The Dutch-Belgian artist duo JODI’s series Untitled Game consists of various levels for the first-person shooter Quake. The levels presented are CTRL-Space and Arena. The players are confronted with just a white surface, which is framed by image elements. Arena represents the transformation of a game into an entirely unplayable one, and is the most radical intervention in the structures of the gameplay. The degree of abstraction goes as far as the complete eradication of representational images. The artistic strategy of deletion used evokes associations with monochrome images in art history. In Zen for Film (1963) Nam June Paik let an unexposed, ‘empty’ roll of film run through a projector.

Zen for Film is an art historically significant film by the Korean composer and video artist Nam June Paik. The original version ran for 20 or sometimes 30 minutes. The film is simply a transparent blank film, which accumulates dust and scratches as it passes through the projector over time with each successive screening. This idea or an “undetermined” piece stems from Paik’s approach to music composition influenced by John Cage’s 4’ 33” (1952), a score which is based on imperfections found in paper.

Since the 1990s, we have seen artists turning their attention to video games. The Chinese artist Feng Mengbo is one of the pioneers of this new artistic focus on digital games. The spectacular work Long March: Restart leans aesthetically toward the two-dimensional video games of the 16-bit era. In Feng Mengbo’s video game, the world of symbols of communist propaganda mixes with set pieces of the Western consumer world and Asian stereotypes in video games such as Street Fighter II.

A stationary bicycle is operated by a user in a darkened space to simulate a bicycle ride through the streets of Manhattan, Amsterdam, and Karlsruhe. The visitor is actively integrated into the installation by using the bicycle, which is positioned in front of a screen onto which three-dimensional street views of the different cities are projected. The city views are composed of computer-generated three-dimensional letters that form the buildings along the sides of the streets and at the same time make up words and sentences that have literary or historical references to the depicted location. (Text by Chiara Marchini)

Players move within a three-dimensional environment, which they experience from the first-person perspective. The surroundings constantly adapt in a subtle way to how the player treats the environment, how they explore it, and how they get to know it. Audio-visually, The Night Journey is comparable to Viola’s other video works. The graphic artists participating in the project have modeled the computer graphics on the image lines of video and translated the grainy, almost blurred appearance of Viola’s video images. The game utilizes the entire range of video aesthetics and places them in an interactive form of computer graphics.

Since November 2011, the artist Alan Kwan from Hong Kong has been recording every step he takes with a camera that is attached to his glasses. Every evening, the artist uploads the video material to the video game Bad Trip, which Kwan designed and programmed himself. The players can then experience the images as memory fragments in the 3D environment of the game, and metaphorically navigate the memories of the artist. Bad Trip foregrounds the highly topical themes associated with life-logging and the Quantified Self Movement.

Memoirs is a memoir of the humanity’s struggle for inventing home appliances in pursuit of happiness. Its antique outlook stimulates a sensibility of nostalgia for old-fashioned home electric appliances. As you come close to the piece, a custom made Polaroid camera automatically recognizes your face and takes a picture of you. Like bringing films to the photo printing office, taking a card with printed web address (http://everyware.kr/memoirs) from a stack gives you a recess to reminisce the good old days. With photos stacking up on the web server, we collectively build and share one’s memoirs through the piece.

Nixon TV is composed of a pair of monitors on which the broadcast image of the former American president Richard Nixon is distorted every eight minutes when electricity is sent through the magnet coil. Nam June Paik has referred to this effect by stating, “TV picture is ‘disturbed’ by the strong demagnetizer’s place and rhythm.” Nixon failed in his presidential campaign because of his unsuccessful use of the media in the TV debate with John F. Kennedy. This made Paik pay attention to the influence of media, inspiring him to create Nixon TV.

10,000 Moving Cities is an interactive net and telepresence-based installation that deals with globalized cities. Visitors can select any city of the world using data goggles as digital interface in a virtual reality system. User-generated content linked to the selected city such as recent news, tweets, images, videos, and posts from social networks, is searched and retrieved in real time and displayed as a multiple moving collage onto the façades of an abstract urban environment.

In the serious game 1378 (km), the player is transported to different sections of the border between East and West Germany. The year is 1976. Players can assume the role of either an East German border guard or an East German refugee. In detailed reproduced scenarios of sections of the inner German border, the situation there can be experienced in the form of a first-person shooter. It is only possible to win the game if one does not shoot. If one shoots a refugee in the role of a border guard, the players find themselves in a court room. In a trial they are held accountable for their actions. 1378 (km) was created as a student art project with an educational character at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) in the GameLab. It was planned to release 1378 (km) on German Unity Day 2010. The art project caused a scandal, which was particularly orchestrated by the negative reviews of BILD newspaper, which described the game as “disgusting.” Some of the relatives of victims killed at the inner German border felt offended, which led to a complaint being file charged against the author Jens M. Stober for “incitement of popular hatred.” The charges against the student were dropped, and the German press council condemned the reviews published by BILD newspaper.

Frontiers has a serious political background: The subject of the first-person shooter faces a refugee situation at Europe’s borders. The game shows the focal points of a refugee route, which leads from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe: The players experience four different border situations and a nightmarish room with documentary materials, which the artists have assembled during their on-site researches. The players can choose from various perspectives: they can choose between the role of a refugee, or that of a border guard.

Papers, Please is set in the fictional state of “Arstroztka” during the 1980s, in the historical background of the Cold War. The gameplay of Papers, Please focuses on the work life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint. The player inspects arrivals’ documents and uses an array of tools to determine whether the papers are in order for the purpose of keeping undesirable individuals such as terrorists, wanted criminals, or smugglers out of the country.

In 1999, Small Fish was created at ZKM in the course of the series ‘Digital_Arts_Edition’. It is a cooperation between the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics and the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media, and is now also available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The elements which can be used to change the score and thus influence the music are widespread abstract forms, circles, points, lines, or moving colored patterns. In the 15 different graphic scores, the player can arrange the multiple parts to affect the music immediately.