Video games like animation often begin as drawings. Just as some artists use animation as their main communication channel, some artists use video games and video games like animations begin as storyboards. However a game storyboard is set out differently because you have different event levels or plot points that define the game world that you are devising. There will be structural issues related to how many levels and main characters or scenarios you want to develop. (A game doesn't have to have people in it) You may have more traditional animation storyboarding alongside structural diagrams, such as secondary event frames detailing dialogue, character meeting rules, or steps in a sequence.
Back in the 1930s Webb Smith, an animator at Walt Disney Studios, started drawing rough sketches of frames needed for his animation drawings on different bits of paper, then he stuck them up on a wall to communicate a sequence of events. If you are wanting to undertake some visual storytelling, whether for a sequence of drawings or paintings, animation, graphic novel or in this case a game, this is a vital tool. Even sculptors such as Robert Smithson used storyboards to work out how their work would be communicated, in the case of Robert Smithson he carefully plotted out how a film of his work 'Spiral Jetty' would be made. If he was working now I'm pretty sure he would have considered the implications of making a game based on his sculptural work.
Notebook ideas for a storyboard of 'Spiral Jetty': Robert Smithson
Movie Treatment storyboard for Spiral Jetty
WALL-E storyboards
I'm interested in the Andrew Stanton directed WALL-E, because there is very little verbal dialogue, the character communicating mostly in mime using hand signals, facial expressions and body language. Even if you are not interested in animation, you can learn a lot about how to deal with non verbal communication by watching how character interaction with inanimate objects can be used to emotional effect.
Wes Anderson is also an animation director who uses storyboarding to think with. He used the storyboard artist Jay Clarke for 'Isle of Dogs', asking Clarke to reference Akira Kurosawa films, for certain visual ideas such as silhouetted framing and dwarfing characters against a backdrop. If you look at the sequence below you can see how closely the storyboard artist has to work with an understanding of camera angle and the emotional impact of camera movement.
Storyboarding roughs, worked up images and final animation
The interaction of human beings with non human others, such as cameras, is also something that is not mentioned enough in books on art theory. As an artist I am aware that unless I am very sensitive to these issues my work will be very poor. The skills that arrive with that of empathy with other forms of being are vital to our survival and all of these skills are used in storyboarding for games.
Super Mario storyboard
Roller Rally storyboard concept
Design for a platform game
The art world has taken a while to accept that games can be developed as a fine art form, but over the last few years like photography and film making, video game design has become more and more accepted as an art form.
Video games as contemporary art
Artists like Alan Butler have involved themselves directly with existing video games, in his case with 'Grand Theft Auto' a game that has detailed sections of real streets as a background against which the gameplay takes place. His work Down and Out in Los Santos (2016-ongoing) is a series of photographs that are created by exploiting a smartphone camera feature within the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Players of GTAV can take photos within the game environment. This operates in basically the same way as ‘real’ cameras do. Butler walks around a simulated three-dimensional space, finds a subject, points the camera, composes the shot and shoots it; which means that Butler is the author of the imagery.
Alan Butler: Photograph taken from Grand Theft Auto
Alan Butler talks about his work
Why video games are art
There are particular games that stand out as being personal expression. Papa y Yo a game designed by Vander Caballero, is centred on a young Brazilian boy, Quico, who while hiding from his abusive, alcoholic father, finds himself taken to a dream-like favela, where he meets a strange creature. The player, as Quico, can interact with the creature and manipulate the buildings of the favela in order to complete puzzles and progress in the game.
Papa y Yo
Sam Barlow the designer of 'Telling Lies' describes it as a "desktop thriller", where the player becomes involved in a drama that is played out through stored video clips and other information presented on a virtual computer desktop. It provides the player with numerous video segments that in the game's narrative, cover a two-year period. Like Janet Cardiff's audio walk pieces such as 'The Missing Voice: Case Study B' from 1999, this game involves you in a complex unravelling of an event.
Sam Barlow storyboarding Telling Lies.
Scenes from 'Telling Lies'
Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, and Johnnemann Nordhagen who are collectively known as 'The Fullbright Company', developed 'Gone Home' which is a game that puts the player in the role of a young woman returning from overseas to her rural family home to find the house empty, leaving her to piece together what has happened. The player has to explore the house and determine what has transpired by examining items, journals, and other items left around the various rooms. Very like Janet Cardiff's walking audio narratives, you build up a story in your mind as you invest time trying to follow what has happened. The story unfolds as you pick up scraps of paper, notes, letters, photos, cassette tapes and other bits and pieces littering the house, which effectively makes it an environmental piece but one with echoes of an artist's work such as Sophie Calle's 'Dumped by E mail'. Each piece of found text helping to build up a picture of what really happened. It is interesting that the game had to be set in 1995 because the designers considered it the most recent year in which technology had not made the majority of communication digital in nature. Perhaps that year will in the future be seen as a watershed year in relation to how society operates.
