Shaken Not Stirred: The Video Game is Shape Arts’ first incursion into video games.
The original Shaken Not Stirred was performance art by Tony Heaton OBE, enacted during the Block Telethon protests that anyone going through the NDMAC archive will encounter. The piece was Heaton smashing a pyramid of stacked charity cans with a prosthetic leg: a literal breaking of a pyramid, a symbol of the top-down hierarchy disabled people lived under.
Shaken Not Stirred is still exhibited as an art piece, most recently in DAM In Venice. But it is no longer smashed, and instead the cans are stacked and left in their pyramid form, only occasionally toppled by wind or vibration and it falls to some poor intern to stack them back up before anyone arrives. Now effectively only half the art piece is exhibited; the pyramid of power stands uncontested.
This is an empty space in the arts in which video games can enter: as interactive and repeatable performance art. Shaken Not Stirred: The Video Game allows the player to reenact the experience while gamifying it – players score points on their throw of the prosthetic leg and what the flying cans bump into. Installed onto an arcade cabinet, the game can be placed physically next to the actual pyramid the player is digitally smashing.
Where video games fit into art is a bit of an unanswered question right now. In the broader culture video games are regarded as just entertainment, not least because they are intentionally made that way. Video games have the misfortune of being birthed into an era where capitalism and marketing has extended its chokehold on the arts. Film had to go through being a novel system of documentation before it became a respected art form. Video games have yet to reach that maturity and any growth is stunted within an economic model aimed towards engaging an audience’s attention and wallet. Thoughts or feelings, the interests of art, are surplus to need.
There is a further hurdle to seeing video games as art: the method by which we engage with them. When people think of viewing fine art, they imagine a library-quiet art gallery where people solemnly look at artworks they’re not allowed to touch. On the other hand video games conjure images of friends excitedly playing on a couch, playing on your phone on the toilet, or someone in a messy room with a face lit only by the neon glow of a computer monitor – all distinctly casual imagery that is at odds with the austere, high-minded environment art has been situated in. Where does a beeping arcade cabinet featuring a pixelated man scoring points by smashing a pyramid of charity cans fit in here?
The myth that art needs to be viewed in solemnity comes from the passivity with which it is historically consumed. There is a (perceived) one-way influence of fine art upon the viewer, in contrast to a video game, where engagement with the artwork is spurred by the viewer’s actions. Interacting with a painting in a tactile or noisy way, as you would a video game, will get you ejected from the gallery, so we’ve come to believe that a video game’s level of interactivity itself doesn’t fit in there.
There are of course pieces of fine art that utilise audience interactivity – the problem is they are largely shit work, guff like coloured sand ‘tracing the movements of life’ as people walk through it. These lack any of the craft of a video game that might convey meaning to the viewer. Art has ignored video games and left itself with the worst of both worlds. The stuffed suits have been happy to keep video games this way as producing them as crass entertainment lines their pockets.
This anti-interactivity norm, which bars the video game and only allows artwork where the interactivity is devoid of depth, stems from how we’ve historically engaged with paintings and sculptures. It says nothing about how we should engage in all art. Shaken Not Stirred is disability art. It was born out of a fight for civil rights against an oppressive culture and politic. It is not in the business of maintaining bad attitudes, but changing them.
Shaken Not Stirred: The Video Game augments the artistry of the original piece. Not only does it recapture the original performance in the way a video recording might, but it allows the player to experience it personally, with Tony Heaton OBE as their avatar. The player not only gets all the things a passive viewer of a video would, but also leaves them with some small connection to the personal experience of Heaton. Is this not a deeper, dare I say more artistic experience of Shaken Not Stirred than looking at a static pyramid of charity cans?
Video games can open a whole new avenue of engagement in the art gallery, either as standalone pieces or augments to physical artwork like Shaken Not Stirred. This is NDMAC’s small contribution.