The digital age has had an incalculable effect on human interaction, communication and creativity. Despite the dangers to privacy, copyright and other potential downfalls to digital new media, it nevertheless opens countless opportunities for artistic enterprises. As Walter Benjamin said in 1935, mechanical reproduction liberates us from the control that others have on how we view art, and from the engineering of consent by those with an agenda that control the media. It provides a medium for people to view and produce art on their own terms, and this is being exploited in many different and creative ways.
Take one of the oldest forms of communication - the art of storytelling is being completely reinvented by media such as video games. They were originally marketed as pure adolescent escapism, and that stigma still attaches itself to them today. But many developers are pushing the boundaries of gaming to incorporate an artistic vision through the narrative, the aesthetics and the gameplay. Some examples are Loved, a very simple-looking platformer that’s beauty lies in its inherent meaning, whatever the player interprets that to be. It encourages the player to question their own actions and the nature of authority. On the other hand, Coma is a very aesthetically-pleasing casual Flash game, but it’s equally clever. This creative artistic vision is not just confined to indie games, however: one of the most popular games of recent years is Portal, ostensibly a first-person shooter science fiction game. But underneath that it’s so much more. There have been many interpretations of this game as a piece of art, including a feminist critique of the game and the FPS genre. And these are just some examples from the vast, diverse and ever-growing repertoire of video games, one of the fastest-growing industries in the world today.
The generativity of PCs that Zittrain writes about is also part of the artistic value of digital media. It means that ordinary people, with a basic grasp of technology, can manipulate it according to their own creative needs. PCs and internet games are open to tinkering and modification (shortened to ‘modding’ in the gaming world). Games such as Minecraft are being modified to mimic other pop culture phenomena (like Pokemon, below) and redistributed for free. Another example of this type of activity is Machinima, whereby ‘Machinimists’ use video material from games to create films.
But digital art isn’t confined to video games. The potential uses of new media as a creative medium are virtually endless. Take poetry, for example. Firefly is an example of an interactive poem, as strange as that sounds. It begins as a simple six-line poem, but each line can be interchanged with six other lines that either change, contort or enrich the meaning. Again, the interpretation is subjective.
If you were a fan of Goosebumps books when you were younger (or maybe you still are…) might remember the ‘Give Yourself Goosebumps’ range. The books gave readers the option to dictate the actions of the protagonists in certain situations, sending them to a different page and on a different narrative depending on what choices they made.
This type of interactive narrative has been developed into something rather more sophisticated on the Web. Interactive fiction is becoming a genre all of its own and lends itself particularly well to the thriller or mystery literary genre. It gives the reader a deeper sense of immersion and an agency to influence the course of the narrative.
All in all, the internet and other digital new media harbour a diverse range of creative art that take advantage of its unique capabilities. But the material we can observe today is just the tip of the iceberg, as there is much more potential in these media for innovation and creativity, which hopefully we will see realized in the future. These media are extensions of ourselves, and the ways in which we enhance and exploit them for artistic purposes will probably also prove that, as Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’.
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