A scene from 'Gone Home'
The complexities of contemporary game design mean that it is done in teams but that doesn't as far as I'm concerned make it less of an art form.
An introduction to the complex world of a video game artist
I think we will have to readjust our idea of what an artist does in the future. This sort of technology requires, like a movie, a whole bunch of people with various skill sets and it is the result of a cooperative effort rather than individual genius. However well known artists are beginning to see how they can use video gaming to extend their existing practices. For instance KAWS (Brian Donnelly) has used an augmented reality artwork at the Serpentine Gallery
A visiter at the KAWS exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery
For one week at the beginning of 2022, 400 million existing 'Fortnite' video game followers could access a fully accurate replica of the Serpentine Gallery within the game, the artworks effectively becoming a game level that allowed a player to walk around with their avatar, and engage with the works.
Lawrence Lek, Nepenthe Zone (2021–ongoing)
In Lawrence Lek’s Nepenthe Valley (2022), the artist has created an installation inspired by the fictional medicine for memory in Greek mythology. Nepenthe Valley consists of an installation of virtual reality environments and was originally made for the virtual gallery AORA, something that is going to get more and more important, especially if Covid19 returns. The work revolves around nine “resting spots,” and it has virtual mountainous landscapes that come complete with meditation and breath-work sessions, infusing into the ethos of gaming a space for health and well-being.
LuYang
The Great Adventure of Material World, 2019, video game and video installation
In Lu Yang’s The Great Adventure of Material World (2019), players encounter a three-channel installation that, at first, appears like a typical role-playing game, with typical graphics, animations, quests, and battles. But players soon realise that the artist has changed the normal game narrative by forcing gamers to work with characters that shatter the illusion of the game’s narrative structure.
For those of you embarking on a fine art career, I think the status and relevance of art in relation to video gaming poses interesting questions as to the nature of art in the future. Many of you will play video games in your spare time, but how many of you have considered that video games could be the best art form to carry your ideas?
Most artists that want to get into working in this area begin by exploring game engines, which are the reusable components developers use to build the framework of games. By using an existing game engine you have more time to focus on the unique elements of your own idea, like character models, textures, how objects interact, etc. At the moment the Unity multi-platform game engine is free. It allows you to create interactive 3D content and I am told that a lot of indie developers use Unity for its ability to be used for pretty much any type of game. I'm also told it is very easy to master, but when I looked at it I found it a pretty steep learning curve, but that shouldn't put anyone off as I'm a pretty poor user of any software.
'Tableau Machine' created abstract images
Finally I'll leave you with an idea. 'Tableau Machine' was an AI based, interactive, visual art generator for shared living spaces. It was as its creators stated, 'an instance of...“alien presence”: an ambient, non-human, embodied, intelligent agent'. Overhead video cameras were placed in key places within someone's house, Tableau Machine interpreted its videoed environment by displaying a sequence of abstract images. At the core of the idea was an AI art generator with deep and long-term connections to its physical and social environment.
Tableau Machine at work: Notice the abstract pink image on the monitor over the fireplace.
It seems a long time ago when this was done, and AI technology has advanced a long way since then. Perhaps it is time for a return to the ideas behind the project, but to this time turn the technology around and to use the idea to make everyone aware of the ubiquitous presence of surveillance camera technologies. You don't need to install any new cameras, they are everywhere, what I would though like to do would be to use the thousands of cameras to generate footage that would be interpreted as abstract art. The audience would be all those thousands of security guards and others who are employed to daily watch over our lives and they would have to interpret the abstract images fed to them, in order to make decisions as to whether or not to take action in response to what was seen. A wishful vision but one that hopefully encourages you all to think about possible new uses for game technology in relation to the existing technological infrastructures that surround us. Perhaps a game that might save us from climate disaster, by getting us to redirect all our energies into saving the planet.
Coda
A recent review of the year's best video games by Lewis Gordon in ArtsReview, illustrates how far games have come as an art form and as carriers of ideas. Check out the review here.
Tom Betts used to work out of Leeds but moved some time ago to Brighton. During his time here he was making drawings with interactive media, specialising in generative programming techniques and computer game modifications, in particular he had made a modification of the first person shooter game Quake. At the time an old cinema space was still available in the Merrion Centre and Tom took it over so that people could play his new art games using a specially erected console. Tom had stripped the graphics down in such a way that when you played you were bringing across the screen abstract 3D shapes, reminiscent of both forms taken from abstract art and those taken from very crude pixelated computer gameplay.
Tom Betts
Computer generated art is sometimes forgotten about, but it is a growing and continually fascinating arena of practice that overlaps the world of systems art and gaming. Coding of course is a very important element within these types of practices.
Frederick Hammersley was one of the first artists to see the potential of computer coding as a way of generating imagery, you can see the relationship between his work and other process led work here.
Frederick Hammersley: Computer generated image 1969
In
England it was probably the work of Harold Cohen that first came to the
public's attention. He used a program calledAARON, which drove a robotic machine that could make large
drawings on sheets of paper placed on the floor.
