CASE STUDY games. Computerspiele von KnstlerInnen (games. computer games by artists) by Tilman Baumgrtel, Hans D.

Christ, Iris Dressler hartware medien kunst verein (hartware media art association), Dortmund, Germany: October 11 - November 30, 2003 Idea + Concept: Tilman Baumgrtel Curators: Tilman Baumgrtel, Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler Participating Artists: Julien Alma / Laurent Hart, Cory Arcangel, Mister Ministeck Norbert Bayer, Tom Betts, Pash Buzari, Leon Cmielewski / Josephine Starrs, Arcangel Constantini, Vuk Cosic, Aurlien Froment, fuchseckermann, Beate Geissler / Oliver Sann, Margarete Jahrmann / Max Moswitzer, JODI, Joan Leandre, Mongrel, Tilman Reiff / Volker Morawe, Anne-Marie Schleiner / Brody Condon, Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, Space Invader, Thomson & Craighead, Olaf Val, Yang Zhenzhong, Lars Zumbansen Archive web site: http://www.hartware-projekte.de/programm/inhalt/games_e.htm

Introduction The exhibition games was originally planned to be presented on two bar tables. It was finally shown in a former warehouse for spare parts on the lot of the shut down blast furnace Phoenix West in the city Dortmund-Hrde. At the very least, this made a difference of 2,000 square meters (6,500 square feet) and posed the challenge of developing an informal presentation into a "real" exhibition of computer game modifications by artists, which we will discuss in the following. The exhibition games was inspired by the fact that over the last few years, a growing number of computer games has either allowed its users to create their own versions of the original environment or given them other options to use games as a medium for creative self-expression. Artists quickly became aware of this opportunity and developed their own versions of computer games -- so-called modifications or, abbreviated, "mods." These artistic modifications frequently transform the premises of the original games up to a point of absurdity or even explicitly contradict them. In this way, they profoundly differ from most of the modifications done by fans, who usually confine themselves to a "revamping" of the existing structures; the artistic modifications implement more far-reaching changes -- often with the effect that the games become completely "unplayable." This interventions into existing games are not only a contemporary version of the appropriations, detournemnts and recontextualizitions of previous modernist art movements. The also get to the heart of the elements that art and play have in common. In his famous essay Homo Ludens, Dutch historian John Huizinga convincingly demonstrated that the apparently so regressive game is in reality the origin of human culture, and therefore of the fine arts as well. To be sure, Huizingas remarks on contemporary art of his time remain rather superficial, 1 yet many of the elements that he describes as being fundamental to games are also valid for art: their apparent meaninglessness and pointlessness, their position outside of the everyday world, their being forever childish. Even if many artists of the 20th century have integrated elements of games into their own work, it is in works like the ones shown at games, where art and games eventually come together in mutually complementing forms. At around 2002, a critical mass seemed to have been reached: there were enough art projects to justify a survey exhibition on the topic. According to the original concept, some of the artistic modifications were supposed to be shown as part of a small presentation conceived by media theorist Tilman Baumgrtel -- in the space of the media art association "hartware." However, since artists engaging with computer games did not at all limit themselves to working with code but also made use of "classical" approaches and spatial forms (such as video / installation), interventions in

See the chapter entitled Spielformen der Kunst in Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel, Reinbek bei Hamburg ,1987 (Rowohlt Encyclopedia), pp. 173 188.
