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Themesicon: navigation pathGenerative Toolsicon: navigation pathGame Art
 
 
 
 
 

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the Hollywood sign are not safe from attack from outer space. His campaigns, which, in the meantime, have taken place around the globe, are meticulous and have been documented in maps, photos and videos on an opulent web site www.space-invaders.com. In case anyone has any doubts, he has the proof: They are among us!

Beate Geissler/Oliver Sann: «Shooter»(2000-2001)

Within the space of a year and a half, the artist duo Sann/Geissler organized a series of LAN parties at their studio to which they invited players who were passionate about games. The results of this collaboration are documented in the two-part «Shooter.» Using a front-mounted camera on a monitor, they photographed players, always from the same perspective, and put them on video while they were playing against each other on a LAN. Through body language, gestures and facial expressions, they mirrored the drama of the conflict. Just like «Painstation,» this work deals with the rematerialisation of immaterial processes, and with the human relationship to unreal, virtual spaces. Above all, however, «Shooter»is a portrait of a generation—the gamer generation—that otherwise received hardly any

 

attention from the public or the media; whatever attention it did receive was negative.

V. GAME ART—NOT YET A GENRE…

The origin of artistic computer game modifications is at the end of a detour for arts that deal with new media. Artists have been using the Internet since the middle of the nineties. Hype about the Internet had come out, but actually, it was a comparatively exotic medium at that time, and Net Art profited from this. Likewise, at the end of the nineties, artists increasingly turned to the difficult-tounderstand area of desktop software before they finally discovered the mass phenomenon of computer games for themselves. The discovery of this secular theme in secular art also needed time, although computer games at this point would have already been available as objects of artistic modification for nearly forty years. Artistic experiments should therefore not immediately be elevated to the position of a new art movement á la Net.art or Software art. Their methods are too divergent for that. Many of the artists who work with computer games have of course been active in the areas of Internet and software art. Yet it would be a simplification if the works this essay focuses on were

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