2014 Directed by Harun Farocki
Cinema’s onscreen worlds have always borne an indexical bond to the real. What happens when computer-generated video game images usurp film as the predominant medium of visual world-making? How does one’s relation to onscreen heroes shift when we no longer identify with real bodies? Harun Farocki’s four-part Parallel I–IV (2012–14) takes up these questions, tracing how, in just over 30 years, video games have developed from two-dimensional schematics to photorealistic environments.
Saw Negativland live earlier tonight. Their current touring show is a rather fascinating multimedia piece proposing fascism as a form of virtual reality, coming to the ultimate conclusion that J6 was, rather than the pure theater I’d largely dismissed it as (or, god forbid, the deadly-serious threat to the supposed decency of our nation that center-left liberals feared it was), the functional equivalent of an MMORPG raid - a small army of people, many of whom have no life outside of this virtual reality, coming together in pursuit of a common but completely fictional goal. The legendary “culture jammers” juxtaposed clips of endless digging in Minecraft and McDonald’s drive-thru roleplay in VRChat with “hipster fascist” podcasters and frank discussions of…
An investigation into the nature of computer-generated imagery; it's congruent with writing that academics have been doing on the subject, but I have such limited experience with video games that I've never paid any attention. At it's most effective, for me, in #2 and #3, where he pushes his player-commands to do things that butt up against the limits of what's been programmed into the game as world-building, trying for example to zoom in or out beyond the boundaries of the available universe -- kinda moving, kinda scary, in a crawling-up-your-own-ass sort of way, and in #4 he extends that inquiry to examine human interactions as displayed when the player's surrogate tries to interact with supernumerary place-holder figures who aren't intended to contribute to the narrative. There's the germ of an idea there about neuro-programming changes in peoples' real-world interactions... but it's not developed to any great extent.
Farocki: “Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.”
model of videogames as image
As a child, I only ever played video games in order to explore their worlds, to discover the fringes and borders of that world, the limitations. I didn't understand why I was so interested in this as a child but watching Farocki's four-part video essay Parallel made me aware of the vast and much more in-depth potential that exists within this subject.
The brilliance in Parallel, and in the other small amount of Farocki's work that I have seen, is how he can do some much with so little - with only pre-existing imagery and spoken word, Farocki is able to delve deep into the materialism of video games and computer-generated imagery. He explores their structure, creation, and their deterministic…
The endpoint of Farocki's recurring fixation on simulation: worlds of outward photorealism and ideal-typical forms bounded by the limits of algorithms, where the imagistic reproductions of the material camera serve as raw materials at best, models at worst, practically obsolete. Sad that I cannot recognize most of the games these images came from though, but they do make me want to look at some YouTube playthroughs.
a geography of the virtual, interrogating the boundaries of digital spaces and the limits of their imitation, while also providing a general overview of video games as image. reminds me a lot of the way i interacted with video games when i was younger, intentionally trying to break the walls of the created environments, seeing the skyboxes and boundless emptiness beyond the facade that was constructed for the game itself.
The first one is by far the most interesting as it feels like it’s exploring the subject of computer generated imagery from a completely different angle (the whole nature thing is just such a good idea and the game choices are ACE), but the rest quickly devolves to ‘the outsider looking in’. Lots of repetition, lots of repetition. So glad we had someone like Phil Solomon who actually explored the possibillities of this image by utilizing the tools rather than thinking out loud about its implications while bumping into invisible walls.
"the creators of computer images do not want to attract flocks of greek birds. their heaven should be populated by creatures of their own design."
Academia will be the death of me.
(this is cool though, and probably the best videogame movie - or essayistic art installation - ever made)
