A Virtual Magic Reality.
“A Virtual Magic Reality,” Scale, vol 1, UCSD, San Diego, 2004.
In the time of Don Quixote, books were a very dangerous form of entertainment and communication. In fact, reading chivalry literature made him loose his mind. When I was a kid my mother did not want me to watch television and read comic books. She considered them a form of alienating popular culture. Some years later my father was particularly annoyed by the noise of rock & roll. As a composer and player of Latin American folk music he found these electric sounds repetitive and unpleasant for the most part and the lyrics in English incomprehensible. He condemned this form of cultural imperialism and tried his best to instigate in me a love and understanding of Latin American culture, music and history. His friend, the singer Victor Jara, was assassinated in the Santiago stadium in Chile in 1973 after being forced to play the guitar with his fingers chopped by soldiers during the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy with CIA backing. I explained to my dad that The Clash wrote a song about that.
Nowadays there is concern among mothers and politicians about video games. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1 has published studies showing the relation between playing violent video games and the increase of aggressive behavior. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enjoyed playing the Shoot-‘em-up video game Doom before murdering 13, wounding 23 and turning the guns on themselves in Columbine Colorado. The Los Angeles Times published very strange conspiracy theories that blamed anarchist activism in the WTO meeting in Seattle on the Grand Theft Auto game series published by Rock Star. This sounds particularly absurd considering the purpose of the game is to make money without any sort of moral concerns.
There is a video game where you are not the one that creates a blood bath but where your journey begins as the sole survivor of a terrible one. “…You must find four pieces of evidence to bring justice to the memory of your small village.” The illusion of power exerted in the usual fantasy of mass murder without consequences of most video games is substituted with the power of symbolic redemption by reconstructing the erased memory of a real massacre. In 1981 soldiers slaughtered 800 people including 100 children in El Mozote, El Salvador. They thought they got the whole town, but they missed one person: Rufina Amaya. This sole survivor was able to tell the story. She broadcasted what happened through the clandestine radio station Radio Venceremos. In 1932 a mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros representing the tragic continental history was whitewashed in Los Angeles. The game takes its name from the title of his art piece: Tropical America. It explores the causes and effects of the erasure of history.
The game is actually an animated graphic novel, a new version of a codex, a mural or a comic book. It does not have the common photo realistic look with more than 16 million colors and imperceptible pixilation of new game consoles and newer PC games. It is black and white and its style resembles and relates more to the prints of José Guadalupe Posada and the woodcuts of the Taller de la Gráfica Popular and to other artists like Goya, Daumier, John Heartfield or Barbara Kruger who have favored black and white graphics in order to have an easy to reproduce and direct impact. It extends the long tradition of political graphic work conceived for a wider audience into the Internet and the 21st century. It understands technology not as an end in itself or as a fetish but simply as a tool to effectively tell history or a story.
If according to Yogi Berra “the future is not what it used to be” neither is the past. New technology allows us to reconstruct it (or both) in a non-linear way. Like the Julio Cortazar novel Rayuela the story (or stories) can happen in different ways. You can go to different places and historical periods through different routes depending on your actions. You can go from the battles of Bolivar to the single-crop economy of Cuba, from the myth of El Dorado to the poems of Sor Juana de la Cruz, from Fray Bartolomé de las Casas to Radio Venceremos. History and myth collide constructing one Latin America and an animated and politicized form of “magic realism” where Zapatista angels, dancing gods, animals, pirates, runaway slaves and the like tell truthful stories owing as much to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as to Eduardo Galeano. The interdisciplinary nonlinear qualities of Tropical America are not just a postmodern troupe but reflect the baroque way of thinking of the birthplace of contemporary cross-cultural life. This point of view is quite different if not opposite to the one given in computer games such as Sid Meier Colonization where you play a Viceroy and develop a form of colonization subjecting nature, Indians, African slaves, rival colonial powers and eventually revolting against paying taxes to your even more exploiting King. In another game called Tropico you play the leader of a small and poor Caribbean island with little resources where you have to develop some sort of political and economical model negotiating between capitalists, workers, the church, the military, the intellectuals, the Americans and the Russians having to compromise and make complicated moral decisions.
The dead people of El Mozote have finally been given a proper burial in cyberspace. This is as symbolic and in that sense as real as an entombment in a graveyard. By being remembered, the murders did not happened in vain and the victims might finally rest in peace. Worst than losing your land, your wealth and natural resources and the product of your labor is to not even exist in people’s minds. Taking these people into account gives them extra life (beyond the video game sense). To achieve this while wasting your time gaming is an accomplishment in reality.