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physical and virtual public space, as well as objects etc., it quickly became obvious that an exhibition reduced to featuring computers on tables would fall short of the goal of such a survey. In addition to the development of games, hartware had to deal with the challenges posed by the move to a new location, since the show was supposed to be the first one taking place in the organization's new exhibition space, the former warehouse for spare parts on the Phoenix West site. The organization, founded in 1996, had originally presented its projects in varying locations -- a technology museum, the building of a former brewery, public spaces, or various art centers -- and for the previous two years, had shown its exhibitions in the Center for Music and Culture (Musik- und Kulturzentrum) of the city of Dortmund. Not only did this mean that games could be realized in a space of 2,000 instead of 400 square meters, but the show would also be featured on a site that was very obviously embedded in its specific industrial history. The few larger exhibitions that had taken place outside of festivals (with their short-term presentation format) and had attempted to show Internet and software art within a museum context had often failed due to the intrinsic characteristics of the medium itself, which can rightfully claim to have pushed the "dematerialization of the art object" (Lucy Lippard 1) as far as no other art form before it. A common approach to presenting net art -- for example during Documenta X -- has been to feature it on computer screens in office-like environments. Since the projects we had selected for our exhibition were only partly and not exclusively intended to be shown on a computer screen, we could draw upon a much larger spectrum of artistic forms of expression; at the same time, it was important to us to avoid treating computer games primarily as a form of aesthetic or thematic raw material for videos, installations, or painting. An essential point of reference for the exhibition were the technological, cultural, and social implications of computer games, and therefore we also gave the audience an opportunity to play -- in the "classical" way -- on computers and gaming consoles. The respective forms of presentation -- ranging from the format "computer on table" to the multiscreen projection -- were either suggested by the artists themselves or developed with them for the specifics of the space in a direct exchange. As part of that process, we also wanted to address certain limits of the presentability of digital art within an exhibition space: for example, the project VelvetStrike by Anne-Marie Schleiner et al. -- which is a collective, net-based intervention in the online game Counter-Strike -- is difficult to reconstruct within a physical exhibition space (since it would require the installation of Counter-Strike itself) and can be more easily represented as documentation of the intervention itself. Even though it was not a primary goal of the games exhibition to demonstrate a paradigmatic way of showing digital art in an exhibition context, one of our objectives certainly was to investigate how computer games by artists can be adequately presented and engage different segments of the public. Subject Artists working with computer games are addressing a subject that plays such an important role in today's pop culture that the latter becomes unthinkable without it -- even though computer games (at least in Germany) are still marginalized within the larger context of society. This marginalization, however, is disproportional to the cultural and economic importance of games. In the US alone, the profits made from the sale of computer games are expected to break $30 billion within the next two years. Games are part of the "media socialization" of adolescents in Western industrial nations and, at the same time, one of the main motivations for developing ever faster computers with ever increased graphics capabilities. Artistic experiments with games are not only related to code but draw from the whole social culture that has grown around games (in addition to reflecting on their cultural and economic impact). Art in this field has therefore quickly crossed the borders that delineated the territory for most of Internet and software art. Modifications Since the beginning of the 1990s, more and more PC computer game producers started to publish not only games but accompanying editors, which allowed users to create their own characters and worlds -- so-called levels -- for these games. One of the first games to offer that possibility was the First Person Shooter (FPS) Doom by id Software. Fans of Doom jumped on the feature and started to

