Early Access: Ceci n'est pas une tomate

I totally missed the "I Fucking Hate Tomatoes" part the first time! But I remember the credits. Anyway, just posting to nominate I Fucking Hate Tomatoes as the title. Just think of tomato haters you'd catch in your net. Anyway, I think the "This is not a tomato" angle is disorienting. I actually watched it again mainly to see how that statement related to the subject matter. Because I couldn't recall one day after. I think its what contemporary philosophers call a purely-verbal argument. That is an argument where the crux is the words themselves, and the belief is that all words are equal and so there are operations that can be performed on the words in the abstract to eliminate the argument, and therefore there is not an argument. Think reducing an algebraic equation. Discovering those operations is a relatively new discipline, that I think David Chalmers turned his attention to after giving up on meaningful interactions with his colleagues on the subject of "consciousness." (Which like "art" seems to circle this drain ad infinitum.)

Michael

I may or may not restate this when the public post goes up; But not wanting to go back to the Roget Ebert debacle, and again trying to get into his head; I think just as context can make anything art, so can context disqualify said thing as art. In Roger's mind I think he saw too many automatic disqualifications. The first big story about games being featured I think in the MoMa I believe placed the games in the "design" section, which is not art per se, but where more functional, less passionate, utilitarian things go. Roger would probably concede that the average video game is "craft" somewhere on a spectrum from design to craft to art... In your headline it says (accurately or not) that "videogames" will never be art. Which is not the same as saying there will never be A videogame that is widely thought to have the qualities of art. Or to put it another way, if that videogame arrives, Robert believed that it will not have the force to retroactively make all videogames art in the public imagination. He was probably also saying he believed videogames will not achieve social relevance. Relevance in the sense of transcending appeal to a niche audience. But that is a much weaker argument. (And I realize this video isn't really about this. Which is what makes it great. But it's still interesting nonetheless.) Lastly, exhibit A) my experience watching some videos of the new follow-up to Shadow of the Colossus: The Last Guardian. My actual real difficulty with this trilogy is how fast and loose it plays with acrobatics and clinging for your life. TLG took this difficulty I had and seems to have amped it up several fold. Just watching videos of it (and the level design I found completely trite) would make my heart fall out of my chest about once every 15 seconds. That is because the boy character is constantly performing death defying feats, and the game gives them no choice but to do so. It is virtually the only thing that ever happens in the game. In any normal media any one of the times the boy risked it all on an impossible death defying leap or grasp that would almost surely be his death, that would be a centerpiece of the media. It would be the moment your heart dropped. And I can't watch this game because my heart drops constantly and I get sweats and I worry I will have a heart attack... For "gamers" they must turn off that part of themself to enter the game. I think that disqualifies it for possessing any humanistic qualities whatsoever right out of the box. And if art isn't human, I don't know what art is.

Michael

Happy New Year! And, yeah, one of the reasons I kept this only tangentially games-related is because I think the conversation applies in so many different arenas. I feel like so much conversation is impossible until you establish the proper framework for that discussion, and I've been getting increasingly interested in work that doesn't just argue a position but establishes the framework necessary for that position to be meaningful.

Ian Danskin

Hehe, I think going to art school may have skipped me straight to Step 3 on that chart.

Ian Danskin

Yeah, I also learned that plant taxonomies are way more complicated than I imply, so I just gotta hope folks will let me speak a little reductively. If we get down to the nitty-gritty, an data is to some extent cultural and arbitrary, so we're really just talking about degrees on a spectrum here, but group some stuff into "hard" science and some stuff into "social" science is still useful at times. Sometimes it's very hard not to fall down the rabbit hole of WHY IS ANYTHING WHAT IT IS???

Ian Danskin

Also can I take this opportunity to just praise The Treachery of Images? Its somewhat simplistic but in my experience its an excellent work use to introduce people for the first time to the arc of "oh that's really clever" "oh no wait that's trite and obvious" "oh no wait that's actually really insightful and has wide reaching implications". As an educational tool to ease people into thinking a bit more on a more...interconnected and critical level, I just love it

