Are Video Games Art? Aaron Smuts

ABSTRACT
In this paper I argue that by any major definition of art many modern video gamesshould be considered art. Rather than defining art and defending video games based on a single contentious definition, I offer reasons for thinking that video games can be art according to historical, aesthetic, institutional, representational and expressive theories of art. Overall, I argue that while many video games probably should not be considered art, there are good reasons to think that some video games should be classified as art, and that the debates concerning the artistic status of chess and sports offer some insights into the status of video games.

KEY WORDS
video games, technology-based art, gamers, game design, game designers, narrative art

1. Introduction

In a Newsweek article from March of 2000, Jack Kroll argues that "games can be fun and rewarding in many ways, but they can't transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art."[1] Kroll's article sparked a series of angry replies, mostly from gamers writing for industry magazines on the web,[2] but the controversy was not confined to fan culture and journalism. In an article published in MIT's Technology Review called "Art Form for the Digital Age," film scholar Henry Jenkins criticized Kroll for dramatically underestimating the potential of video games.[3] Outside of academia, Kroll's article was also cited in an amicus brief advising the Seventhth Circuit Court of Appeals on a case regarding an Indiana video game censorship law.[4] The extent and diversity of the response indicates that Kroll hit a nerve, and it is worthwhile to dig a little deeper into the issue.

Despite the cultural prominence of video games and technology-based art, philosophical aesthetics has completely ignored the area. Scholars in other disciplines, such as film, have taken the lead in the conceptual debate. This is unfortunate, since seldom are there questions in the philosophy of art that have direct, real world consequences. Philosophical inattention to video games has a de facto effect on the multi-billion dollar industry by inadvertently making hasty censorship attempts easier. The fact that philosophers have not raised the question of whether video games can be art lends credence to the assumption that they are not.

In this paper I argue thatby any major definition of art many modern video gamesshould be considered art.[5] Typically, one advances the art status of a purported art form in a deductive fashion, by first picking a favored definition of art, then demonstrating that the candidate satisfies the sufficient conditions for art according to that definition, and finally concluding that the art form in question is art. Rather than defining art and defending video games based on a single contentious definition, I offer reasons for thinking that video games can be art according to historical, aesthetic, institutional, representational and expressive theories of art. If we can agree that all these theories generally track our intuitions about what should be considered art, then when they are all in agreement we have good reason to think that we have successfully picked out an art form.

My argument proceeds in three major steps: I begin with a brief description of three recent games that have received extensive praise from gamers and game reviewers. I then attempt to situate video games with respect to larger issues about art and games by assessing the relevance of arguments about the aesthetics of sport and chess. Finally, I offer a host of reasons why some video games should be considered art according to several major theories of art. Overall, I argue that while many video games probably should not be considered art, there are good reasons to think that some video games should be classified as art.[6]

2. Three Candidate Games

It will be useful to give a brief description of a few important games from which I will draw key examples. Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment, 2001), Halo (Bungie, 2001), and Tom Clancy�s Splinter Cell (Ubisoft, 2002) are three recent games that have earned significant critical acclaim. The sophistication of these games indicates the promising aesthetic potential of the purported art form.

Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment, 2001) is a third-person shooter, a game where the camera takes a perspective from slightly behind the character, allowing the player to control the direction in which the character looks and moves. Max Payne is a noir-revenge thriller in which the player's avatar[7] is a rogue cop on a mission to avenge the death of his wife and child. The game employs first-person, voice-over narration, like many works in the film noir genre, and it includes periodic graphic-novel cut scenes, inserts that develop the narration between levels or major sections of play. Although the cut-rateChandler-inspired dialogue and voice-over could use some extensive rewriting, the game makes a great effort to motivate revenge-directed anger by forcing the player to work through hallucinatory flashback episodes in which Max is impotent to prevent the slaughtering of his family. The elaborate plot, complete with double-crossings and evidence of conspiracies spiraling out to the highest levels, helps to evoke classic noir-inspired dread.

Halo, the most successful game for Microsoft's X-Box platform, is an elaborate science fiction adventure set in an artificial world. The game mixes play modes, moving from the first-person perspective of a cyborg warrior, to driving and flying modes of play. Like Max Payne, Halo takes over 20 hours to complete. The levels (or long, goal-directed segments of play) are highly integrated with the narrative, and much of the pleasure in playing the game derives from slowly uncovering the purpose of the world on which your army has crash-landed. The narrative development is highly sophisticated for a video game and involves plot twists, double-crossing and surprise introductions of new characters.

Splinter Cell, also a game for the X-box, is renowned for its graphics and life-like character movement. In the game's jingoistic narrative, you play a secret operative set to infiltrate a hostile country. As in the other two games discussed, Splinter Cell has an elaborate narrative that is tightly integrated with the game play. It is a third-person shooter but requires stealth-like movements. Much of the game play is spent waiting and hiding in suspense. The game features a complex plot, extremely detailed character movements and elaborate lighting effects, which include stunning shadow play and chiaroscuro. Splinter Cell is a highly unified effort to provoke the feeling of tension one has when sneaking around and hiding from danger.

These three games represent recent trends in video game design made possible by increasingly sophisticated technology. All feature integrated narratives, graphics nearing photo-realism and elaborate three-dimensional worlds with rich and detailed textures. I do not claim that any of these games are great art, but they are all adept at achieving the goals they set for themselves, goals of provoking specific emotions that are typical of similar genres in other art forms.

3. Where's the Art?

In order to determine whether video games are an art form, we first need some idea of where the art might lie. Video games combine elements from narrative fiction film, music and sports. They are arguably an art or sister art of the moving image, specifically, a form of digital animation. The code is like musical notation that is performed by the computer, and the games are played like sports. As we shall see, the debates concerning the artistic status of chess and sports offer some insights into the status of video games.

In the philosophy of sport, David Best makes a distinction between sports that are evaluated aesthetically (aesthetic sports) and those that are not (purposive sports).[8] Although we may say that a baseball pitcher has a beautiful arm or that a boxer is graceful, when judging sports like baseball, hockey, soccer, football, basketball and boxing, the competitors are not formally evaluated on aesthetic grounds. However, sports such as gymnastics, diving and ice skating are evaluated in large part by aesthetic criteria. One may manage to perform all the moves in a complicated gymnastics routine, but if it is accomplished in a feeble manner one will not get a perfect score. Best argues that "an aesthetic sport is one in which the purpose cannot be specified independently of the manner of achieving it."[9] One might argue that such sports are so close to dance that they are plausible candidates to be called art forms.

One objection to calling sports such as diving art forms is that they are competitive. If this objection holds, then perhaps video games are not art works either, since they are essentially competitive. Competition is considered inimical to artistic creation because it locates the purpose behind the production in non-aesthetic goals. However, it is fairly obvious that competition does not deny something of art status. Greek tragedies were explicitly entered into competitions, but no one seriously denies that they are art because of their competitive provenance. One can compose a poem with the intention of submitting it to a contest without its ceasing to be an art work. The same can be said of any kind of art, and there is thus no reason to think that competition is incompatible with other aesthetic goals.