Harold Cohen: 1982
I have briefly touched on these issues before, in particular read the notes on the work of Corneel Cannearts. The
history of this type of work is something I must admit to not being fully
cognisant of. However what I can do is offer a few pointers to those of you
wanting to open out your own research into the area. The work of Nam
June Paik was probably what first alerted me to the importance of the
electronic manipulation of imagery. Paik with technical support, developed
a video synthesizer that allowed him to mix and manipulate colours and shapes
from different images. He stated at the time, "This will enable us to
shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as
colourfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and
as lyrically as Jasper Johns". (Edith Decker, Paik Video, S. 152.)
Sometimes Paik's work can be too easily seen as simply to do with his
appropriation of numerous TV sets and building them into towers or robot like
sculptures. He was also deeply involved with how electronic media operated, was
very interested in why electronic images were like they were, and was using
theories taken from Marshall McLuhan's
concept of 'the medium is the message', in order to justify his
experiments.
Artists such
as John F. Simon Jr. have pointed out the similarities between concept-based
and software-based art. "I see parallels between my work and works by
those like Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt at the end of the sixties,"
states Simon. "Their wall sketches especially were nothing more than a set
of instructions…I believe that software and programming are a natural
continuation of this concept because software is basically nothing more than a
set of instructions… The ideas of some concept artists could be written as
programs and could then be implemented by a computer. The art works would then
simply produce themselves. Or, more simply: art does what it says. That’s
the way I look at my programs." (Baumgärtel,
2001, p.103) Simon has also made the link between his work and
LeWitt's in a much more direct way. See.
John F. Simon Jr.: 'Combinations'
For those of you wanting to look at creative coding, I am told that 'Processing', and 'openFrameworks' an open source C++ toolkit are good places to begin. Raven Kwok is an Openprocessing user and he is worth looking at if you want to get an idea of much more contemporary work in this area. You can get an idea of Kwok and how he works from the clip below of Kwok introducing himself.
Raven Kwok
Davidope is the pseudonym of animated GIF artist David Szakaly. Even someone as digitally challenged as myself has been able to make animated GIFs, so this area of working might be a place to start if you have never thought of making images for a computer screen before. Davidope has used GIFs to revisit concepts such as those investigated by Bridget Riley back in the 1960s. The issue about GIFs is that they take up very little computer memory and therefore they can be accessed on a wide range of devices; you also don't need to understand coding to begin making interesting things.
Davidope: Animated GIF
Florian Cramer has emphasised what has been called the 'defect paradigm' in many computer artist's interactions. This is probably due to the fact that artists are not necessarily good programers. He sees destruction or creative modification as the focus of works that specifically concentrate on using the graphic qualities of games as visual raw materials, such as Arcangel Constantini's "Atari Noise"
Although I understand the conceptual game being played in 'Atari Noise' and of course its relationship with mathematical variation and systems art, I personally much prefer Cory Arcangel's 'Super Mario Clouds'. Based on the Nintendo NES game; Cory Arcangel hacked the game and modified it so that all that remains of the game are the white clouds on a blue sky. Cory Arcangel had to open the cartridge, on which the game was stored, and replace the Nintendo graphics chip with a chip on which he had burned a program he had written himself.
Cory Arcangel's 'Super Mario Clouds'
Cory Arcangel's work acknowledges the conventions of contemporary art installations and in stripping the images down to simply clouds, he creates an oblique link between the history of Modernist painting and the history of gaming. In effect performing a Greenbergian move within the conventions of computer generated art. For me this move was one that demonstrated that this area of work was now mainstream. Much more recently Larry Achiampong & David Blandy in 'Finding Fanon 2' which is available as a UHD video, have combined art-house cinema with machinima. It has been stated that, "their work investigates the post-colonial condition within the simulated world ofGrand Theft Auto V.The result is a multi-layered narrative which raises questions about the alleged ideology-free spaces of video games". Metamakers Institute
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy: Finding Fanon 2
The issue about Cory Arcangel or Larry Achiampong & David Blandy's work is that it is work that transcends the boundaries of computer game art, becoming simply 'art', the fact it is using computer game technologies is no longer the be all and end all issue for the work. Like Hito Stereyl they use technologies as part of the way they think about ideas. See Hito Stereyl playing with ideas associated with the technologies of video making.
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin: Listening Post
'Listening Post' was the first piece of computer assisted art that I thought worked as well as any other. Even though it was made way back in 2001 it still feels contemporary, therefore I would suggest it is the concept rather than the technology that carries the weight of the idea.
See also: The work of Rachel Ara is a good place to start if you are interested in a more feminist stance in relation to work in this field.
Network Art: Practices and Positions edited by Tom Corby: See the chapter 'The Ludic Hack' in particular p.85 for some interesting comments on the relationship between Arcangel Constantini's "Atari Noise" and the work of Nam June Paik.
Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (The MIT Press) by Casey Reas is a good book to look at if you want to begin the process of learning coding. The work of Darrell Viner