Alex Hambrock

I think I would disagree with the idea that math is a realm of natural things with natural meanings, but I'm also not sure how much it actually matters to the point you're making. The mathematical systems we use every day are technically based on a set of arbitrary axioms that we use because they correlate extremely extremely well to the observed universe and fall into a similar category of "based on evidence and consensus we say this because its just useful", but alternate mathematical systems do exist and have their uses and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem hinges on the separation between systems that can and can't demonstrate certain properties of prime numbers (not that primes are special, they were just the easiest way to demonstrate "this is a problem for systems that need to do anything remotely useful"). But like I said, I'm not sure how important this very technical point is

Alex Hambrock

Title Thoughts: I would at least go with English if you're appealing to a primarily english audience. I'm one of those people who knows 0 French so I couldn't even tell what the title was even tho it's a fairly simple sentence featuring a picture of a tomato. But I'm also AWFUL at titles so I will leave it there. Other thoughts: I like these videos where you contextualize and explain problems of the human condition that I am aware of and navigate readily but have never taken the time to sit out and organize and reach some kind definitive response to. My feelings on the 'are video games art' conversation has, for years, been 'this is a stupid conversation that I find incredibly uninteresting'. And that is where it remains. (And I'm NGL at first I was kind of disappointed to see you throwing your hat into the ring because I am also sick of videos about people defending or decrying the notion that video games are art, but surprise! This is actually exactly the perspective on that whole nonsense fight that I enjoy.) But with a video like this I can do a bit of a better of explaining WHY I don't care, and why I don't think it is relevant, and why I don't think the prig trying to tell me video games aren't art doesn't even actually care about art to begin with. I also think this has a lot of uses beyond this conversation as well, though. I deal with similar issues a LOT in SJW circles. I.E. as a white person raised in a middle class white society where I only SAW people who were not white on a limited basis, I was raised on what is to me the 'standard' definition that racism is, that basically thinking or acting poorly toward a person on the basis of their skin color, regardless of what that color is, is racism. Easy to understand, easy to convince myself such issues were largely a relic of the past, certainly what I took away from my 2nd grade education and never questioned because it would be like 15 years before anyone challenged that idea. Now the common conversation, in circles I now frequent, is that racism is about structural and systematic power imbalance, that while you can be bigoted against white people on the basis of their skin color, it isn't racism in a country where white people have and have ALWAYS had the dominant power. And I don't even struggle to believe this but for a long time I dug my heels in against the idea that you could just change the meaning of a word like that and expect me to know about it, until I realized that, you know, this isn't actually some new Tumblr thing. This conversation has been happening for a long time and I've never been hearing it or taught it from that perspective due to growing up in a society with an invested interest in making sure I don't think or care about the fact that in my world white people have always had the power and want to keep it and would prefer to not critically examine that. Anyway, so what I'm saying is, and I'm sure you've seen this, a LOT breath wasted over the definition of and use of the word racism by people who have histories and invested interest in maintaining a specific definition. A lot of derailing tactics, perhaps not even intentionally utilized, to avoid conversation of behaviors and their effects because it's preferable to just say "I'm not a racist, because racism means X" repeatedly, argue over definitions of words, get frustrated and offended, refuse to engage deeper. This can all be cross applied to pretty much all social justice issues. Homophobia, transphobia, I saw this conversation happening over the word 'islamaphobia' once. It's a very frustrating facet of navigating conversation, and perhaps endemic of the way we approach education as a matter of memorizing facts. If you memorized the definition of a word over 20 years ago and have been operating under that general understanding your entire life, it IS kind of dicks when a movement comes along and to tell you you're wrong. ANYWAY delightful video, and happy new years (=

AV

Definitely not intentional, will fix before I take this thing public. Thanks!

Ian Danskin

I kinda stopped counting videos for specific months when I realized I was falling so far behind in the Fall. The promise on the Patreon is "release a video most months," so I guess I'm counting this as 2016 because that means I released greater-than-6 videos, so that's technically more than half the months. Aiming to be much, much more productive in the coming year.

Ian Danskin

P.S. For me the most interesting argument going for video games is the 3-D element. Everyone thought hypertext was going to be a new art form. But what they didn't realize is the linear book is actually a great memory aid. When the book branches out like a tree, our brains don't have any facility for processing it. The 3-D video game locates the hypertext episodically and in 3-D space, which we do have mental faculties for. The 3-D video game is the natural substrate for the hypertext. Anything can be art perhaps. But do we have the brains to appreciate them or contain them or not is the more interesting question.