develop their versions of the original. On January 25, 1994 -- about one month after Doom launched on the Internet -- Brendon Wyber, a student at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, published his Doom Editor Utility (DEU) on the Net. This constantly upgraded program, developed with the help of amateur programmers from around the world, made it even easier to hack Doom and build ones own versions. Doom meets Star Wars? Why shouldn't there be a variation on Doom where the Simpsons battle Ronald McDonald? With Doom, id Software had given its customers a potent piece of software for the construction of three-dimensional spaces. Granted, one needed experience in using computers, but it was not necessary to be a programmer. "This was a radical idea not only for games but for any media, as David Kushner put it. It was as if a Nirvana CD came with tools to let listeners dub their own voices for Kurt Cobains or a Rocky video let viewers excise every cranny of Philadelphia for ancient Rome.2 In the following years, the press would repeatedly report about students who had recreated their high school in the form of a shooter game. Most of these students used Doom or its successor Quake, which already had a sophisticated level editor. In the midst of all the outrage over adolescents transforming their schools into a site for virtual "shoot-outs," critics would tend to overlook the fact that these adolescents had also learned to work with software that allowed for the creation of advanced 3D models and, only a few years earlier, had been exclusively used by a privileged few -the industry and well equipped academic research labs. Other games followed suit, also handed the tools for creation to their users, and turned consumers into producers of visual fantasy worlds. In the case of the action game Half-Life, the modifications went so far that a completely new game was developed: Counter-Strike, which would become one of the most successful computer games of all times. By now, the possibility of modification has become more or less a standard feature of PC games. The characters, maps, and levels developed by gamers -- their playfields, so to speak -- are often offered for download on the Internet and can gain their creators a prestigious position within the gaming scene. Newly developed levels are not the only method of putting gaming software to creative use. Another strategy for using games in the production of unique projects was discovered by players of Internet games such as Ultima Online: virtual products (such as swords, clothing etc.) form an economy of their own and are sold through Internet auction houses such as Ebay for real money. Another group that developed an inventive strategy are the amateur graphic artists who use the "photo album" function of the game The Sims to compile their own photographic novels. J.C. Hertz calls these practices "a decentralized culture that rapidly learns, adapts and selects for best practices. This culture and its processes are perhaps the industrys greatest assets. 3 The most important example of these processes are the self-made levels of First Person Shooters. In the beginning of the 1990s, the spatial representations that characterize these levels still were the holy grail of academic computer visualization. Thanks to Doom and Quake these techniques entered the kids' rooms and artists' studios. The potential of computer games was quickly discovered by the artistic community, particularly by those working with new media and the Internet. The first attempt to use a computer game as artistic medium seems to have been ars doom by Orhan Kipcak and Reinhard Urban, which was shown at Ars Electronica 1995 and was a crude satire on the art world that very obviously stood in the tradition of early 1990's context art. 4 The piece managed to start a tradition of its own: the idea of computer games as a commentary on the art world and its institutions would subsequently surface in the works of artists such as Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson, as well as Florian Muser und Imre Osswald who created a level that was modeled after the Hamburg Contemporary Gallery (Hamburger Galerie fr Gegenwart 5). Among the first artists who engaged with games also was the artist duo JODI who used a very different aesthetic approach to the subject. During a residency at the C3 media art lab in Budapest in 1999, the duo created a first modification of the First Person Shooter Quake6, called Untitled Game. It was followed by numerous variations7 that -- both with regard to their look and their rules -- deviate from the original game in disconcerting ways. At around the same time, Margarete Jahrmann's and Max Moswitzer's artwork LinX3D (1999) turned the game Unreal into a site for an abstract engagement with the "materiality" of code. The projects by JODI and Moswitzer / Jahrmann introduced several themes that soon would interest other artists. While the simple reconstruction of physically existing architectures within a computer

game quickly turned out to be a conceptual dead end, these artists concentrated on the specifics of the image world of the games. These would be subjected to a deconstruction as relentless as the one that JODI had previously performed on web pages in their net art projects. Manipulation of the graphical surface was not enough for JODI who also began to get interested in the non-visual aspects of the software. Among the latter are user guidance and the "physics" of the game, which JODI changed up to a point where the game would become unusable. Artists such as Tom Betts and Joan Leandre have been using this approach as a starting point for their own works. The Presentation of Digital Art -- Problems and Approaches Point of Departure While computer-generated art has been flourishing since the mid-1990s -- gaining renewed interest first through the arrival of net art, then through artistic practice involving software -- the art world has only hesitantly reacted to this development. This has been a continuing concern