| Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers. |
art. «I see parallels between my work and works by those like Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt at the end of the sixties,» says Simon. «Their wall sketches especially were nothing more than a set of instructions…I believe that software and programming are a natural continuation of this concept because software is basically nothing more than a set of instructions… The ideas of some concept artists could be written as programs and could then be implemented by a computer. The art works would then simply produce themselves. Or, more simply: art does what it says. That’s the way I look at my programs.»[24] Florian Cramer has also taken up this argument, but emphasizes that, compared to its historical predecessors, software art today is, «no longer a laboratory construct and paradigm of conceptualistic purification but rather, since the spread of errorridden code from PCs and the Internet, a cause of crashes, incompatibilities and viruses; a symbol of contingency instead of stringency.» [25] The defect paradigm has also played a role in artistic modifications of computer games although, interestingly enough, a considerably smaller one than in Internet and software art. Above all,
destruction—or should we say creative modification?—is the focus of works that specifically concentrate on using the true graphic qualities of games as ‹visual raw materials› like, for example, in Arcangel Constantini's «Atari Noise» or Jodi’s «JET SET WILLY ©1984». [WB und http,//jetsetwilly.jodi.org] By way of example in what follows, I will present some of these works that deal explicitly with abstract representational forms of computer games.