Michael

I broadly agree with Roger Ebert. I think he means video games as we know them, and if he's reincarnated into a future where "video games" have risen to the challenge, or rather the echelon occupied by older art forms, by then we will have subdivided them into categories that are not "video game." The primary challenge to video games being art is how they are made. Right now making video games is broadly not something people can do. And when they do so, they accept very hard constraints in order to do so. This is because the technology is absolutely inadequate. The main people's whose business it is to make video game is large corporate conglomerates. The role of the corporate conglomerate is to refine the presentation, to fund its development, but not to give rise to the thing in itself. There are "indie" actors but their output doesn't compare to the time when like products were made by large, moneyed commercial enterprises. A lot of the future right now is learning how to do things without the involvement of corporations. And the only reason we can do that is because of the advent of digital technologies and data warehousing on orders never dreamed of in the pre-digital era. If you want to truly make a video game, like an artist can truly make most kinds of art, then you are in for a difficult journey. I can tell you because that's what I do, and you can be prepared to spend up to 30yrs just to develop the tools you need almost from scratch. If you want to have meaningful control over the final product. That's if you started at the turn of the century. And you have to be prepared to do the damn near impossible, and have the ability to do so, which is continue to do something even while having no significant facilitation or approval from others, basically forever. I think this is so difficult that if something isn't seen as valuable by others then it simply doesn't yet exist, because people simply do not possess the willpower and fortune to bring something wholly new into existence without the support of others behind them. IOW: you better be goddamn near insane to truly affect this juvenile medium. OH AND, magnificent work. You've knocked it out of the park again.

Michael

Killing time before viewing I'm reminded of two definitions of art from my yesterday. 1 comes from the Sense8 "Christmas Special" which I'm watching in chunks: Art is love made public. Probably not an original saying, but an apt one. 2 comes from my learning that David Bowie was potentially to star in a lost Derek Jarman based on Jung's Aion yesterday. Taken indirectly from a site with some backstory on that: "Ten years of reading in these forgotten writers, together with a study of Jung and his disciples proved vital in my approach to both Jubilee and The Tempest. As for the black magic which David Bowie thought I dabbled in like Kenneth Anger, I’ve never been interested in it. I find Crowley’s work dull and rather tedious. Alchemy, the approach of Marcel Duchamp, interests me much more." Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (1991) (I think a column of some kind?) Translation: art is seeing the everyday in a new light. Or putting a frame on it. Or you might even say an <i>artificial</i> light. Source (<a href="http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2011/07/04/mister-jarman-mister-moore-and-doctor-dee/)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2011/07/04/mister-jarman-mister-moore-and-doctor-dee/)</a>

Michael

I'm somewhat inclined to agree here. As long as the thumbnail image shows "ceci n'est pas une tomate," I think Ian can avoid potentially alienating the prospective audience by listing the YubTub title as "This is Not a Tomato," and maybe a pithy subtitle ("What we talk about when we talk about art," or maybe a reference that hasn't been beaten to death).

Spare Parts

Quick misspelling of "label" in "indie label," in case you care about that (or it wasn't intentional). This is a wonderful essay. I'm so happy to see a new video from you!

Xingcat

Awesome piece, as usual! So does this count as a December or January release in your books?

Jenny Wang

Fantastic piece!

Yeah this is great! Maybe do like a subtitle, such as "how we talk about art" or something. To create less confusion. I get that the french title makes sense, but you speak english during the video and there might be people from France who click on the video and don't understand vice versa.

Ossian Olausson

First off, AMAZING WORK. Gave more clarity to this debate in 10 minutes than an entire philosophy class on Aesthetics that I took in college. Good on you for finishing it in December too. Title feedback: The title might jump out at people more if were in English? Obviously I understand why you put it in French, but personally I didn't figure out what it said before watching it, which leads me to believe that perhaps other people might not be drawn to check it out based on the title. Also, you don't actually talk about Treachery of Images in the video - which is fine, but for people not familiar with the work... it might cause significantly less confusion if you let an English title essentially translate the french in the thumbnail. Also, Re: 3:14 <a href="https://s29.postimg.org/qxv2f69if/Screen_Shot_2016_12_31_at_5_58_40_PM.png" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://s29.postimg.org/qxv2f69if/Screen_Shot_2016_12_31_at_5_58_40_PM.png</a>

Bevibel Harvey

Love it! There was some flickering on some photos though, it's quite subtle, but you might want to fix it before you send this out into the wild