Short interview with artist David Blandy

In Fine Art, there's a rich heritage of sympathetic engagement with cutting edge software and technology and I love this corner of the art world*! In this short post I'm publishing an online interview with Artist David Blandy who uses games and Machinema.

ID: What drew you to using game engines?

DB: I like to subvert systems from within. So when talking about the virtual self it makes the most sense to use the virtual spaces I’m most familiar with as a location. In the Finding Fanon works the world of Grand Theft Auto 5 becomes a found object, an arena to house the journey of our two avatars as they search for Fanon’s lost plays. In Backgrounds the backgrounds from fighting games such as Streetfighter Alpha and King of Fighters 98 become a place for my father, a landscape painter, to enter the landscapes of my screen life. It was natural to use game engines, as they’re one of the places that I live, the site of everyday virtuality, with their own aesthetic and rules.

ID: In the works I've seen, you use the engines to deliver narratives, does allowing the viewer freedom to explore a space you've created have any appeal?

DB: Yes it really does. I’ve just written a tabletop roleplaying game (alongside a group of RPG gamers from Essex) and through that experience I can see how that sort of fully interactive space could be used to think through societal relationships. Taking that space into the virtual would be a big task but I think it could work really well.

ID: I'm wondering how much you let the engine dictate the look and feel of your work, or do you approach it with a strong aesthetic as well as narrative and work towards that?

DB: I like to strip the engines down to bare essentials, often just leaving the landscape and the protagonists, allowing the image to be read as something cinematic without denying the origins in the game.

I approach making machinima in the same way as using video, finding interesting images that function in a particular way when set against the script. The meaning always comes in the space between the sound and image.

The narrative structure tends to be very simple: A journey of a few protagonists across a landscape to find a new space, sometimes with the implication of something being unresolved. The voiceover then talks of thoughts and conversations that are brought up by this combination of subjects, whether that’s Larry and my families or the relationship between my father and me.

These works very much seek to illustrate falling into another pre-existing aesthetic space, taking on all its associations and layered meanings. GTA is not a neutral space. King of Fighters is not a neutral space. The virtual world is not a neutral space, it carries all the baggage that players bring from the physical world.