beams, immediately reminiscent of Mondrian paintings. Later versions of «Jet Set Willy © 1984» develop this aesthetic further in another direction where, for example, all the colours are removed from the game or the playing scenarios are replaced with nothing but text. Of course, this makes the work a modification of an existing game that is reminiscent of the work of Tom Betts or Jodi’s own modifications of «Quake» and «Quake.» Yet while Jodi show a pre-enacted version as a video, they use their work—as «Machinima» filmmakers do—as software in order to produce their own films and to give their work another conceptual direction. Instead of deconstructing the ‹contents› of the program, only its re-designation as a tool for generating animations is in the foreground.

Norbert Bayer («Mr. Ministeck»): «Touchscreenss» (1998–2001)

Norbert Bayer uses computer games to generate picture motifs for his plastic mosaics. This Berlin artist, who operates under the pseudonym «Mr. Ministeck»[27], turned the toy of the same name from the seventies into his medium. His series, called «Touchscreens,» is based on screen shots from games on the C 64 home computer. Bayer re-materializes these immaterial

images that represented an initial contact with digital images for an entire generation of computer users. His works are reminiscent of Pop Art in their emphasis on technical composition, like the use of rasters, which Roy Lichtenstein or Sigmar Polke stress in their paintings, or the blurring and fuzziness of photographs that Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter produce.

IV. Socialisation

As should be clear by now, computer games are not only a fascinating aesthetic development but also a social movement. This is shown by different phenomena like, for example, LAN parties, in which as many as several thousand players face off against each other in a kind of tournament. Then there are online players, who in games like «Ultima-Online,» have created their own economies, whose ‹products› are traded for real money in ‹real life'. There are also amateur graphic artists who, using the ‹photo album› function from «The Sims,» build entire photo novels. J.C. Hertz speaks of «a decentralized culture that rapidly learns, adapts and selects for best practices. This culture and its processes are perhaps the Industry’s greatest assets.» [28] The works that will be described in the following section deal with the