ISEA 2011 Istanbul panelist : Voicing electronic arts Chair Person : Norie Neumark Presenters : Nermin Saybasili, Igor Stromajer, Isabelle Arvers Location : Sabanci Center Room 1, Sabanci Center, Levent There is an uncanny quality to voice in electronic arts, viscerally carrying bodily intimacies to the listener through physical spaces, yet dislocated from the speaker’s body through reproduction and transmission. The digital voice is paradoxically human and machinic – intimate and intense, as it connects subjectivities on the one hand and the digitally abstract on the other hand, as it passes through machines on to the other. Whether voices call to us across the internet, or across the smaller space of an installation, or from the small screen of machinima, media artists have found this paradoxical and uncanny quality alluring and have worked with it across a range of media and emotional ranges. While voice is often discussed in a political and metaphorical sense (giving people a voice through media) the aim of this panel is to address the aesthetics of voice in media art. Machinima as a Political or Artistic Detournement of Video Games by Isabelle Arvers This paper presents Machinima as a political or artistic detournement of video games. By using virtual spaces and changing perspective as an artistic strategy, machinima allow a distanced critique of a simulated world. They tend to erase the boundaries between reality and fiction and redefine the transgressive power of the game. As Guy Debord states in The Society of the Spectacle, “There, where the real world is changing into simple images, simple images become real human beings and efficient motivations for an hypnotic behavior.” Machinima re-actualize the Situationist conception of cinema in which voices in dialogs, or interviews, or voice over and images, act as different layers of content. In the purest hacking tradition, machinima can be perceived as a « detournement » or a diversion of mass media to become a means of expression, political or artistic… Machinima represents the particular moment when gamers begin to produce content and where games become tools of expression. These movies are mostly narrative, but they can also be experimental, artistic, or related to music, documentaries, ads, and feature films. They can be seen as a new way of representation in the digital age, along with 3D animation, digital cinema, or video. Machinima has a huge potential because it uses mass consumption objects that are games, to help people self-express. A recent French study showed that 99.8 % of teenagers play video games daily. Therefore, it can be said that games surround our everyday life. This is the reason why it is meaningful to diffuse a cinematographic genre using games and open source tools, to make movies and artworks, enabling and amplifying other ways for people to express themselves.

1. by Isabelle Arvers Cheats or glitch? Voice as a Game Modification in Machinima ISEA 2011 Istanbul 16 Sept. 2011

2. http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=LaDr4jgYl20&autoplay=1

3. Voices in machinimas appear as the human side of the virtual game environment. Behind the gamer performance that produces character actions, dialogs create the sense and the drama of the movie. Voices, through dialogs, songs, or voice-overs, also become game modifications, as they transform the original game function and offer a new set of meaning to the virtual realities.

4. Background From games to Machinima Spacewar!

8. The french democracy by Alex Chan http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=_CnXqxrkqWg&autoplay=1

10. Relation of Voice to Image More than an aesthetic, games are a 3D vision of the world, a digital representation of it. And in these environments, voices transform the meaning of the scenes. Voices are a tool to appropriate these worlds by adding our own stories, thanks to dialogs between characters. Voices bring sensitivity, a sense of humor, or an absurd touch to these virtual spaces.

11. Confessions secrètes by Systaim http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=Pw0zeDSCWrw&autoplay=1

12. Voices in Machinima a Situationist Détournement of games? By using virtual spaces and changing the perspective as an artistic strategy, machinima allow a distanced critique of a simulated world. They tend to erase the boundaries between reality and fiction and redefine the transgressive power of the game.

14. Can dialectic break bricks by René Vienet http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=3wPCiyjtBfo&autoplay=1

17. This Spartan Life Malcolm Mc Laren interview by Chris Burke http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=ilMwGBepKxw&autoplay=1

18. Landlord Vigilante by Eddo Stern and Jessica Hutchins http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=BuEpF0MRn5k&autoplay=1

21. World of electors Alex Chan http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=IoSNt6zK8I8&autoplay=1

23. The Influence of Theater and Improvisation in Machinima Performance In the human voice, the body travels from thought to its expression as language. « Voice is a sculpture of the thought. It is the information sculpted by the air through the organs. It transforms the immateriality of thinking into materiality by bringing the body inside the sound « Joseph Beuys, L’entrée dans un être vivant , conference at Free International University, Dokumenta 6, Kassel (1977)

24. Voice is the simultaneous presence and absence of human corporeality. Voice is the content and the meaning in language but also the sound of a person and their body through time and space. « anonymous body of the actor in my ear « Roland Barthes, Le grain de la voix.

25. The voice over represents a huge part of machinimas. Paul Marino talks about it as the “humanness that is otherwise missing from the digital package “: The voices of actors in machinimas “animate” the virtual spaces. They give life and personality to digital puppets, which were not a priori conceived by the game developers to have dialogs with each other. And as machinima directors cannot play with the facial expressions of their digital puppets in the way cinema does with live actors, or in traditional animation, they need to work very precisely on the voice-over.

26. Bill & John KBS Productions http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=oVZqFWk0JDI&autoplay=1

28. Red vs Blue by Rooster Teeth http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=9BAM9fgV-ts&autoplay=1&start=10

30. Voice as a sound image Because video games are a medium they know and master, it is interesting to get young generations to use 3D real time engines to write and direct movies. The workshops aim to transform an object of mass consumption and entertainment into a means of film production and expression. Educating young people in technical writing, reading, production and editing. Working on a playful reappropriation of the first cultural object: the video game.

31. Machinima workshops

33. Machinima workshop Go Play One Hyères http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=S6bg8ljOD1s&autoplay=1

34. The image rights for voice‘Right of Publicity’: the individual will have an exclusive right over the use and exploitation of their image (including voice ) in a commercial context.