+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+

Oct 13 ,2006

Interview with Eddo Stern, by Thomas Beard

Last month at Cinematexas, Eddo Stern unveiled Darkgame (prototype), a

videogame installation in which two participants, playing against each

other, maneuver avatars around a two-dimensional plane, their movements

projected against the gallery wall. What's unusual about this scenario is

that the experience for both parties involves elements of sensory

deprivation. One person is completely "blind," unable to view the main

interface and responding only to nonvisual cues: the vibrations of a headset

Stern designed to correspond with the location of the opposing player, and

related audio signals. And while the other character is able to see the

action play out in real time, the field of play becomes obscured when he or

she is hit and small patches of gray begin to expand. Sure to open up new

avenues for gaming, it's an education of the senses and a truly heady mod.

Well known for his work on such projects as Tekken Torture Tournament, where

gamers endured electric shocks relative to the injuries of their onscreen

fighters, and Waco Resurrection, in which players assume the role of David

Koresh as government authorities advance on the Branch Davidian compound,

Stern's art challenges and expands not only our relationships with

videogames, but also the social and political histories from which they

spring. In this interview, Thomas Beard speaks with Stern about his latest

work, as well as MIDIs, memes, and the act of straddling the worlds of art,

industry, and internet culture.

Thomas Beard: Let's begin with Darkgame. How did the piece evolve and when

did you become interested in this idea of sensory deprivation in gaming?

Eddo Stern: Well, it's an old idea that I've been sitting on for a few years

now. Before Waco I wanted to make a game where you can't see but it got

sidelined. Eventually it evolved into this new gaming concept that I'm

trying to work with, a kind of empirical role-play. In researching my

article "A Touch of Medieval," I was getting to this place where role play

breaks down: the idea of the "real"-non-roleplaying player, the real

character action, how dexterous their fingers are, or how social they are or

how aggressive, the idea of real physical and mental abilities versus the

idea of role playing, how those aspects of the person eventually come

through into a game and what it would be like to build games around these

aspects.

Where it happened for me was in Everquest--because I have a really bad sense

of direction--and in the early days of that game they made it hard for you

to get around. There were no maps, so basically your memory and your sense

of direction were all you had. Eventually they developed the Ranger class,

and they had this ability called tracking. As a Ranger you would have an

extra interface, like a radar you could use to navigate, and for me this was

the decisive reason to "roll" that character class, a class that

artificially compensated for a physical/mental weakness that I had. I was

kind of like a bionic character; suddenly you're experiencing the opposite

of what happens in real life, being the guy with the super sense of

direction who people ask for directions

Two other big inspirations for Darkgame are certain Paul Bowles short

stories--one is called "The Tender Prey," which has to do with torture and

exoticism--and JG Ballard's "Manhole 69," which is about a sleep deprivation

experiment.

TB: Do you see this particular project moving in new directions?

ES: I'm interested in making it a game that blind people and seeing people,

for instance, could play together, a game where the abilities of the blind

person would become a benefit in the game, a boon to them, kind of what I

was talking about before, the relationships of different types of talents

that people have and different types of disabilities that the computer

processes into different character types. The game is going to evolve into a

3D game using Torque, which is the same engine we used in Waco, and I'm also

going to play around with having the players fluctuate between deprivation

and full sensory overload, bombarded by too much information. So for example

having them process mental puzzles or challenges or quizzes while performing

with hand-eye coordination. That's a part of the game that I'm pretty

excited about.

You know Open Mind? It's a research project started at MIT, creating a

database of common sense knowledge for an artificial intelligence by feeding

it true/false statements, and last I checked they were up to three quarters

of a million. Curiously, while I was researching this in the beginning of

this year I found another project online called Mindpixel, which is

basically the same exact project except it's a corporate venture, not

attached to a research institute. Something about this idea really hooked

into me, and at the time I was using the data from the projects to make up

elements of the overstimulation aspect of the game. So while you're playing,

for instance, you come up to these big robots or creatures and they start

bombarding the players with questions verifying truths from the database. As

you're playing the game you need to respond yes-true, false-true and the

questions move from being very scientific truths to historical truths to

religious truths to truths where you really kind of stop in your tracks.

It also becomes kind of a language poem, this constant staccato of

questions, anywhere from: "The universe is expanding. True or false?" to

"White is a color. True or false?" So there's this idea of certain sensory

deprivation where you will lose your vision as part of the gameplay and

you'll lose your hearing and you'll gain this haptic feedback, which is the

part that I demoed so far, but you'll also be dealing with this

poetic-cerebral layer. Seems very simple at first but before you know it

it's a really high computational order, your brain shuts down. I'm

interested in stressing the brain, in this case logically, but also on a

moral ethical belief level as well with more arbitrary questions about truth

and what we know to be true.

TB: Along the lines of sensory deprivation and stress, considering past work

like Tekken Torture Tournament and Cockfight Arena, you have a longstanding

interest in transforming the experience of gameplay into a decidedly

physical one. What do you find significant about those more corporeal

aspects of your work?