One might argue that the situation is somewhat different with video games, since they are experienced competitively and there are no uncontested art forms where the audience's experience is itself competitive. This line of objection fails to account for the competitive aspect of the plethora of fictions that are centered around competitions. National Velvet, Sea Biscuit, The Karate Kid, and numerous other fiction films that we might consider art encourage the audience to root for one side of a competition, making the experience of the fiction competitive. If one takes issue with my examples, any suspense-generating fictional example will do. Does Hamlet cease to be art because the audience is encouraged to side with Hamlet against his father's killer?

One might respond that although we may find ourselves rooting for a fictional character in a novel, play or film, this experience is far different from that of rooting for our own success in a game. The objection may conclude that being involved in a competition precludes aesthetic experience; however, this objection is beside the point. We should not confine the audience of video games to players, since often games are played with an audience. There is no radical difference here between video games and dance contests or poetry slams. Although playing video games usually involves a smaller audience-to-competitor ratio, there is no reason why the audience watching someone play a game must be smaller than the audience of non-competitors at a poetry slam.

Nevertheless, we should not ignore the aesthetic experience of the performers of art works. The video game player can plausibly be considered a performer in a larger video game performance. Since the primary goal of most game design is to enhance such aesthetic experiences, it would seem that we have good reason to evaluate games as art works. Unfortunately, the philosophy of art and aestheticians appear oblivious to the aesthetic experience of performers of art works. However, we must ask, does not even the amateur musician have aesthetic or artistic experiences?

Though video games share a competitive aspect with sports, the comparison between sports that may be art and video games does not bring to light any other important similarities. Indeed, video games and art-candidate sports are different in an important way. Unlike sports that are evaluated on aesthetic grounds, the playing of video games has not been considered an art form. It is true that recordings of game play have been taken and pieced together to make digital video art. In addition, some games allow the player to save and distribute instant replays. However, the performance of a video game is not normally evaluated aesthetically. Perhaps someone will make an argument that playing a particular video game is an art, but I do not wish to make such a claim here. A player can be evaluated for a form of athletic quickness, but not usually for grace or other aesthetically relevant features of play. Surprisingly, this is not the case in a chess performance.

A similar question has arisen regarding the artistic status of chess.[10] Some consider chess to be an art form, much like the aesthetically evaluated sports. One might think it is difficult to call chess art and exclude things, such as crossword puzzles, that we do not normally consider art works; however, insofar as crossword puzzles only possess one solution, there is no such thing as an elegant or otherwise aesthetically qualified property of their solution.

There are two primary reasons why someone might argue that chess is an art form. In major competitions, there are often two prizes: one for the winner and one for the best game. The best game is determined in part by the elegance of moves, the originality of solution and the difficulty of play. Whether this earns chess the status of art has centered around the question of whether elegance is a goal of the players. Even if it is not a primary goal, one can argue that elegance and simplicity play a role in the choice of moves. Perhaps the aesthetics of a move serve as heuristics that optimize selection. If this is the case, then aesthetic concerns can become part of mastery of the game itself, adding support to the idea that playing chess is an art form. In addition to judgments of the most beautiful game, end-game solutions are often evaluated for their formal simplicity and elegance. This is a more controversial basis for calling chess an art, since if end games should be considered art, then logical and mathematical proofs would become candidates.

As stated previously, unlike chess and gymnastics, the playing of video games has not been proposed as a candidate for art status. One reason that video game play is not considered an artistic performance is that video games are numerous and the technology has changed rapidly over the last few decades. As such, there is no one video game around which players have focused on for extended periods of time. Though video games appear to be performative, what might count as the performance--the playing--is not considered art. Perhaps this is because the games themselves draw more attention than the players. Unlike video games, non-electronic games such as poker and football are just rules of play: they describe penalties and goals. Electronic games are different in that they are much more than rules:[11] They include narratives, graphic design, characterization, dialogue and more.

Having looked at the relevance of the aesthetics of chess and sport, we are in a better position to understand where the art of video games might lie. Unlike chess and sport, the art is not only in the playing; as in film, the type of art that should concern us in video games involves not the playingbut the making.

4. Video Game Art: A Historical Narrative

Today, the question "Is it art?" arises most commonly in response to single art works whose art status is in dispute. Noel Carroll has offered a compelling account of how such disputes can be, should be and are resolved. He advocates a narrative approach to resolving such disputes, whereby a candidate artwork is assessed by whether a story can be told linking the problems and goals of recognized artists at a previous period to those of the artists whose work is in question. Although we seldom have an opportunity, the narrative historical account can be also applied to art forms or representational systems as a whole. I will attempt to provide a brief sketch, that could be fleshed out into a more comprehensive story, of the relationship between video games and other mass art forms.

Advances in computer technology over the last 40 years provided the means whereby artists could attempt to solve a recurrent problem at the heart of modernism: How to involve the audience in the art work? Those working in theater and performance arts experimented with happenings and participatory theatre, trying to bring the audience into the performance. However, the problem was more difficult for artists working in film and literature, where we find novelistic experiments such as Cortazar's Hopscotch struggling with the limitations of the medium. Video games allowed artists to tackle a more difficult sub-problem facing non-performed arts, the problem of how to involve the audience in mechanically reproduced art.

In the last chapter of Principles of Art, Collingwood complains that mechanically reproduced art is essentially flawed because the medium of transmission prohibits art works from being "concreative." Collingwood argues that in mechanically reproduced art:

"The audience is not collaborating, it is only overhearing. The same thing happens in the cinema where collaboration as between author and producer is intense, but as between this unit and the audience nonexistent. Performances on the wireless have the same defect. The consequence is that the gramophone, the cinema, and the wireless are perfectly serviceable as vehicles of amusement or of propaganda, for here the audience's function is merely receptive and not concreative; but as vehicles of art they are subject to all the defects of the printingpress in an aggravated form."[12]

This is the first and only time Collingwood uses the term "concreative" in The Principles of Art, and just as Collingwood himself left the notion somewhat unexplained, concreativity has been almost completely ignored in the philosophy of art.[13]

In A Philosophy of Mass Art, Noel Carroll makes one of the few contemporary references to Collingwood's term.[14] Carroll sees Collingwood's criticisms of non-concreative art as one species of the passivity charge against mass art, the claim that mass art is inherently defective because it reduces the audience to mindless drones, thereby prohibiting the free play of the imagination that genuine art provokes. On this reading, Collingwood is complaining that the audience is made a mere receptacle by mass art and that mass art is defective by virtue of its pacifying effect. Although this may be part of Collingwood's criticism, I think his emphasis lies elsewhere. Rather than criticizing mass art for its pacifying effect on the audience, Collingwood is diagnosing what he sees as a source of limitation on the expressive potential of mechanically reproduced art. It is not the art work's supposed deleterious effects on the audience that is at issue but the inability of the audience to provide feedback to help the artist create the most effective work possible.

On my reading, Collingwood is pointing out a feature of mass art that Walter Benjamin noticed in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," written in 1935, three years earlier than the publication of The Principles of Art. Benjamin argues that in mechanically reproduced art the potential opens up for the art work to fall out of step with the audience, losing its immersive grip and thereby providing conditions likely to spark a critical attitude. He says, "the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic."[15] Rather than playing up the supposed politically liberating potential of this limitation of mechanically reproduced art, Collingwood laments the handicap.[16]

We often hear it said that films can "break the fourth wall" through techniques such as directly addressing the audience, but the wall remains. It is ontologically impossible for the audience of a film to break the wall. Video game technology has allowed artists to experiment with solutions to the problem of how to make an interactive movie: Video games are the first concreative mass art.

