Art Beyond Games: Critical and Creative Approaches in New Media Art

This artist/practioner panel explores the status of games as a medium of critical engagement and artistic expression in new media art today. Drawing upon our own projects and others as examples, we will consider how new media artists are engaging with game design and game technology platforms in their work today. Is it possible to think of art beyond games as currently understood? Can artists’ games move beyond remediation of commercial games, or reflections on gamification in contemporary culture, as the field matures? To what extent are projects using videogame technologies are inevitably defined by their platforms in how they are received? Does creating artwork with a game engine inevitably nudge the creator into familiar tropes and experiences? How do game studies concepts like play, agency, interactivity, flow, co-presence, immersion, virtuality, and procedurality help define and shape an aesthetic for new media art more broadly? Through examples and critical reflection we will explore the affordances of games as an artistic form, consider what games open up for us as artists, and speculate on ways to work against the grain of existing approaches. We will also explore the evolving affordances of game-engine software and related technologies for our future practice. And how are emerging technologies, such as reality capture and tracking, synthetic media creation, and procedural simulations finding their way into the work of artists who engage with games?