In the time of Don Quixote, books were a very dangerous form of entertainment and communication. In fact, reading chivalry literature made him loose his mind. When I was a kid my mother did not want me to watch television and read comic books. She considered them a form of alienating popular culture. Some years later my father was particularly annoyed by the noise of rock & roll. As a composer and player of Latin American folk music he found these electric sounds repetitive and unpleasant for the most part and the lyrics in English incomprehensible. He condemned this form of cultural imperialism and tried his best to instigate in me a love and understanding of Latin American culture, music and history. His friend, the singer Victor Jara, was assassinated in the Santiago stadium in Chile in 1973 after being forced to play the guitar with his fingers chopped by soldiers during the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy with CIA backing. I explained to my dad that The Clash wrote a song about that.
Nowadays there is concern among mothers and politicians about video games. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1 has published studies showing the relation between playing violent video games and the increase of aggressive behavior. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enjoyed playing the Shoot-‘em-up video game Doom before murdering 13, wounding 23 and turning the guns on themselves in Columbine Colorado. The Los Angeles Times published very strange conspiracy theories that blamed anarchist activism in the WTO meeting in Seattle on the Grand Theft Auto game series published by Rock Star. This sounds particularly absurd considering the purpose of the game is to make money without any sort of moral concerns.
There is a video game where you are not the one that creates a blood bath but where your journey begins as the sole survivor of a terrible one. “…You must find four pieces of evidence to bring justice to the memory of your small village.” The illusion of power exerted in the usual fantasy of mass murder without consequences of most video games is substituted with the power of symbolic redemption by reconstructing the erased memory of a real massacre. In 1981 soldiers slaughtered 800 people including 100 children in El Mozote, El Salvador. They thought they got the whole town, but they missed one person: Rufina Amaya. This sole survivor was able to tell the story. She broadcasted what happened through the clandestine radio station Radio Venceremos. In 1932 a mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros representing the tragic continental history was whitewashed in Los Angeles. The game takes its name from the title of his art piece: Tropical America. It explores the causes and effects of the erasure of history.
“Reality is more real in black and white2”
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz
The game is actually an animated graphic novel, a new version of a codex, a mural or a comic book. It does not have the common photo realistic look with more than 16 million colors and imperceptible pixilation of new game consoles and newer PC games. It is black and white and its style resembles and relates more to the prints of José Guadalupe Posada and the woodcuts of the Taller de la Gráfica Popular and to other artists like Goya, Daumier, John Heartfield or Barbara Kruger who have favored black and white graphics in order to have an easy to reproduce and direct impact. It extends the long tradition of political graphic work conceived for a wider audience into the Internet and the 21st century. It understands technology not as an end in itself or as a fetish but simply as a tool to effectively tell history or a story.
If according to Yogi Berra “the future is not what it used to be” neither is the past. New technology allows us to reconstruct it (or both) in a non-linear way. Like the Julio Cortazar novel Rayuela the story (or stories) can happen in different ways. You can go to different places and historical periods through different routes depending on your actions. You can go from the battles of Bolivar to the single-crop economy of Cuba, from the myth of El Dorado to the poems of Sor Juana de la Cruz, from Fray Bartolomé de las Casas to Radio Venceremos. History and myth collide constructing one Latin America and an animated and politicized form of “magic realism” where Zapatista angels, dancing gods, animals, pirates, runaway slaves and the like tell truthful stories owing as much to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as to Eduardo Galeano. The interdisciplinary nonlinear qualities of Tropical America are not just a postmodern troupe but reflect the baroque way of thinking of the birthplace of contemporary cross-cultural life. This point of view is quite different if not opposite to the one given in computer games such as Sid Meier Colonization where you play a Viceroy and develop a form of colonization subjecting nature, Indians, African slaves, rival colonial powers and eventually revolting against paying taxes to your even more exploiting King. In another game called Tropico you play the leader of a small and poor Caribbean island with little resources where you have to develop some sort of political and economical model negotiating between capitalists, workers, the church, the military, the intellectuals, the Americans and the Russians having to compromise and make complicated moral decisions.
The dead people of El Mozote have finally been given a proper burial in cyberspace. This is as symbolic and in that sense as real as an entombment in a graveyard. By being remembered, the murders did not happened in vain and the victims might finally rest in peace. Worst than losing your land, your wealth and natural resources and the product of your labor is to not even exist in people’s minds. Taking these people into account gives them extra life (beyond the video game sense). To achieve this while wasting your time gaming is an accomplishment in reality.
1. http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp784772.html
Tropical America can be played at http://www.tropicalamerica.com. It is a project of OnRamp Arts and was written by Juán Davis and directed by him and Jessica Irish. It was illustrated by Artemio Rodriguez and developed in collaboration with Los Angeles artists, teachers, writers and high school students. It won the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) award for best E-Entertainment.
Labels: arte, Latin America, Published Texts, video games
posted by Rubén Ortiz Torres at
5:48 PM
0 Comments
