Videogames
“in 1997 I had a show coming at a Swiss gallery. I had no idea what to exhibit but a Swiss guy staying in my house as a guest, told me he was about to buy a PlayStation. "It's a machine we use to play computer games on the TV" he explained. I looked at him.. "He is an old guy" I thought "at least 50.. He is playing videogames?" So I went and bought a PlayStation myself. I bought a copy of Lara Croft too. Back home, I hooked the PlayStation to my computer-I never owned a TV- and then.. I met Lara Croft's butler. He is serving tea while they introduce Lara Croft and he is a REALLY old guy. You can bounce on him and he quite loses his balance, he quite drops his teacups on the floor. I stopped playing-that's not a game I thought, there's art here. I start going around the butler and begun taking pictures of him, screenshoots. Then I went back to the game. Very macho game I decide, I am Lara Croft and I am also driving her, making her do whatever I want. I can look at her or look the world through her eyes. I can also look at her dying. Kill her... Now I was in a cave. Bold arrows coming from both sides of the cave were hitting Lara. I could easily move us out of there but I decide to rather not. I turn on my computer screen recording software instead and start making a movie of Lara- and myself in her- receiving hits, slowly dying, finally falling dead on the snow. I played that level again and again and I record it a dozen times and then I shouted down the PlayStation and I start planing my Geneva show. There would be photographs and videos filmed inside videogames on it I had decide. It was only a few year later that I learned from a professor in UCLA that with this exhibition I had introduced to Visual Arts a whole new field, the art of MACHINIMA.
