Reboot 6 — jeu vidéo, aux bords de l’immersion — Palais de Tokyo — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 7 PM

With Arnaud and Bertrand Dezoteux (artists), Julien Prévieux (artist), Mathieu Triclot (philosopher at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard).

Two antagonistic positions today prevent us from apprehending video game images in all their diversity: on the one hand, the establishment of a cause-effect relationship between the video-game state and a myriad of phenomena supposedly harmful to society (alienation of young people, loss of a sense of reality, news items, etc.); on the other, the avantgardist affirmation of the video game as new art. The argument of immersion in an inevitably impoverished virtual world is foremost in the first case, often reinforced by the condescending idea that we are dealing with a low form of culture; the attempt to achieve artistic legitimation is behind the second case, renewing the opposition between popular culture and great art that was already ruinous for the understanding of other practices (cinema, for example). It is not a question of making a wholesale denial of these two distinct visions; rather it is about sidestepping them and exploring the video game in the various ways in which it is experienced: in arcades, on consoles, in on-line games, military or industrial simulation, but also in museum institutions, since the conservation and exhibition of video games constitute one of the contemporary issues relating to this medium, for all that it has a short history. Exploration of the components of the video-game image must guide this analysis of the places where it can be seen and played, knowing that the dissociation of playing and looking perhaps constitutes one of the conditions for grasping what the video game promotes: new methods of surveying space, different ways of telling stories, worlds we are forced to sum up differently, etc. Far removed from the motif of interactivity, dominant in describing our relationship to video game pictures, attention should be paid to the types of perception their sequences produce, to the modes of cross-influences they maintain with other animated images (film, video, television, animated film), to the exhibition procedures that reveal their perceptible potentialities, irrespective of the game model: in order to rediscover in this roundabout way, even possibly to intensify, the pleasure of playing, or quite simply, if we are not players, to experience the feeling of seeing what a video game image is like for the first time.