since the middle of 90ies and the emergence of a net-specific art. Before net art, digital art was developed in formats that fit into the way art was traditionally displayed. The computer art from the 1960ies and 1970ies were mostly exhibited as prints. And the interactive installations of the 1980ies and 1990ies also lend themself to the conventions of art presentations that museums and galleries had come to accept since the emergence of installation art in the 1960ies. Net art as an art that took place primarily within its medium, the Internet was the first digital art movement that was primarily screen-based and was best viewed on a computer monitor. Software art and a lot of game art projects followed this cue, and therefore made it difficult for curators to present them in traditional art spaces. They resisted showing these pieces not only because of practical problems (keyboards and mouses (mice?) that could be stolen, terminals that could used for net surfing instead of art viewing, computer that might crash), but also because many simply did not want ugly computers in their exhibition halls. That has lead to a situation, where the last computer to be seen in galleries and museums before one arrives at the art is usually that at the reception desk or cashier. Visiting these exhibitions thus often seems like a time travel to a period where the work with digital media was not as much of a given as it is now. Therefor most presentations of contemporary art deprive themselves of an opportunity to include artistic statements on computer and net culture -- despite the fact that one can hardly deny that the latter are among the most important aspects of our society and therefore should be a subject of artistic projects. This is not meant to say that the use of a computer or the Internet in an artwork is in and off itself a sign of quality and that these works automatically make relevant statements on networking and computerization. But existing works that address our information society also often work with that society's most important infrastructure: the Internet. To show these works within an exhibition violates certain conventions of presentation within the art world: many of the projects need to be shown on a computer, which means that the exhibition space will contain what most curators and audience members still preceive as an aesthetic insult -- faceless beige boxes. These also create certain problems of accessibility (for older audience members, in particular), they can be used by only one visitor at a time, and they pose technical challenges. Moreover, discussions about net art have often raised the question whether it is in fact the Net itself that is the most genuine site of presentation for this art form and whether net art in physical exhibition spaces "by nature" constitutes an oddity. On the other hand, museums and physical exhibitions are tried and tested spaces for mediation and communication of ideas; and new media art definitely does not have such a surplus of these spaces at is disposal that it could easily relinquish a few. Particularly when it comes to those forms of media art that elude traditional categories of the artifact, exhibitions should take advantage of the opportunity to push concepts, practices, and strategies to the foreground instead of fetishizing the original. In the case of net art this means that the installation of numerous computers with Internet access makes sense only to a limited extent, since it can always only simulate an "original" and "authentic" space for experiencing net art. The goal of exhibitions can not be to (re)construct an authentic experience of net art. Instead they should communicate how a virus distributed through the Internet, a "hacked" code, or a modified computer game relate to and affect art -- or one's life. They should make clear that the genuine spaces for experiencing and engaging in net cultures can only to a limited extent be translated into a physical exhibition space. If artworks have not been produced for the context of an exhibition this does not inevitably mean that they can not be a subject of discussion within that context; however,

this discussion can not be fixated on the ideology of the authentic but has to point to those sites of artistic practice that extend beyond the exhibition space. Contemporary exhibition spaces have to develop forms of presentation (in the broadest sense) that, in a productive way, confront the contradictions and exclusions in the relationship between art and the institution without nullifying them. After all, the practice of expanding artistic agency is by no means a new situation created by net art but has been an underlying narrative of the art of the whole 20th century, accompanied by the rhetorics of transgressing boundaries between art and life. After World War II, visual artists had already begun to explore the new "sites" that had opened up through the replacement of industrial society by a post-industrial "information society" as a locus for their work. Systems Art and the early Conceptualism of the 1960s, in particular, attempted an artistic annexation of "virtual" information spaces and social, political, and exonomic systems, which often blew up the boundaries of the traditional museums and galleries. The use of video as artistic medium or the involvement of (often remote) landscapes in Land Art had also frequently