5. Video Games and Every Major Theory of Art

In this section, I argue that according to most major theories of art, many video games should be considered art. I do not offer detailed definitions of each theory of art, since every theory has various contentious formulations, the major variations are familiar to most readers, and to outline in detail the specifics of every theory would require much more space. Instead I operate with informal glosses of the theories that are adequate for my purpose.

As the classical film theorists focused on the relationship between cinema and photography and theatre, one may think that the best way to approach video game art is to find its differentiating features with a similar art form. In the case of video games, the sister art is cinema. However, in defending the art status of games, the opposite may be more useful: Examining just how close video games are to animation and digital cinema may be more productive.

Almost anything said about video games is controversial. Some game developers even scoff at the idea that video games are an art, as do certain filmmakers, even distinguished ones. Theorists who call themselves ludologists argue that video games should not be considered just another narrative art form, but a form of play. Other theorists, narratologists such as Janet Murray, argue that video games can and should become more narrative-driven in order to realize their artistic potential. This seems to be the path game developers have chosen. Current video games have highly integrated narratives that are often far more complex than the most sophisticated noir plots. Even if you can remember the details of "The Big Sleep" (Howard Hawks, 1946), you will never be able to recount the details of most modern games. As mentioned previously, many narrative games can take upwards of 20 hours to complete.

For the past decade, there has been a moderate amount of influence between film and video games. Although most of them are awful, several films have been made based on video games. More commonly, video games are made based on film subjects. Many readers of this article will think of PacMan or Pong when they hear of video games. If so, then the possibility of creating a narrative film on a video game story should sound surprising. As my examples indicate, recent games are far more complex than PacMan; they often involve complex stories and characterization. For those who have not played heavily narrative-integrated games, the possibility of basing a narrative of whatever sophistication on a game should indicate the level of narrative complexity already to be found in the medium.

Game designers often try to make their games look more like film by including cut scenes and imitating other cinematic features. Most narrative-driven games are heavily interspersed with full-motion video sequences called cut-scenes. The game called Splinter Cell is typical. In this game, cut scenes are encountered frequently on various missions. After major events and before new episodes, a cut-scene will be introduced to indicate the goals of the level and the objects for which one should be on the lookout. In addition to including these small digital movies, games often attempt to emulate the look of film. In the popular game Halo, for example, if you look up towards the sun, the glare produces nested circles, as if the player is controlling a movie camera. This is inconsistent with the perspective of the player who is not looking through a camera, but the reference to cinema is intended to enhance the realism, as if the game were a documentary. Such techniques are clear examples of game designers trying to situate their work in the tradition of cinema. For such reasons, any historical theory of art that admits film as an art form would most plausibly admit video games.

Through repeated allusions and attempts at emulating the moving image, game designers intend that we appreciate their games as we do digital animation and video art. Modern video game designers are deeply concerned with traditional aesthetic considerations familiar to animators, novelists, set designers for theater productions and art directors for films. The development of game environments is an intensive process involving the creation of level maps, lighting sources, setting detail and visual texture complexity. As the author of a realist novel or the set designer of a film might place props in a room, level designers aim for the consistent incorporation of details to flesh out the world of the game. Character movement is another area of design in which video game designers share goals with animators. For example, the designers of Splinter Cell carefully created hand-animated movement studies for the player-character to add richness and a life-like feel to the textures. From set design to lighting techniques, games largely draw upon the aesthetic toolkit available to filmmakers. Any aesthetic theory of art that acknowledges the art status of animation would also recognize many contemporary video games, since the intentions of the creators and the variety of aesthetic experience the two art forms admit overlap considerably.

A strong case can also be made for video games on institutional grounds, since there is a developing art world for video games. Over the past decade, there has been a variety of museum exhibits of video games, ranging from technological development lessons to explorations of the influence of video games on digital art, as well as stand-alone exhibits of the emerging art form. Although not exactly an art museum, from June 6, 1989 to May 20, 1990, the American Museum of the Moving Image featured a show called "Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade" that brought a collection of arcade games for visitors to play first hand. The show traveled to 10 other locations throughout the country from June 1990 to September 2003. Since this show, the museum has had several other major video game exhibits and has almost always had a video game exhibition on display.

In July 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted a symposium entitled "ArtCade: Exploring the Relationship Between Video Games and Art," where recent video game-inspired artworks were presented alongside a selection of video games from the 1970s to the present.[17] In the same year, over a dozen art exhibits featured video game-related art work. Video games are appreciated as both art forms in their own right and astools for the creation of art works such as "Machinema" or the video loops of digital artists who use clips from games to construct avant-garde video art. In the spring of 2001, the Whitney Museum of American Art housed a video game-art exhibit called "BitStreams," which featured video game-influenced works. Recent biennials have also incorporated interactive digital artworks, and video games and digital art are a growing presence in museums.

Not only are video games gaining recognition from museums of art, fine arts programs are springing up focused on the graphic aspects of video game design. MIT, NYU, Carnegie Mellon and CalArts all have programs concentrating on entertainment technology, and the University of California at Irvine is creating a MFA program devoted to interactive media. Georgia Tech recently created a PhD in interactive media that merges communication studies and computer science.

Outside of art world and academic contexts, video games, like other mass art forms, are the subject of popular aesthetic evaluation. In December of 2002, the National Network, a unit of MTV networks, announced that it would be creating an awards show dedicated to video games. The show will offer awards for categories such as best villain and best movie adaptation. A digital cable channel devoted to video games called G4 was launched in 2003.[18] Several newspapers, including the Village Voice and the New York Times have started publishing game reviews. The web site www.metacritic.com posts summaries of reviews for three popular art forms: movies, video games and popular music.

The institutional credibility for attributing art to video games is improving. There is clearly a burgeoning art world for videogames, and one need not wait for every modern art museum in the country to feature a dedicated exhibit before feeling comfortable in calling video games an art form. As indicated by the ties between animation and video game design, a persuasive story can be told that links the goals and features historically attributed to art works to those of video games. Much like film production, game design is an expensive, collaborative project. Several groups within the production process pursue aesthetic goals common to other arts.

There are also video game auteurs who imprint a creative stamp on a series of games that show artistic distinction. Shigeru Miyamoto, the designer of "Mario Brothers," "The legend of Zelda" and other popular games for Nintendo, is considered the Eisenstein of video games. He is the subject of several popular articles and is often a hero in books devoted to the history of video games. Miyamoto is praised for his ability to create original stories, characters and the look behind captivating and complex games. Today there are hundreds of game designers working with programmers, producers, level designers, dialogue and script writers, balancers who adjust difficulty to skill and a variety of other specialists who contribute to a finished game.

