Zombie Art
In time for Halloween, Jason Nelson’s new internet game/artwork “Alarmingly These Are Not Lovesick Zombies” challenges our usual expectations of video game movement, death, and pleasure. Like his popular “game, game, game and again game,” Nelson’s aesthetic combines lo-tech folk-arty scribbles with a sense of multimedia fractured poetics to challenge notions of what a game can be. While many commentators suggest that electronic games are a new type of cinema, or a TV-age replacement for the bildungsroman, Nelson’s work implies something different.
November 4th, 2007 at 3:12 am
That was one of the weirdest games I have ever played. I do not think it was very well put together and I found some of the images slightly disturbing.
November 5th, 2007 at 10:04 am
I am curious, Joe, about what you think Nelson’s new work does imply if not a kind of “filmic” iterration. Both the idea of the electronic games as new cinema or _TV age replacement of the bildungsroman (Lord knows how that would work), strike me as interesting and provocative, but they all seem to be efforts to use metaphor to define something quite new. Is your tantalizing “implies something different” not a teaser for a way to try and find a definition that is not so chained to what we have now–i.e. an attempt to defy the failure of language to define? Love to hear your thoughts.
November 6th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
I really didn’t understand the concept of the game and I was slightly confused the entire time I was attempting to play it.
November 6th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
I think that there has always been attempts to understand new forms through the old. So, for example, television became at first merely radiodrama with images (and still is to a certain degree), and radio itself in the day was always haunted by the specter of theater and vaudeville. Anybody who attempted to forge an aesthetic based on a medium’s particular qualities risked alienating an audience used to previous sensory inputs. But with Nelson, we question notions of video games that might come from other narratives and aesthetics–for example, the question of the goal and of avoiding death and the relation between the two. If you think about what’s interesting about Tetris as opposed to Doom, you might start to have some sense of the direction he’s taking. But he’s also a poet, so that one should think about the experience in terms of spacing, rhythm, color, dynamism . . . I think he might also be creating an “outsider” aesthetic for games. You tend to see a lot of games coming out of university programs that try to be like something that came out of EA only crappier. With Nelson’s work it seems that, as with experimental film, he’s creating an independent, personal aesthetic which is appropriate to his means and addressed to a smaller audience.