put the artworld to the test. By now, art institutions have had no choice but to accommodate the challenges of the art of the 1960s and accept pieces with an anti-institutional gesture, which does not necessarily benefit these works: up until today, there are hardly any curatorial concepts for Performance, Land Art or interventions in public space that go beyond the auratic elevation of ephemera and documentation. Apart from that, one tends to gratefully focus on that part of the respective artistic oeuvre that was produced for the market in the first place; which means that the very existence of the institutional boundaries that were criticized, exhausted, and transgressed by the artists has been suppressed as much as these artists' rejection of the categories of the original and the autnomous character of a work. The discussion surrounding the possibilities and limits of curating digital art can and must take place on a broad art-historical level and on the background of a critical test of general exhibition practices. A pre-condition for this would be that digital art is treated as a curatorial subject within the art world to a much greater extent than it has been the case so far. As problematic as the presentation of net art at Documenta X may have been, it is even more reason for concern that there have been hardly any additional attempts to integrate net art into international exhibitions on that level. Even important approaches such as the "Hybrid Workspace," which was implemented at the same Documenta, have unfortunately not been further developed within the established art world. Neither does it help digital art to discuss it only within its own circles, nor is it acceptable that established art discourse simply ignores it. Apart from a few exceptions, the market-oriented art world, meaning commercial galleries, has so far declined to engage with digital art, partly because it has the -- not unreasonable -- fear that there is not much to sell and earn with this art. Except for artists such as Holger Friese, who sold his net art project Antworten.de (answers.de) to a collector, most net art projects have not only been "commissioned" by the artists themselves but are also in their "collection." CD-ROMs or software art also are not sold for much money at this point, since the art market is as little prepared for the sale of digital art as it was for selling video art or non-material art forms such as body art or performance in the 1970s. The rejection of a purely product-oriented understanding of art that is implicit to most works of new media will continue to make it difficult for art institutions to show them. However, a reversal of that situation -- channeling the creative energy released by the Internet and personal computing in the last decade into the creation of trouble-free, pure "exhibition art" -- would not be desirable either. Luckily, the tradition of self-organization is one of the greatest assets of the software and net art scene and such a strong force that one can hope that this scene will not be interested in limiting itself to the production of auratic museum pieces in the near future. At the same time, recent years have seen the development of many net art and software pieces that have incorporated sculptural and installation components, so that there are no basic obstacles for presenting them in a museum -- despite a resistance of curators to engage with them. As long as this does not change, the art world will be "saved" from computers and the Internet, while they are increasingly becoming an integral part of the lives of most inhabitants of the First World. The same applies to computer games. On the positive side, this means that exhibitions such as games can focus on establishing relationships between those pieces that have been produced for an exhibition context -- and these might very well be works of "pure" computer art, unless one considers computers only as an office

tool -- and those projects that resist the conditions of the "white cube" through their process-oriented nature and the spaces for production and agency they create. In the latter case, it is important to develop forms of mediation that address these works' incompatibilities with the exhibition framework, which has to admit to its limits and gaps: exhibitions have to be understood not only as platforms for artifacts but as discourses and contexts that by far exceed art existing in its four walls. Games: Presentation and Curatorial Approach The games exhibition was primarily focused on giving an at least representative if not inclusive survey of the existing approaches (from diversified to conflicting) that artists have taken to computer games. The spectrum ranged from political and ironic comments on computer games and social critiques to explorations of aesthetic dimensions -- from the graphical surface to the textures of code. Next to modifications that could be played on computers and game consoles or in front of projection screens --on- or offline, alone or in a multi-user scenario -- the exhibition also featured video installations, interventionist, conceptual, sculptural or graphical works. One of the original ideas for the exhibition was ultimately abandoned: we initially had planned to show artists' computer games in a broader art-historical and cultural context by presenting them together with works from Fluxus and conceptual