In addition to the similarity between film directors and game designers, the history of video games can be tied to other arts. Much as film grew out of photography and drama, video games grew out of digital animation. Beyond the goals of verisimilitude, games share narrative themes and expressive goals with the history of Western literature and theater. In the Seventh Circuit Court decision for American Amusement Machine v. Kendrick, Richard Posner argues that the video game should be considered an art form, since it shows thematic and expressive continuity with herald literature and is at least as effective as much in the popular arts that is considered protected speech. Posner defends what is considered by most standards a mediocre game:

"Take once again "The House of the Dead." The player is armed with a gun--most fortunately, because he is being assailed by a seemingly unending succession of hideous axe-wielding zombies, the living dead conjured back to life by voodoo. The zombies have already knocked down and wounded several people, who are pleading pitiably for help; and one of the player's duties is to protect those unfortunates from renewed assaults by the zombies. His main task, however, is self-defense. Zombies are supernatural beings, therefore difficult to kill. Repeated shots are necessary to stop them as they rush headlong toward the player. He must not only be alert to the appearance of zombies from any quarter; he must be assiduous about reloading his gun periodically, lest he be overwhelmed by the rush of the zombies when his gun is empty.

"Self-defense, protection of others, dread of the "undead," fighting against overwhelming odds-- these are all age-old themes of literature, and ones particularly appealing to the young."

Posner clearly sees the thematic and expressive continuity between literature and a mid-level genre video game. Though this may not be an example of great art by any acceptable standards, nothing inherent to the video game rules out its artistic potential, here the arousal of emotions through an interactive narrative. It should be clear that a strong case can be made that most expressive theories of art would have to include video games if they include film and literature.

As Judge Posner notes, video games excel when they are about struggle. Although many games are more clearly about triumphant victory in battle, there is nothing stopping game designers from creating a game about the horrors of warfare. As should be apparent, current narrative-based video games can easily meet neo-representation theories of art such as Danto's "aboutness" criterion, where an art work is roughly something formally appropriate to what it is about. By putting players in the position to make decisions affecting the lives of simulated civilians and troops, games could potentially be the most formally appropriate way to comment on war via a fictional representation.

The art status of video games has much stronger support from representational theories of art than do other disputed art forms. In The Philosophy of Human Movement, David Best argues that there is a crucial difference between sports and art: Sports fail to meet basic representational criteria. Putting the contrast nicely, Best says that "whereas sport can be the subject of art, art could not be the subject of sport. Indeed, the very notion of a subject of sport makes no sense."[19] In this way, the distinction between sports and video games is profound. As such, video games are much more plausible candidates for art than are aesthetic sports or chess.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I provide several reasons for thinking that some video games may be art. Clear thematic continuities tie video games to the history of western literature, and games share expressive goals with other recognized art forms. Museums and art programs have begun to incorporate video games into their exhibits and curriculum as games begin to achieve recognition in the art world. Like the great figures we expect to find occupying key places in an artistic canon, there are game designers who have reached auteur status. Similar to other bourgeoning art forms, there is a quickly growing body of recognized major works in video games. In addition, game designers have used the medium to tackle previously unsolvable artistic problems facing film and literature, linking the art of video games to the problems facing modernist film and literature.

Although all video games should not be considered art, recent developments in the medium have been widely recognized as clear indications that some video games should be regarded as art works.[20] Of course, the status of an art form is never decided apart from its products. Without masterpieces, arguing that video games can be art seems premature. "Max Payne" and "Halo" are two of the best games ever produced, but they are not great art. I expect that in the course of time current video games may seem as artistically insignificant as Lumi�re actualit�s, with little more than historical significance. Perhaps it is a trivial feat, but several recent games have reached levels of excellence that exceed the majority of popular cinema. The potential of the medium seems clear: good if not great video game art is in the near future.[21]

End notes

[1] Jack Kroll, Newsweek, March 6, 2000.

[2] Numerous web pages are devoted to criticizing Kroll.

[3] Henry Jenkins, "Art Form for the Digital Age" (Technology Review, September/October 2000); see also Henry Jenkins, "Games, the New Lively Art," forthcoming in Jeffrey Goldstein (ed.), Handbook for Video Game Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press).

[4] See the IDSA's (Interactive Digital Software Association) amicus brief for American Amusement Machine Ass�n v. Kendrick (2000).

[5] A set of necessary conditions for something to be a video game might look like this: Something is a video game only if (1) it incorporates a visual display (2) allows for user input that can (3) change aspects of the visual display, (4) giving the impression of movement (5) for purposeful, internally indicated progressive action (6) in face of some difficulty (7) that exists apart from any conventionally (externally) established rules or goals.

[6] There is nothing unusual about the suggestion that some video games are art and others are not. We make a similar distinction for most every major art form. Many do not consider the photographs in grocery store circulars to be art, but most think some photographs are art. Most people do not consider the jingles in commercials to be art, but almost everyone considers some pieces of music to be art. . . .

[7] The player-controlled characters in games are called "avatars."

[8] For more on the sport-as-art debate, the following sources are useful:

Louis Arnaud Reid, "Sport, The Aesthetic and Art," British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 18, Oct. 1970, pp. 245-258.
Maureen Kovich, "Sport as an Artform," JOHPER, vol. 24, Oct. 1974, p. 42.
Paul G. Kuntz, "Aesthetics Applies to Sports as Well as to the Arts," Philosophic Exchange, sum. 1974, no. 1, pp. 25-39.
David Best, "Art and Sport," Journal of Aesthetic Education, 1988, vol. 14, pp. 69-80.
S. K. Wertz, "Are Sports Art Forms?" Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 13, no. 1, 1979.

[9] David Best, The Philosophy of Human Movement (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), p. 105.

[10] There is only a handful of articles on the chess-as-art debate. I provide a small annotated bibliography in this note, for those who might be interested.

In one of the earlier articles on the subject, Harold Osborne argues that chess can be considered an art form since it affords the possibility for the creation of objects of intellectual beauty. Harold Osborne, "Notes on the Aesthetics of Chess and the Concept of Intellectual Beauty," British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 4, no. 2.

Rachels argues that not only do we appreciate chess games as aesthetic objects, they are played / created with aesthetic goals in mind. James Rachels, "Chess as Art: Reflections on Richard Reti," Philosophic Exchange, 1984-5, vols. 15&16, pp. 105-115.

Lord argues that though chess games may be objects of aesthetic contemplation, they are not art works. Museums include aesthetic objects that are not art, to follow the institutional theory of art and call such things art would be to gerrymander the concept. Lord endorses something like an expressive theory of art. Catherine Lord, "Is Chess Art?" Philosophic Exchange, 1984-5, vols. 15&16, pp. 117-122.

Humble argues that chess playing should be considered an art form. He argues that the competitive aspects can contribute directly and indirectly to the aesthetic value of the game. Though chess may be an art form, he concludes that its masterpieces are only minor art works in the grand scheme of things. P. N. Humble, "Chess as an Art Form," British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 33, no. 1, 1993.

For a consideration of the composed chess problem as art, see C. P. Ravilious, "The Aesthetics of Chess and the Chess Problem," British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 34, no. 2, July 1994. Humble offers a defense against Ravilious's objections that he should have talked about composed chess problems rather than competition chess and that he over emphasizes the role of competition. P. N. Humble, "The Aesthetics of Chess: A Reply to Ravilious," British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 35, no. 4, 1995.

[11] I would argue that video games are unlike other formal games in that they lack rules altogether. As the old saying goes, "Rules are made to be broken." We would not say that the law of gravity is a rule governing our behavior; rather it is a brute physical limitation. In video games, the supposed "rules" are much more like physical laws than rules which one must follow or face penalty. In a video game, one simply has no choice.

