At the conclusion of his ascent into the Warp, Fulgrim leads his children on a quest towards a full artwork, a theatrical production fulfilling all the ambitions of every theatre-director or musician with a little dreaming, every creative mind behind the music video - The Complete Work. A work of art encompasses the totality of existence, the world enclosed by the firmament of artistic creation for the audience to step into. For the audience, such a thing is obviously impossible, with the human mind being only on a narrow few channels of simultaneous sensory input, but for the artist...
The artist when working with such an idea first works with a unity of fundamental form - the same as God's creation is done through a unified substance of All, the artist in creating the Maraviglia must do so through a unified foundational substance by which all things in the work are linked. For Fulgrim, it was the Warp, which unified all aspects of the theatrical production and its decor. This can be seen in worlds within a single medium, where a complete world is created in tableu of a single work, such as in the paintings of Bosch - notice The Garden's cabinet is built in such a fashion deliberately, the world within its firmament upon the exterior of the cabinet, opening to show the world at a ground-level perspective, looked at as if one were on a high hill.
The digital world offers this to artists as few other things do and it's for this reason that polymaths are selected-for in social media. Specialized art is outdated when all things are unified into the single medium of the screen, leading to only those who can be polymaths themselves or imitate it by unifying specialists under a single corpus, achieving true artistic heights within the world of the cyber. This can be seen in the emergence of two predominant medium of artistic expression in the digital - videos and games.
The skillset required to produce both requires the artist pull-together specialities, disparate strands of small production that then have a meta-discourse of unification wherein they form the work. For video production, graphics must be produced, requiring either/or drawing, modeling, cinema- or photo- graphy skills, then applied with some form of audio, requiring sound design and music. The meta-discourse comes at the point of the video editor, wherein the raw material that is already a form of artistic production is brought together into the complete product. No surprise that this long-practiced artform, so beloved for its wholeness by the Modernists, flourished in the digital age like never before. This is given an additional layer by player freedom in games. "Assets" are all created disparately, themselves often requiring mini-steps, such a the texture artist, modeler, and level designer working in a pipeline of varying orders to produce the same genre of end-results. All of this is then linked in a non-linear fashion by programming, where all assets are tied together by sets of scripts and systems - open and circular where film is monodirectional and linear. Film always fell short of its aspirations to being complete in this way - film ultimately always fell victim to the fact that its aspirations at wholeness were contradictory to its own nature as a straight line. Games never suffered this problem, being enclosed circles from the beginning.
At the end of it all, Fulgrim’s rituals give birth to a new species of consumer or channeler of art - the Kakophoni. The centerpiece of the performance was the audience-musician meeting, as Daemonettes took control of the show and exposed it to the warp. Kakophoni emerged from this experience having experienced ecstasy, heights dizzying from which they were unable to return to the old, forever only capable of breathing the light mountain air. Such is the experience of art from the end of the consumer. While the creator exists in drawing together disparate strands of materials and process to form the final work, the consumer enters the art as one enveloped, then as an aquatic life form, drowning giving birth to a human whose lungs can process water. The consumer enters the art first as a traveler and then uses it as a conduit as a writer themselves, forming now the author-function of interpretation in both their further usage of the discourses within their own linguistic systems and in working-within the original work.
Games like few else awaken this capacity of art. No wonder that the line between mod and original game is constantly blurred, with vestiges of the old able to be seen in countless games a bit sloppy about hiding their origins - “impulse101” in any Source game to experience it firsthand. As games operate through processing and this processing requires interaction with the meta-discourse of the work - the machine, games naturally give birth to further advances on their own technology as they then become interpreted and worked-within by creators afterwords. Worlds, enclosed firmament-globes, thus mutate, akin to cell division.
The cell-division nature of games is shown in the reverse of games, the only medium which is purely meta-discourse without an alternative craft that goes into production beforehand - writing. Writing is language, the equivalent to programming which draws it together, with no others below it. Writing however is completely codependent on all other writing - notice the evolution of form and style over the years, the consistency of grammar, syntax, references and citations - what else could this be but cell division? One work forms the SDK or ripped-assets for another.
The problem of all forms of artistry is the problem of technique over substance, the Protestant Mindset of art where the work turns into an exercise of a practiced skill with no pretensions to a linguistic flowing-through at all. This is the issue of all specialized disciplines and ultimately it takes over, where the art of the discipline turns into incest, as the discipline is speaking only to itself. Painting showed this as it went into the era of abstract minimalism, where meta-technique became the sole concern of artists - Ad Reinhardt’s matte grids, Kline’s action painting, Pollock’s barnyard drippings. Paint became the focus of painting, as the technique ultimately surfaced as primary above form.
It’s only in the production of meta-works - when image making ascends into texture artistry or set dressing - that artistry emerges primary above technique. Technique is an impossible term in writing. All thousands of years of shifting form and style have proven as much. And in meta-production, artistry happens as the artist no longer becomes a practitioner, no different from a tennis player, but a creator wholly, a builder of discourses beyond the mere production of things and the working of hands.
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