art that also addressed aspects of play. This would have inevitably led to a premature categorization and canonization of computer game art. We decided to leave open what computer games by artists might be and what tendencies and possible developments could manifest themselves in the future. The presentation concept for the exhibition was essentially determined by the specifics of the artworks themselves, the conditions of the exhibition space, and the curatorial approach. We deliberately wanted to distance ourselves from a curatorial practice that would evade media arts' complex demands of presentation and reception through a gesture of the "unpretentious" and "lablike." (Proponents of the latter method frequently try to justify it by arguing that any form of diligence could be mistaken for worship at the altar of the established art market.) With games, we wanted game art -- as an underexplored and little discussed terrain of contemporary art -- to become readable not as a provisional blueprint but as an artistic composition, with all its deviations and interstices, and open up the field for critique. Within the exhibition space, with its palpable patina of industrial history, white cubes were built for some of the works, which created a room structure that was at the same time branching and clearly delineated. The very individual charm that always characterizes former industrial buildings was neither supposed to be hidden nor develop its own dynamics. The contrast between the warehouse, the cubes (pointing to a museum context), and the artworks, which only in some cases had been designed for the white cube, created a certain atmosphere of the "in-between" that was somehow fitting for our curatorial objective. While making sure that the lighting and sound requirements of the individual works were accomodated, we also presented some of the projected pieces in open space, along with different modifications, which could be played on computers and gaming consoles. The sequence of closed and open room segments made it possible to both separate the works that required a certain closure and concentration and at the same time open up a field of possible relations between different positions. The "open" presentation of media artworks has recently been increasingly popular, which creates a number of problems: either the sound components of different works overlap to a point where they seriously interfere with each other; or a majority of the works can be experienced only through headphones. Then there is the scenario where the sound has been turned down so much that it becomes almost inaudible. On the basis of a hardly comprehensible consensus that the otherwise common "stall architecture" is disreputable when it comes to new media, an essential element of the artworks -- which can be more or less pronounced -- is simply being ignored. Open presentations of media artworks as in the games exhibition are certainly possible. But they are not "more beautiful" or fundamentally "better" than other forms of presentation and have to be developed very specifically for the overall exhibition scenario as well as the character and requirements of the individual works -- at least if one does not regard media art in general as a form of animated wallpaper. In the specific case of the games exhibition, the overlapping of different sound sources was not only not disturbing, it also created a certain atmosphere reminiscent of gaming arcades, which otherwise was not part of the presentation concept. While no specific route through the exhibition was prescribed, there was a pronounced positioning of

works in the entrance area. Two video projections were facing each other at a distance of 18 meters (50 feet): Shooter by Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann and Fury by Aurlien Froment. The video piece Shooter consists of single portraits of different female and male players absorbed in their game, leaving it up to the viewer to draw conclusions about the course of the game from the facial expressions. The gamers' head movements emphatically reflect the imaginary three-dimensionsal environments of the games in an invisible physio-motorical extension. While the video Fury was not inspired by an exploration of computer games but derives its contents from the sets of action movies, it still refers to the navigation paradigms that are characteristic of 3D games. The exhibition thus introduced the audience to two different points of view that are directly linked to the image world of computer games and its strategies. Using these pieces as a starting point, the show then investigated the diversity of artistic approaches to computer games through single works or smaller groups of projects. The (optional) final work in the exhibition was the video piece 922 Rice Corns by Yang Zhenzhong, which also did not result from an exploration of computer games but certainly can be understood as an ironic comment on their inherent logic of competition. What viewers see is two chicken engaging in the banal act of scratching in a pile of rice grains. Their eating of the grains is interpreted according to the logic of a game: a simple score board and two voices counting (in Chinese) diligently keep score of the chickens' rice consumption. A latently ironic attitude to their own subject characterized quite a few works in the exhibition. Only two pieces in the show