[12] R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 323.

[13] In Art as Experience, John Dewey developed his theory of the "esthetic" by reference to certain unified and complete experiences that creatures have with their environments. He calls such an experience "an-experience." An experience only becomes "an-experience" for Dewey when it involves doings and sufferings and is marked off from the rest of our experiences as unified and complete. One might say that Dewey thinks "esthetic" experience is best had from interaction or interactivity, and that anesthetic experience results when people become dominated or under whelmed by their environments. For more on Dewey and anesthetic experience, see Aaron Smuts, "Anesthetic Experience," Philosophy and Literature, 29.1, 2005, pp. 97-113. More remains to be said about how Dewey reconciles the success of non-interactive artworks with his interactive theory of "esthetic" experience.

[14] Noel Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 102.

[15] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 672.

[16] In this article, I am not concerned with whether or not Collingwood's remarks on the value of concreativity are consistent with his larger theory of art.

[17] See Kendra Mayfield "Once It Was Atari, Now It's Art," Wired, 19 July 2001.

[18] Reuters, "Video Game Industry Gets TV Award Show."

[19] David Best, The Philosophy of Human Movement (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), p. 122.

[20] One may ask why the art status of video games is an interesting issue. Beyond the practical consequences the art status of video games may have on censorship attempts, the question "Are video games art?" has inherent interest. It is essentially the same question as "What is art?"

[21] I would like to thank Noel Carroll and Heidi Bollich for excellent comments on an earlier draft of this paper, Lee Brown for commenting extensively on a shorter version of the paper at the ASA Eastern division meeting in April 2005 and the two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Aesthetics for their very helpful suggestions.

Aaron Smuts
445 13th St., Apt. #1
Brooklyn, NY 11215
asmuts@gmail.com
Published November 2, 2005

Above copied from: http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=299

"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, pp 278-294

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself are as old as the episteme -that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy-and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the structurality of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted (I use this word deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure-although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game. From the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arché as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions. the transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]-that is, a history, period-whose origin may always be revealed or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps say that the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structuralality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full presence which is out of play.

If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix-if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my principal theme-is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the I center have always designated the constant of a presence-eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.

The event I called a rupture, the disruption alluded to at the beginning of this paper, would presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word. From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presence-but a central presence which was never itself, which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.

Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It would be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to designate this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era, our own, but still it has already begun to proclaim itself and begun to work. Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by choosing one or two "names," and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence has most nearly maintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of being as presence. But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language-no syntax and no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. To pick out one example from many: the metaphysics of presence is attacked with the help of the concept of the sign. But from the moment anyone wishes this to show, as I suggested a moment ago, that there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or the interplay of signification has, henceforth, no limit, he ought to extend his refusal to the concept and to the word sign itself-which is precisely what cannot be done. For the signification "sign" has always been comprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified. If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept. When Levi-Strauss says in the preface to The Raw and the Cooked that he has "sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible by placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of signs," the necessity, the force, and the legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass or bypass this opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The concept of the sign is determined by this opposition: through and throughout the totality of its history and by its system. But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity, without the risk of erasing difference [altogether] in the self-identity of a signified reducing into itself its signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself. For there are two heterogenous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way, consists in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting the sign to thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting into question the system in which the preceding reduction functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction. And what I am saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of metaphysics, in particular to the discourse on "structure." But there are many ways of being caught in this circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less systematic, more or less close to the formulation or even to the formalization of this circle. It is these differences which explain the multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who make them. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally-for example, Heidegger considering Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last "Platonist." One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for Freud, or for a number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread.

What is the relevance of this formal schema when we turn to what are called the "human sciences"? One of them perhaps occupies a privileged place-ethnology. One can in fact assume that ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when a de-centenng had come about: at the moment when European culture-and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts-had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference. This moment is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or scientific discourse, it is also a moment which is political, economic, technical, and so forth. One can say in total assurance that there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism-the very condition of ethnology-should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the destruction of the history of metaphysics. Both belong to a single and same era.

Ethnology-like any science-comes about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily a European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them. Consequently, whether he wants to or not-and this does not depend on a decision on his part-the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency. We ought to consider very carefully all its implications. But if nobody can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little, this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are of an equal pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought. Here it is a question of a critical relationship to the language of the human sciences and a question of a critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of putting expressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy.

If I now go on to employ an examination of the texts of Levi-Strauss as an example, it is not only because of the privilege accorded to ethnology among the human sciences, nor yet because the thought of Levi-Strauss weighs heavily on the contemporary theoretical situation. It is above all because a certain choice has made itself evident in the work of Levi-Strauss and because a certain doctrine has been elaborated there, and precisely in a more or less explicit manner, in relation to this critique of language and to this critical language in the human sciences.

In order to follow this movement in the text of Levi-Strauss, let me choose as one guiding thread among others the oppostion between nature and culture. In spite of all its rejuvenations and its disguises, this opposition is congenital to philosophy. It is even older than Plato. It is at least as old as the Sophists. Since the statement of the opposition - Physis/nomos, physis/techne [nature/culture, nature/art or making] - it has been passed on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes "nature" to the law, to education, to art, to technics - and also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to society, to the mind, and so on. From thebeginnings of his quest and from his first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss has felt at one and the same time the necessity of utilizing this opposition and the impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures, he begins from this axiom or definition: that belongs to nature which is universal and spontaneous, not depending on any particular culture or on any determinate norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, which depends on a system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure to another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But, in the very first pages of the Elementary Structures, Levi-Strauss, who has begun to give these concepts an acceptable standing, encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one and the same time the predicates of nature and those of culture. This scandal is the incest-prohibition. The incest-prohibition is universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural.

Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and is charactenzed by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to culture and presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact, or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far from appeanog as a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all the social rules, which possesses at the same time a universal character.

Obviously, there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference between nature and culture. In beginning his work with the factum of the incest-prohibition, Levi-Strauss thus puts himself in a position entailing that this difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, becomes obliterated or disputed. For, from the moment that the incest-prohibition can no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer be said that it is a scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent significations. The incest-prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them--probably as the condition of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest.

I have dealt too cursorily with this example, only one among so many others, but the example nevertheless reveals that language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. This critique may be undertaken along two tracks, in two "manners." Once the limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of these concepts. This is a first action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be neither a philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these words. Concerning oneself with the founding concepts of the whole history of philosophy, de-constituting them, is not to undertake the task of the philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. In spite of appearances, it is probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy. The step "outside philosophy" is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who are in general swallowed up in metaphysics by the whole body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it.

In order to avoid the possibly sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice-which I feel corresponds more nearly to the way chosen by Levi-Strauss-consists in conserving in the field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human sciences criticizes itself. Levi-Strauss thinks that in this way he can separate method from truth, the instruments of the method and the objective significations aimed at by it. One could almost say that this is the primary affirmation of Levi-Strauss; in any event, the first words of the Elementary Structures are: "One begins to understand that the distinction between state of nature and state of society (we would be more apt to say today: state of nature and state of culture). while lacking any acceptable historical signification, presents a value which fully just)fies its use by modern sociology: its value as a methodological instrument."

Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes.

On the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. More than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Mind faithfully echoes the text I have just quoted: "The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted on seems today to offer a value which is above all methodological." And this methodological value is not affected by its "ontological" non-value (as could be said, if this notion were not suspect here): "It would not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a general humanity; this first enterprise prepares the way for others . . . which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemical conditions."

On the other hand, still in The Savage Mind, he presents as what he calls bricolage what might be called the discourse of this method. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the means at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself. I am thinking in particular of the article by G[erard] Genette, "Structuralisme et Critique litteraire," published in homage to Levi-Strauss in a special issue of L'Arc, where it is stated that the analysis of bricolage could "be applied almost word for word'' to criticism, and especially to "literary criticism."

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engi~eer, whom Levi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it "out of nothing," "out of whole cloth," would be the creator of the verbe, the verbe itself. The notion of the engineer who had supposedly broken with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Levi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that thee engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse breaking with the received historical discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by a cenain bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.

This brings out the second thread which might guide us in what is being unraveled here.

Levi-Strauss describes bricolage not only as ;n intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical activity. One reads in The Savage Mind, "Like bricolage on the technical level, mythical reflection can attain brilliant and unforeseen results on the intellectual level. Reciprocally, the mythopoetical character of bricolage has often been noted."

But the remarkable endeavor of Levi-Strauss is not simply to put forward, notably in the most recent of his investigations, a structural science or knowledge of myths and of mythological activity. His endeavor also appears-I would say almost from the first-in the status which he accords to his own discourse on myths, to what he calls his "mythologicals." It is here that his discourse on the myth reflects on itself and criticizes itself. And this moment, this critical period, is evidently of concern to all the languages which share the field of the human sciences. What does Levi-Strauss say of his "mythologicals"? It is here that we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue (power) of bricolage. In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arche'. The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the "Overture" to his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few key points.

1. From the very start, Levi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book as the "reference-myth" does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is specious and the use of the myth improper. This myth deserves no more than any other its referential privilege: In fact the Bororo myth which will from now on be designated by the name reference-myth is, as I shall try to show, nothing other than a more or less forced transformation of other myths originating either in the same society or in societies more or less far removed. It would therefore have been legitimate to choose as my point of departure any representative of the group whatsoever. From this point of view, the interest of the reference-myth does not depend on its typical character, but rather on its irregular position in the midst of a group.
2. There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the source of the myth are always shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place. Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center. In order not to short change the form and the movement of the myth, that violence which consists in centering a language which is describing an acentric structure must be avoided. In this context, therefore, it is necessary to forego scientific or philosophical discourse, to renounce the episteme which absolutely requires, which is the absolute requirement that we go back to the source, to the center, to the founding basis, to the principle, and so on. In opposition to epistemic discourse, structural discourse on myths- mythological discourse-must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which it speaks. This is what Levi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked, from which I would now like to quote a long and remarkable passage:
In effect the study of myths poses a methodological problem by the fact that it cannot conform to the Cartesian principle of dividing the difficulty into as miany piarts as are necessiary to resolve it. There exists no veritable end or term to mythical analysis, no secret unity which could be grasped at the end of the work of decomposition. The themes duplicate themselves to infinity. When we think we have disentiangled them from each other and can hold them separate, it is only to realize that they are joining together again, in response to the attraction of unforeseen affinities. In consequence, the unity of the myth is only tendential and projective; it never reflects a state or a moment of the myth. An imaginary phenomenon implied by the endeavor to interpret, its role is to give a synthetic form to the myth and to impede its dissolution into the confusion of contraries. It could therefore be said that the science or knowledge of myths is an anaclastic, taking this ancient term in the widest sense authorized by its etymology, a science which admits into its definition the study of the reflected rays along with that of the broken ones. But, unlike philosophical reflection, which claims to go all the way back to its source, the reflections in question here concern rays without any other than a virtual focus. . . . In wanting to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythical thought, my enterprise, itself too brief and too long, has had to yield to its demands and respect its rhythm. Thus is this book, on myths itself and in its own way, a myth.
This statement is repeated a little farther on: "Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes (the first-order codes being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft of a third-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths. This is why it would not be wrong to consider it a myth: the myth of mythology, as it were." It is by this absence of any real and fixed center of the mythical or mythological discourse that the musical model chosen by Levi Strauss for the composition of his book is apparently justified. The absence of a center is here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author: "The myth and the musical work thus appear as orchestra conductors whose listeners are the silent performers. If it be asked where the real focus of the work is to be found, it must be replied that its determination is impossible. Music and mythology bring man face to face with virtual objects whose shadow alone is actual. . . . Myths have no authors."

Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its mythopoetic function. But by the same token, this function makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion.

Nevertheless, even if one yields to the necessity of what Levi-Strauss has done, one cannot ignore its risks. If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent? Shall we have to abandon any epistemologica; requirement which permits us to distinguish between several qualities of discourse on the myth? A classic question, but inevitable. We cannot reply-and I do not believe Levi-Strauss replies to it-as long as the problem of the relationships between the philosopheme or the theorem. on the one hand, and the mytheme or the mythopoem(e), on the other, has not been expressly posed. This is no small problem. For lack of expressly posing this problem, we condemn ourselves to transforming the claimed transgression of philosophy into an unperceived fault in the interior of the philosophical field. Empiricism would be the genus of which these faults would always be the species. Trans-philosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical naivetes. One could give many examples to demonstrate this risk: the concepts of sign, history, truth, and so forth. What I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually comes down to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. The risk I am speaking of is always assumed by Levi-Strauss and it is the very price of his endeavor. I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all the faults menacing a discourse which continues, as with Levi-Strauss in particular, to elect to be scientific. If we wanted to pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would probably end up very quickly with a number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to the status of discourse in structural ethnography. On the one hand, structuralism justly claims to be the critique of empiricism. But at the same time there is not a single book or study by Levi-Strauss which does not offer itself as an empirical essay which can always be completed or invalidated by new information. The structural schemata are always proposed as hypotheses resulting from a finite quantity of information and which are subjected to the proof of experience. Numerous texts could be used to demonstrate this double postulation. Let us turn once again to the "Overture" of The Raw and the Cooked, where it seems clear that if this postulation is double, it is because it is a guestion here of a language on language:

