AVE 1985 > AveCom 2008

It’s all in the game…

Intro

Born out of the necessity to create a podium for video-art, the AVE festival developed into a platform and meeting-point for artists and art-students that worked with audiovisual media, a breeding ground ‘avant la lettre’. “Artist are presented who use the artistic possibilities of electronic media in an inventive and creative way” 1. The fine arts were the starting-point, and that is the main reason that, in spite of all the wonderfully phrased criteria, the ultimate condition became: “art with a plug”. A beautiful example was “Junge Tüten” by Timo Kahlen2. Five paper sandwich-bags were transformed to a sort of tornado-shape by twisting the bottom part. In a corner of the exhibition space the bags danced throughout the opening hours thanks to 2 strategic placed ventilators. Even though there were sky-high pilled up monitors all over the rest of the space, with ingeniously mixed images, the bags effortlessly drew all the attention.

However, the AVE festival was caught up by modern times. A stage for the electronic media was no longer necessary as these media were more and more embraced by the regular exhibition spaces. AVE did not have any paid employees, and despite its growing scale it remained low-budget throughout the years. It thrived on the goodwill of several cultural institutions and the unrestrained efforts of many volunteers. In the first half of the nineties a change of mentality towards working on a voluntary base made it impossible to organize the festival in like manner.

AVE made a swing with a playfulness comparable to the dancing sandwich bags. For each edition different program-makers were selected and the festivals character was derived from their concept. Under the new name AveCom, this resulted since the nineties in 4 totally different manifestations, each of them related to the spirit of the time and relevant developments in the fields of the arts and technology of the new media.

Focus

‘Interactivity’ is a word that seems to gain more importance and magic everyday. If something isn’t interactive, it is old-fashioned and overtaken by the events. Instead of accepting what is being proposed to us, we can change the coarse of fiction, a football match or a film by pushing the buttons. With 4.500.000 hits on Google, you can find a lot of ‘interactivity’. In the arts it is not much different, how else to explain the unstoppable increase of the ‘community arts’, it is certainly not because of the quality realized in all these projects.

With disregard to the question if all this interactivity really makes you happy, AveCom focuses in 2008 on the audiovisual phenomenon that is undeniably connected with interactivity: games.

Interactivity on the TV-screen started with the first remote control (Zenith Space Command) with 4 buttons: on/off, volume and channel up - channel down. The first who actually let the viewers influence the TV-screen was Nam Jun Paik with his Participation TV in 1963: by talking, screaming and singing in a microphone, abstract images appeared on the screen. After that it took ten years for the first game to come out: in November 1967 a demonstration of the first fully functional Ping-Pong game3. With the arrival of the first Atari game computer and the game “Pong” (1972 Nolan Bushnell) the game was on its enormous advance4. Nowadays Atari even has its own virtual museum.

That “Pong”, as archetype and Mother of all games still appeals to the imagination, shows the exhibition “Pong-Mythos” 5, with works of artists from ten different countries. Games have to be taken seriously.

The true meaning of the word ‘interactive’ is ‘mutually or reciprocally active’6. AveCom aims to show the interaction between art and games. Are there specific artist-games, or are the artists just subservient to the design of the game. To what extend have the games served as inspiration or have been of influence on other areas within the arts the last 40 years.

Much of the artworks that will be shown during “It’s all in the game…”, will be on or derived from the intersection of audio-visual / digital / new media / technological innovation. However, if they are rigged up together with Super-8 or meccano, we will consider this to be a blessing. AveCom will get to her next level with “It’s all in the game…”: we will not guarantee that there is a plug on all of the artworks. If fashion-designers, painters, architects, sound-artists, performers or writers were inspired by the game, they will surely be shown in this edition. AveCom will not only exist of projections, video and performances, the main part will be formed by the exhibition.

A 3-day festival, October 3rd - 5th, organized by Square Eyes Festival, will consists of digital movies, installations, performances and live-cinema and will kick off a 4-week exhibition. The exhibition will show all imaginable fields of art that were inspired by the game-world and vice versa. The main location is the Centre for Visual Arts Arnhem, where all the exhibition spaces are made available. A separate programme will be shown in the Centre for Visual Arts in Nijmegen.

PR-text AVE 1989

2 AVE 1990, Timo Kahlen (D), “Junge Tüten” (Young Bags)

3 http://www.ralphbaer.com/

4 The first computer-game was Spacewar by Steve Russel, at that time computers were room- seized and not available for a big audience

5 11 Febr.- 30 April 2006, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, www.pong-mythos.net

6 Merriam-Webster