with tile-sets and sprite-sheets, like the NES classic Super Mario Bros. 3, also digitally "cut" and reposition images to completely build the game environment and utilize layers of interaction to drive the object-collisions that drive the game play. Interactive fiction like Porpentine's Howling Dogs, or games like Edith Finch that setup a series or intersecting, playable stories to navigate, also present a form of narrative collage. I would argue that they are collage-like components in almost all games - the game to player interface represents a huge amount of information, feedback, and ideas mediated by a system and then recombined in a form that the players understand in different ways.

From a more visual standpoint, many game interfaces and spaces are a collage of different visual feedback and information through many forms - text, numbers, maps, in-game action, audio, objects, players, worlds, etc, all coming together to communicate many different layers of meaning all at once. In understanding how this juxtaposition can influence meaning, and change the potential meaning a player might take from a game's "collage", game designers can be more intentional with how they craft and design this interaction space. And there are also many games that simply possess a more "collage-like" aesthetic, where the visuals feel more intentionally deconstructed or re-assembled. Looking at the two examples below, I think it is interesting to consider how this use of collage as part of the visual style of a game can still produce two very different player experiences and overall game aesthetics.

The Gardens Between

Cruelty Squad

Content Description: Animated gun violence and gore, and flashing lights / strobe effects

2.6 The Aesthetics of Collage

As noted above by the two different uses of a collage aesthetic, visual collage can look a variety of ways, and produce very different overall visual outcomes and in some cases, overall aesthetics. That being said, most collaged works retain a few consistent visual components and some core aesthetic properties. There is almost always some form of visual or evident cutting or deconstruction, and then recombination to produce something new.

A hugely important aesthetic affect of this cutting and recombining is that the new work produced will retain some of the original meaning of the recombined media. In this sense, the new, remixed work will communicate a new meaning, but it will be partially informed by parts of the original information. This is something that is incredibly important to be aware of when working with a collage style, as whatever the visual composition communicates via color, text, texture and/or symbolic / representational meaning needs to be carefully balanced with the original meaning of whatever media is included.

This affect will hopefully be further explored in the studio project this module. You will be creating new "board games" by collaging the visual elements of at least 3 existing board games. These new board games will be represented by a new game-board visual design. It will not need to be playable, rather, you will use this process of cutting, repositioning and transforming to experiment with both the physical processes of composition-design, and the conceptual process of collaging - what new game designs, interesting rules, and/or potential types of gameplay could be implied, created, envisioned, and/or produced by combining the original meaning of some aspects of already existing games.

Games like the Kingdom Hearts series, that combine characters across a wide variety of existing narrative and visual worlds, into a new world, roles and narratives, can also be considered a type of collage game {that works with both visual and conceptual collage}. As someone insightfully mentioned in class, it is sometimes impossible to remove the already existing meaning from the characters and a challenge to fully invest in their new roles and stories.

Pre-made Art Assets + Collage

The video below describes a game designers process for making the same type of game in 8 engines. This is an amazing design exercise that is super helpful for a variety of processes and aspects of designing games. For this viewing, however, I’d like folks to consider what major area of game design this exercise does not address, and what the potential outcomes might result on the games being produced.