Critics who might take me to task for not having begun by making an exhaustive inventory of South American myths before analyzing them would be making a serious mistake about the nature and the role of these documents. The totality of the myths of a people is of the order of the discourse. Provided that this people does not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never closed. Such a criticism would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing the grammar of a language without having recorded the totality of the words which have been uttered since that language came into existence and without knowing the verbal exchanges which will take place as long as the language continues to exist. Experience proves that an absurdly small number of sentences . . . allows the linguist to elaborate a grammar of the language he is studying. And even a partial grammar or an outline of a grammar represents valuable acquisitions in the case of unknown languages. Syntax does not wait until it has been possible to enumerate a theoretically unlimited series of events before becoming manifest, because syntax consists in the body of rules which presides over the generation of these events. And it is precisely a syntax of South American mythology that I wanted to outline. Should new texts appear to enrich the mythical discourse, then this will provide an opportunity to check or modify the way in which certain grammatical laws have been formulated, an opportunity to discard certain of them and an opportunity to discover new ones. But in no instance can the requirement of a total mythical discourse be raised as an objection. For we have just seen that such a requirement has no meaning.
Totalization is therefore defined at one time as useless, at another time as impossible. This is no doubt the result of the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization. And I assert once again that these two determinations coexist implicitly in the discourses of Levi-Strauss. Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way: not from the standpoint of the concept of finitude as assigning us to an empirical view, but from the standpoint of the concept of freeplay. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field-that is, language and a finite language-excludes totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions. One could say-rigorously using that word whose scandalous signification is always obliterated in French-that this movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarily. One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements it, which takes its place in its absence-because this sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over and above, comes as a supplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified. Although Levi-Strauss in his use of the word supplementary never emphasizes as I am doing here the two directions of meaning which are so strangely compounded within it, it is not by chance that he uses this word twice in his "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss,'' at the point where he is speaking of the "superabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to which this superabundance can refer":

In his endeavor to understand the world? man therefore always has at his disposition a surplus of signification (which he portions out amongst things according to the laws of symbolic thought-which it is the task of ethnologists and linguists to study). This distribution of a supplementary allowance [ration supplementaire]-if it is permissible to put it that way-is absolutely necessary in order that on the whole the available signifier and the signified it aims at may remain in the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the use of symbolic thought.
(It could no doubt be demonstrated that this ration supplementaire of signification is the origin of the ratio itself.) The word reappears a little farther on, after Levi-Strauss has mentioned "this floating signifier, which is the finite thought":

In other words-and taking as our guide Mauss's. precept that all social phenomena can be assimilated to language-we see in mana, Wakau, oranda and other notions of the same type, the conscious expression of a semantic function, whose role it is to permit symbolic thought to operate in spite of the contradiction which is proper to it. In this way are explained the apparently insoluble 1 antinomies attached to this notion. . . . At one and the same time force and action, quality and state, substantive and verb; abstract and concrete, omnipresent and localized-mana is in effect all these things. But is it not precisely because it is none of these things that mana is a simple form, or more exactly, a symbol in the pure state, and therefore capable of becoming charged with any sort of symbolic content whatever? In the system of symbols constituted by all cosmologies, manawould simply be a valeur symbolique zero, that isto say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic content supplementary [my italics] to that with which the signified is already loaded, but which can take on any value required, provided only that this value still remains part of the available reserve and is not, as phonologists put it, a group-term.
Levi-Strauss adds the note:

Linguists have already been led to formulate hypotheses of this type. For example: "A zero phoneme is opposed to all the other phonemes in French in that it entails no differential chararacters and no constant phonetic value. On the contrary, the proper function of the zero phoneme is to be opposed to phoneme absence." (R. Jakobson and J. Lutz, "Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern" Word, vol. 5, no. 2 [August, 1949], p. 155). Similarly, if we schematize the conception I am posing here, it could almost be said that the function of notions like mana is to be opposed to the absence of signification, without entailing by itself any particular signification.
The superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.

It can now be understood why the concept of freeplay is important in Levi-Strauss. His references to all sorts of games, notably to roulette, are very frequent, especially in his Conversations, in Race and Histotory, and in The Savage Mind. This reference to the game or free-play is always caught up in a tension.

It is in tension with history, first of all. This is a classical problem, objections to which are I now well worn or used up. I shall simply indicate I what seems to me the formality of the problem: by reducing history, Levi-Strauss has treated as it deserves a concept which has always been in complicity with a teleological and eschatological metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed. The thematic of historicity, although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy, has always been required by the determination of being as presence. With or without etymology, and in spite of the classic antagonism which opposes these significations throughout all of classical thought, it could be shown that the concept of episteme has always called forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a becoming, as tradition of truth or development of science or knowledge oriented toward the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self. History has always been conceived as the movement of a resumption of history, a diversion between two presences. But if it is legitimate to suspect this concept of history, there is a risk, if it is reduced without an express statement of the problem I am indicating here, of falling back into an anhistoricism of a classical type, that is to say, in a determinate moment of the history of metaphysics. Such is the algebraic formality of the problem as I see it. More concretely, in the work of Levi-Strauss it must be recognized that the respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure, compels a neutralization of time and history. For example, the appearance of a new structure, of an original system, always comes about-and this is the very condition of its structural specificity-by a rupture with its past, its origin, and its cause. One can therefore describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account, in the very moment of this description, its past conditions: by failing to pose the problem of the passage from one structure to another, by putting history into parentheses. In this "structuralist" moment, the concepts of chance and discontinuity are indispensable. And Levi-Strauss does in fact often appeal to them as he does, for instance, for that structure of structures, language, of which he says in the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss" that it "could only have been born in one fell swoop":

Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one fell swoop. Things could not have set about signifying progressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern of the social sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a crossing over came about from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it.
This standpoint does not prevent Levi-Strauss from recognizing the slowness, the process of maturing, the continuous toil of factual transformations, history (for example, in Race and History). But, in accordance with an act which was also Rousseau's and Husserl's, he must "brush aside all the facts" at the moment when he wishes to recapture the specificity of a structure. Like Rousseau, he must always conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe -an overturning of nature in nature, a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a brushing aside of nature.

Besides the tension of freeplay with history, there is also the tension of freeplay with presence. Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternativeof presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around. If Levi-Strauss, better than any other, has brought to light the freeplay of repetition and the repetition of freeplay, one no less perceives in his work a sort of ethic presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech-an ethic, nostalgia, and even remorse which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project when he moves toward archaic societies-exemplary societies in his eyes. These texts are well known.

As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation-would be the other side. This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace.

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words, through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Levi-Strauss wished, the "inspiration of a new humanism" (again from the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss").

There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation-which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy-together share the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, the human sciences.

For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing-in the first place because here we are in a region (let's say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference. Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, theformation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing-but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.

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Take a Chance on Me: An Essay on the Mediation of the Contemporary Condition, Thore Soneson

"…time stands still in a raging speed, like an north american soap; rich in superficial drama, poor on development and coherence. Therefore the most fundamental project for the 21:st centrury would be: Demand control over time! Demand the right to be inaccessible, to slow time, to peaceful studies without the noise from the transmitters of trash in informationsociety, demand time to understand how we got here and how we can reclaim control over our own time." (1)



We live our present lifes in a crossfire of media, of stories and messages. Immersed in digital moviechannels, programmed with prepacked human interest and testimonials. We constantly decode messages, every second awake in mediasociety consists of a chase to comprehend. We live in a multimedial game dramatization, staged on web-site after web-site. We are forced to make choices, navigate according to your wishes, be constantly aware of our needs and act as a skilled hyper-text strategist.

This increasing and exploding amount of content and saleable interactivity can if continued, lead to a collapse of meaning; a state of overwhelming frustration, where the art of listening to another human being is exchanged with another quest set up by gamecreators – our urge to constantly seek new opportunities, new frontiers.

Contemplate for a while on the antropologist Hylland Eriksens opening line in the quote: "…time stands still in a raging speed like an north american soap; rich in superficial drama, poor on development and coherence." In his essay he deliberately throws incendiary torches, his viewpoints are delivered in a polemic rage. But he shares the manifest moral with a growing number of critics of media trivialities. How can we handle this condition ? How can we create unique experiences in this massive explosion of expressions ?

