Although such works by Mr. Haddock, 40, have drawn a lot of
attention, their public nature in some ways limits the potential
payoff. Anyone can print out the images from his Web site and frame
them without compensating him. He works as a property manager and
handyman to help support his wife and two young children.
Other artists have gone further, creating game modifications, or
mods, that turn the original games on their heads. Dirk Paesmans and
Joan Heemskerk, artists known by the joint name Jodi, created a
modification called SOD that stripped the old Wolfenstein 3-D
shooter game of all color and depth. The player is left with simple
Mondrianesque blocks and lines.
In 1996 the Swedish artists Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson
created Museum Meltdown, a virtual re-creation of the Arken Museum
of Modern Art near Copenhagen based on a modification of the Duke
Nukem 3-D game. The user can walk through the virtual galleries of
the museum while blasting monsters to bits and destroying artworks.
The game was exhibited in the Arken Museum, and the artists
relied on other video games to create modifications based on museums
in Stockholm and in Vilnius, Lithuania. Mr. Bernstrup said that many
critics were confused and even angered by the work at first but
later started to see a deeper connection between modern art and
video games. The artist said that David Elliot, the former director
of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, became quite skillful at the
shooter game Half-Life after it was modified for Museum Meltdown
III.
Of course, museum curators are often not skilled video game
players. Laura Heon, the curator of Mass MOCA's "Game Show"
exhibition, conceded that she had no talent at video games. She
brought in Alex Galloway and Mark Pride of Rhizome
(www.rhizome.org), an online repository of new-media art, to help
prepare the video game portion of the show. The museum sprinkles
computer terminals among the works of art rather than isolating
them.
Mr. Galloway, who is now working on animations that will run on
hand-held Game Boys, said that museums were often poorly equipped to
handle such exhibitions. "It's really difficult to exhibit artwork
meant for the Web," he said. "Many museums default to this cybercafe
style, where they put a bunch of computers in a museum space.
Sometimes it works with comfy couches and really good connectivity.
But there are so many examples of museums who didn't have the right
people on staff, and half the time the computers aren't even up and
running."
Meanwhile, video-game-based artists are gaining a foothold not
just at museums but at universities, too. Last fall the new Beall
Center for Art and Technology at the University of California at
Irvine opened with "Shift-Ctrl," an exhibition of video game and
computer art that remains online. The school is planning to create a
major in video game design and already offers classes and projects
focused on games. The online exhibition "Cracking the Maze," which
focused on downloads of game mods and hacks, was presented as part
of a San Jose State University program called Computers in Art
Design, Research and Education.
The field has yet to find its Rembrandt or Picasso or Kubrick, a
breakthrough artist who becomes a household name. Game designers
like Mr. Wright and Mr. Bushnell are still the mainstream figures..
But that doesn't prevent the artists from trying to think
bigger.
"I discovered games, searching for a strong subject to
represent," Mr. Manetas said. "In the time of Goya, this was the
life of the rich and of the poor; in the time of Cézanne it was
nature; in Andy Warhol's time it was movie stars and famous people.
But for us, what really matters are pieces of hardware and of
digital personae. I also paint computer and video game gear, because
it is original material."
"Nobody," he said, "has made any art with such stuff
before."
