Immersion into the Uncanny vs. Established Aesthetic Experiences - on the change of interface and imagery in video art games

image: DiMoDA 2.0 Morphe Presence

King, Dorothée: Immersion into the Uncanny vs. Established Aesthetic Experiences - on the change of interface and imagery in video art games, in “In and Out of Art History: The Video Games Conundrum”, LEA (The MIT Press) Special Issue, 2018.

Since Nam Jun Paik's experiments with video in art spaces and his invention of the idea of a 'super highway', many artists and exhibition makers have explored aesthetic experiences in video art. In 2005, Marnix de Nijs installed his interactive video game Run Motherfucker Run for the technology-savy audience of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. A film with an uncanny atmosphere, somewhere between a thriller chase-scene and urban horror, expands in front of the user who, stimulates the image through his pace in running on a large tread mill. In 2017, after twelve years of rapid technological change in digital visual representation, the encyclopedic RISD museum in Providence shows DiMoDA 2.0: Morphe Presence. With sleeker rendered images and predictable narration we appear to have arrived at an artistic video game aesthetic that invokes familiar and agreed-upon modes of aesthetics and interaction. Through the analysis of the interplay between interface and imagery in relation to historical trends in exhibition culture, I analyze the above mentioned art works in seeking to understand the path of video game art into established museums.