The Sublime

One possible road to investigate would be to recover the intensity of experience. The quality Jean-Francois Lyotard termed the sublime, the ability of art to guide us to an experience of the now – "It happens" – reclaiming the moment of experience as alive with meaning. The term "It happens" constitute for Lyotard a reverence for the experience we feel before we put words to what we feel.

One method to reclaim the experience in an age where narrative models are emptied and banal, would be to accept the collapse of meaning. To create an univere of content – text, images, thoughts, scenes – and let the machine take over. Let a randomizer generate paths for the narrative to take, leave the choice of which content to link to and what experiences to relive.
To bring meaning to such a model, we must agree on a fundamental thesis – all human communication is an experience. The process at work in art is that of an constant exchance between individuals. Or as put by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer :



"The work of art has it's true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it. The "subject" of the experience of the art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself. ... All presentation is potentially a representation for someone. That this possibility is intended is the characteristic feature of art as play. " (2)



This awareness of the process in art that it reaches its full meaning first in the eye of the beholder is a definition on one of the fundamentals in human nature – our capability to communicate.

We are actors in an ongoing process, active in a game of meaning and expression. Not, as so often in the traditional narrative structure, at the recieving end of a pre-packaged dramatization with a fixed morale and ending. To use an element of chance as a strategy to vitalize narration would be one method to eliminate the passive reciever.



In Contrast to One-Dimensional Narrativity

The digital technology creates a kind of counterimages to the superficial and one-dimensional content in mainstream media. It opens the field of narratives for real interactivity, opens up possibilities to play with time and discard the straitjacket of the linear experience in traditional storytelling. F. Scott Fitzgerald became aware of this artistic restraint when he came to Hollywood and formulated his analysis of storytelling art in moviemaking: "It's an amazing art form. A series of scenes put in a particular order designed to leave the viewer with no choice but to feel one particular way."

Today with the impact of the digital world, moviemakers in Hollywood can create alternative story structures, beyond this straitjacket Fitzgerald identified. One such play with reality, time and identity is to be found in The Matrix (Warchowski Brothers 1999) where the story develops on severel parallel timelevels, and on top of that, in simulated realities. All levels influence each other and depend on information from the other to tell the story.

Among artists, the possibilities created by the digital tools, have opened up a whole artistic field, labelled new media. The genre's aesthetic expressions expands constantly, at an creative interplay with software creators. In common though, the new media art has the computer. In Denmark the new media art scene early establised a forum for showing and discussing digital art, the netgallery artnode.dk. Artcritic Mette Sandbye commented the project Looped on this web-site, taking a special interest on the evolving art of digital storytelling:



"…the computer user is co-creator of the work. The work takes the form of a process; a place where something happens. Made possible with distinctive combination of every imaginable form of audio and visual, moving or still material. And the unstable condition of hypermedia, where every line is connected or can be dissolved in digital, replaceable units." (3)



The co-creation, the possibility to actively participate as a beholder, can be seen as a distinctive form of artistic communication made possible by the digital techonology. It creates an open field between artist and audience, a transgressive field that can accomodate "...the importance of defining play as a process that takes place in 'between'."(4) to quote Hans-Henrik Gadamer who claims that this "field" as fundamental for the interplay of art and communication.




still images from Soneson's interactive movie production SPEED.
Film clips and stills, quotes and fragments of monologues as text are randomly selected from a database The clock image is the navigation tool, here you make an associative choice among words that are displayed at random.


The Interactive Field

In the digital domain, research in the potentials of this open field delivers new results at an almost overwhelming rate. Every medialab with a digital programme investigates the possibilities of the interaction, the role of the interactor. The renewal of the narrative grammar and language comes from knowledge created in experiments with interaction. The digital innovations breads more voices, more potential stories that involve more people in communicative processes.

This multiplicity differs from the variety in the entertainment industry. It is based on an openess where the romantic image of the Artist as exclusive creator of meaning has been exchanged with an image of the Individual as co-creator. The artist / writer today create works with a multidimensional quality, made possible by digital technology.
The screenwriter and director no longer has en exclusive right to o n e interpretation of their work. A transparence has been created by digital media where the interplay - the game – have an important place.
At the same time, this deconstruction of the early secrets and models of drama in the setup of the interactive gameplay, can make us so active as co-creators of the stories that we lose out on the capability of emotional surprise and immersion in the drama. Our focus are shifted from content to process, from following a narrative stream to stearing a personal path over troubled waters.



"In electronic narrative the procedural author is like a choreographer who supplies the rhytms, the context, and the set of steps that will be performed. The interactor, whether as navigator, protagonist, explorer, or builder, makes use of this repertoire of possible steps and rhytms to improvise a particular dance among the many, many possible dances the author has enbled." Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet H. Murray (5)



Again, making the element of chance attractive in the setup of a digital narration, can be a method to transform the focus on catharsis that is so dominant in traditional storytelling into another narrative form; catharsis being the point where meaning and coherence traditionally is created for the audience. Interactivity and non-linear storytelling opens up for this intensity of experience that Lyotard named "the sublime". This experience is created before language, before explanation, before structure. Here we can trace the roots of attraction inherent in the elements of chance. Chance is freed from "planned" meaning and goal. Chance can re-create the moments of "it happens" as defined by Lyotard in our contemporary stories.

In the digital landscape chance can be the tool that again opens our eyes for stories and their possibilities to carry thoughts, emotions and experience. Since chance per defininition cannot be programmed with an intention or purpose, it can bring life to the play. It can open up communication and the quality Gadamer sees as immanent in the human exchange of experiences - "All presentation is potentially a representation for someone. That this possibility is intended is the characteristic feature of art as play. " (6)



© THORE SONESON / 2001-01-12





notes:

(1) Hylland Eriksen, Thomas "Ögonblickets tyranni gör oss historielösa" article in daily paper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet 1999 12 27 ( my own translation to english )
(2) Gadamer, Hans-Georg chapter "Play as the Clue to Ontological Explanation" Wahrheit und Methode p102-103, (1960)
(3) Sandbye, Mette Looped from cataloque to exhibition "100 teckningar" (artnode.dk Köpenhamn 1999)
(4) se footnote 2
(5) 4. s.153, chapter "The Aesthetics of the Medium", in "Hamlet on the Holodeck", Janet H. Murray (1997), senior research scientist at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(6) se footnote 2


Thore Soneson holds an MA degree at Malmö University - Art and Communication, as creative producer, 1999 / 2001. He has professional experiences as a writer / producer of new media with SPEED an interactive CD-rom (Exhibited at NIC 2001, Nordic Interactive Conference,Copenhagen), THE STORY OF A, interactive movie script, 2002-4 (work in progress), IN SEARCH OF THE MILITANT CODE scenario contribution to Michael Johanssons project FIELDASY 2002. He has written scripts for feature film and television, among them NEMESIS DIVINA, feature film script 2002, THE SEVENTH SHOT feature film, scriptwriter, 1998, PASSION multimedia performance MALMÖ KONSTHALL, scriptwriter, videodirector, 1995. For more info on SPEED the paper and other media work visit www.soneson.net


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