John Sharp

Works of Game

November 15, 7PM
721 Broadway, RM 006

Though games have been a part of fine art explicitly and implicitly since at least the early twentieth century, more often than not, they have been evaluated using the aesthetics and critical valuations of the prevailing artforms of the time — painting, film, conceptual art, postmodernism, etc. For the contemporary art community of the last ten to fifteen years, videogames have functioned as a set of technologies, processes, subject matter or popular culture rather than as cultural form with its own set of conceptual, formal and experiential affordances. The games community, on the other hand, has focused on the innate properties of games and the experiences they provide with a limited understanding of what it means to create and evaluate fine art today. As a result, the two communities discuss many of the same works and use many of the same tools and techniques, but do so to very different ends using isolated vocabularies and methods of evaluation and critique.

This talk, based on an in-progress book by the same name, investigates this gap through a formal aesthetics and critical evaluation of games that satisfies the aesthetic and critical expectations of the two communities.

Join us for the first guest lecture of the 2012-2013 year.  This event is free and open to the public.
Please RSVP here.