ES: I think one of the quests for game designers is to enhance the gaming

experience beyond these familiar experiences, categories. The idea of action

is one that they've always done, the pleasure of action, that's sort of the

main genre really. But game designers have gradually expanded the play arena

to humor, games that make you laugh, to competition, to social games like

The Sims, to nurturing games where you're building things. But for example

horror poses a problem where cinematic devices used in horror movies simply

don't work in games. I always find that horror games are really not that

scary. The idea of genre that's inherited from film in the game design

thinking process presents a lot of challenges, like drama or true suspense

and horror. And I wanted to see if there's a way to design games that move

into psychological realms of horror and suspense, beyond the boundaries of

irony and cinematic cliches.

For me one place to reclaim a wider range of experience was to incorporate

the body. In a way the body allows for an undeniability of certain emotions,

fear is one that I've worked with, as well as surprise, anxiety and

embarrassment. Tekken was trying to create an experience that can be quite

scary for some people and that really heightens the gameplay. The idea of

anxiety and stress in the face of physical harm, and the process of

overcoming that, allowed a much more compelling experience for a lot of

players. Cockfight was a more casual piece, there's a social element there

of course, the physicality of the game allowed for players to really perform

beyond the confines of something predefined and preprogrammed.

TB: I was also hoping we could talk about music. In a video like Vietnam

Romance, for instance, there seems quite a bit invested in the pop

mythologies of the songs you make use of and the powerful sway that the

nostalgia they evoke holds over us. What kind of role do you see these

soundtracks playing in your pieces, both individually and as a whole?

ES: I use sound in two ways primarily, often simultaneously. I use music

ironically and sometimes very unironically, employing their emotional force.

Sheik Attack is a piece where the music is central to creating a rift

between the more neutral, more mechanized visual footage that you see for

most of the video, so most of the footage that's very lo-res is accompanied

by very rich, baroque music that has a historical and political

significance. At that time it was the most powerful tool I found I could use

to metaphorically recreate this relationship between the emotional weight of

utopian Zionism and growing up under its powerful ideology, and the reality

of manifested Zionism which is much more rough and harsh and harder to come

to terms with. The richness and warmth of the music and the cold tinniness

of the visuals mirror this relationship and constantly temper each other.

Then in Vietnam Romance it's quite a different relationship because I used

MIDI tracks. When you have a very emotional song and then strip out all the

lyrics, all the human voice, but leave the melody, your preserve the

emotional gush but also introduce a feeling of alienation. Somehow I feel

this is the emotion of nostalgia. Regarding the use of MIDIs, I once saw

Alexei Shulgin use them in his show and that really inspired me, his use of

a hollowed out emotion, a hollowed out Russian nostalgia for America.

And in the new piece I'm kind of going in a different place with the music.

I was at the MacDowell Colony earlier this year and I heard a great musician

who was there at the time, Elizabeth Brown. She played a beautiful piece

that was Theremin and flute, pure sci-fi emotion, but not in the way that

cheesy Theremin music can be. I was overcome by it, and in Darkgame, I am

going for a science fictiony, yet politically referenced world. This whole

recent history of post 9/11 events feels like science fiction to me. There

was something about the way 9/11 happened that was so over the top, so

fantastical, as I am sure many people feel, and images from Iraq and

Afghanistan are still resonating on that layer, like a giant statue of

Saddam being felled is so linked for me to JG Ballard's story "The Drowned

Giant."

TB: Exactly, as though the past five years has just been one long alternate

history story.

ES: Or the high-tech marine with the laser counter and F16s flying over him

riding on a horse in Afghanistan. That was just crazy. The whole conflation

is the visual inspiration for me towards the feel of the world that I want

to recreate in Darkgame. Elizabeth Brown's music for me is that, a strange

connection of science fiction and history, the sort of reality we're

experiencing now.

TB: From film festivals to commercial galleries to conferences and seminars

of various stripes, you've exhibited in a number of very different forums.

Have you been struck by any interesting differences or similarities in how

your work has been received or experienced from venue to venue?

ES: Yeah, it's interesting. The art world I think is somewhat aware of

gaming art but is really fighting to process it on its own terms--of genre

or its historical lineage as fitting it into a movement--and I think pop art

is where it ultimately will fall. On the same hand, that fascination with

pop exists in a parallel non art-world world, internet meme culture, which

to me is really interesting. Recycling icons and mutating them through flash

animations and Photoshop and what they now call mashups--All your base are

belong to us, Punch a Spice Girl--is totally alive and well on the internet

as digital folk art. Tekken was targeted in some ways for that audience, so

once we did it we put up a little QuickTime movie and it had gotten picked

up by Memepool and Metafilter and Fark and other Slashdot-like sites. It's

funny that something like Tekken can work on both worlds at the same time,

net meme culture and within a history of body art and performance as well.

Showing Waco at E3 was exciting, having the industry take a look. I think

with games there's potentially a more complex relationship than we're used

to with, say, products that you buy as gadgets versus fine art objects. The

idea of a game busting into a gamer community, a game that's very different

from what they're used to but that still adheres to some rules and standards

of game design and gameplay technology, that's where I am most happy to be

now. I can see game projects like Tekken and Waco and hopefully the new game

project feeding back into a much larger awareness of what can be done both

with gaming and art.

+ + +

Thomas Beard is a writer and curator of film and electronic art. From

2005-2006 he was Program Director of Ocularis, a non-profit media arts

organization based in Brooklyn. Prior to that he served as a programmer at

Cinematexas, and has organized screenings and exhibitions at such venues as

Aurora Picture Show, Chicago Filmmakers, MassArt Film Society, Pacific Film

Archive, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.