were net-based in the narrower sense and presented online: qqq by Tom Betts and Linx3D by Jahrmann / Moswitzer. The works that could be played by the audience on computers remained offline (in accordance with the instructions given by the artists). Other pieces, such as the projected ones by JODI and Cory Arcangel, were delivered on DVD. In retrospect, it became clear that it would have been important to indicate the on- or offline status or the specific audio-visual sources of the individual games. The differences between these particular methods and materials were hard to perceive for the audience but would have been extremely important for an understanding of the works. Another project that was shown online was the website Space Invaders8, which essentially addresses the mass distribution of the iconography from the legendary arcade game of the same name. In the form of mosaics made from ceramic tiles, the figures / icons from the game are placed graffiti-style in strategically important places in different cities around the world. The web appearance of Space Invaders is more than mere documentation and expands the project into a multi-layered narrative space that oscillates between conspiracy theory and modern marketing strategies. While we could have invited the artist to also "position" the space invaders in the city of Dortmund, we were not particularly interested in organizing a site-specific intervention but wanted to introduce ( within the exhibition) an artistic approach that offers a completely different take on games than, for example, modifications. A very different type of intervention -- in virtual public space -- is the project Velvet-Strike9 by AnneMarie Schleiner et al. As a critical commentary on the Iraq politics of the US administration, the artists commissioned the creation of anti-war motifs, which can be spray-painted onto the environment of the online multi-user game Counter-Strike -- which occasionally led to strong protests by the gamers. This form of participatory interventionism within a very specific public realm can hardly be repeated on the exhibition site. Acknowledging the particular nature of the project, we showed a video documentation of the piece produced by the artists as well as some enlarged screen shots of the spray painting in order to communicate the concept of the work -- and an important aspect of net culture. In the case of Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds, we also presented the project's underlying concept -- in the form of a "users manual." The piece is based on a hardware / software manipulation of the video game Super Mario, which is pushed so far that all that remains of the game is its background -- a blue sky with passing clouds. On his website, Arcangel has diligently documented each single step of the manipulation 10. This documentation was exhibited along with the projection in the form of digital prints. Conventional, commercial computer games were not included in the exhibition, since we very explicitely wanted to focus on artistic processes of appropriating games. Nevertheless it was important to us to point to a social dimension of computer gaming culture that obviously plays a fairly important role for the artists: the gaming community itself. During one weekend, a LAN (Local Area Network) Party organized by a local gaming association took place within the exhibition space. The paradoxical situation of having a LAN Party within the highly artificial framework of an art exhibition

was inverted in a productive way: the organizers and gamers made use of the theatricality of the situation and used it as a stage for public performance in order to counter the one-dimensionsal clich (largely based on ignorance) of the dumb, lonely, and blood-thirsty player of "shoot-'em-ups." Since some of the internet fan magazines announced the LAN Party to their clientel and reported on the event, it also created publicity in circles that are not easily reached with newspapers or the arts press. Another aspect the exhibition was supposed to communicate was a certain artistic attitude that also surfaces in net and software art: a simultaneously critical and enthusiastic, ironical and respectless, (de)constructive instead of reactive mode of engagement with what a handful of corporations has declared to be the status quo of the technically achievable. That one can easily solder together one's own computer game was demonstrated by Olaf Val and his SwingUp Games, which consist of the simplest computer games assembled from plastic foil, light bulbs for bicycles, bell wire and little motherboards. Val, together with Ralf Schreiber, also offered a "GameBoy Workshop," where 10-13 year olds could build their own games. The kids were directly involved in all processes of production, ranging from the etching and soldering of motherboards and the development and programming of game ideas to the designing of the shell and casing for the game. A third program aimed at making the broad spectrum of the exhibition project accessible to the public was a film and lecture series that critically addressed interrelations between the different strategies inherent to contemporary image worlds, among them the special effects of the Hollywood industry, the 3D animations of computer games, and the simulation technologies of science and the military. The goal of these three programs was to pick up on the parentheses that the exhibition had established for its discourse and expand them through the involvement of different audiences and their specific competences and interests. This form of expansion that does not reduce an exhibition to artifacts arranged in space is particularly important to us. Contemporary art itself -- and particularly media art with its interdisciplinary and socio-political context -- does not only evoke multiple spaces of discourse but also explicitly addresses different audiences with this discourse. By "different audiences" we do not mean a hierarchy of the so-called "expert" and "lay" audiences but a diversity of know-how, be it -- as in the case of games -- with regard to contemporary art, computer games and software development, or a critical reflection on current visualization methods. Only if we understand the audience as productive "users" and not as coming from "the other side of the tracks" (in relation to exhibitions / art), can exhibitions turn into spaces that satify the demands of contemporary art -- participatory spaces of discourse that can be made accessible together with the recipients. This approach by far exceeds the nave construct of a "push button" interaction. Apropos interaction: while exhibitions including tables with computers often leave parts of the audience struggling with the machines, we hardly noticed any anxiety about computer use during games. This may have been partly due to the number of computers, which was reasonable. It also may have had something to do with the fact that "interactive" participation throughout the exhibition was never gratuitous or a didactic exercise suggesting to the viewers that they would "co-produce" an artwork but leaving them with the disappointing experience of being degraded to a participant in a type of Pawlovian experiment. In games, interaction as well as the use of computers per se always originated from the familiar structure of play. It is interesting to note that hardly any of the visitors spent time reading the instructions printed on the mouse pads. Instead they used the method that is also employed by experienced computer users when they deal with a new program: trial and error. Visitors approached the new technologies with a mixture of curiosity and lack of respect. While we originally were worried that the traditional art audience would shun the exhibition, since computer games have not been sufficiently introduced as material of contemporary art, and gamers would take offense because of the artistic and institutional appropriation of their very own terrain, it was primarily curiosity that brought both "groups" to the exhibition. Considering the topic, it obviously was a predominantly young audience that attended the exhibition. After an initial visit, the 10 - 15 year olds would frequently return with their parents in order to introduce them to gaming culture. It was interesting to see that a certain type of exchange among family members seems to require a visit to an allegedly neutral "cultural site," although a visit to the kids' room would often suffice. The engagement of visitors on site was a highly communicative affair. Although people took advantage of the possibility to approach the well-trained exhibition supervisors, problems with understanding or using a work were mostly solved amongst each other. Even though the exhibition site -- a former warehouse -- was not consistent with a traditional art institution, and the artistic

appropriation of computer games has not yet been ordained as high culture, both of these conditions were not an obstacle for the majority of the considerable amount of visitors. The unusual presentation was honored both within and outside the traditional art world: games was awarded the prize for "special exhibition of 2003" by the German section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). And the show also recieved the "Innovationspreis" (Innovation award) of the Fonds Soziokultur, a german foundation, that supports social projects and had cosponsored the show. [Translated from German by Christiane Paul]
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition features German and English texts and documentation of the installations in Dortmund: hartware medien kunst verein / Tilman Baumgrtel (eds.), Games. Computerspiele von KnstlerInnen, with contributions by Tilman Baumgrtel, Claus Pias, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Gerrit Gohlke, Silke Albrecht, Katrin Mundt and Iris Dressler (Revolver Verlag: Frankfurt/Main, 2003), 120 pages, ISBN 3-936919-77-1

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 1997), reprint 2 David Kushner, Masters of Doom. How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture , (Random House: New York, 2003), p. 166 3 J.C. Hertz, "Gaming the System" in: Lucien King (ed.), Game On, (Barbican: London, 2002), p. 97 4 Karl Gerbel, Peter Weibel (eds.), Mythos Information - Welcome to the Wired World , @rs electronica 95, (Springer: Vienna / New York, 1995), p. 254 - 257 5 Florian Muser and Imre Osswald, No Room Gallery, http://www.re-load.org/artists/noroom/berlin.html 6 JODI, Ctrl-Space, http://ctrl-space.c3.hu 7 JODI, Untitled Game, http://www.untitled-game.org 8 http://www.space-invaders.com 9 http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/ 10 http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/21c/21c.html