So I just stumbled across the Realtime Art Manifesto, presented last month at the medi@terra art festival by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, creators of the Endless Forest. Having finished reading it, I'm left feeling invigorated (which is what a manifesto ought to do to you).

If you are interested in creating interactive worlds/systems/experiences, read this. If you're not satisfied with what the big budget developers are feeding you, read this. If you wanna elevate the medium, go on and read the damn thing.

Realtime is a poetic technology

Sounds nice, right? There are a lot of good little nuggets here. I found a lot of it dovetails nicely with my intentions and goals for my thesis. But then, some of it I can't entirely abide by. Take Point 7's condemnation of game-related art in the contemporary art world:

Make art-games, not game-art.
Game art is just modern art
-ironical, cynical, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning.
It abuses a technology that has already spawned an art form capable of communicating far beyond the reach of modern art.
Made by artists far superior in artistry and skills.
Game art is slave art.

Yep... they just went there. I think there is plenty of room for game-art and art-games, but their distinction is still relevant. As much as I may love Brody Condon's narcotic flying Elvises, in forsaking its medium's interactivity, it has more to do with video art than the burgeoning realtime medium whose technology it employs.

I'm sure a number of designers here at the IMD are going to take issue with this one:

The game structure of rules and competition stands in the way of expressiveness.
Interactivity wants to be free.

I could rip out half a dozen other little catch phrases, but taking them out of context might soften the blow. Read it and let's discuss.

Realtime Art Manifesto

found via abstractmachine by way of processing blogs

Interesting read. Part 6, regarding rules and how games can restrict playfulness, couldn't be shouted loud enough. Indeed, many games are an endless succession of restrictive goal related activities that ignore other more experiential potentials of the medium.

Part 7, "Don't Make Modern Art" rings bells in my head (as does the overall argument) of the famous Modern Art critic Clement Greenberg, who issued similar manifestos promoting formalism and rejections of realism and consumer influence. Perhaps the authors are not referencing the Modernist art movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, since they go on to talk about "contemporary" art. If so, it's a poorly worded "Art Manifesto". If not, this part of the argument doesn't make much sense. Irony, rejection of ideal beauty, and embracing self-reference are Post-Modernist values. Game-art is certainly valid; it enriches our past and creates interesting hybrids and examinations of where we've been and where we are going. Not all great art creates wholly new forms. The "avant-garde" is what we interpret it to be.

8. "Reject Conceptualism" seems like an argument for good interactive design more than anything else. But when it's part of an art manifesto, it brings up issues about interpretation that have been around for a long time. Should all art be simple and clear? Should all interactive systems be intuitive? I think these values are part of good interaction design, but they aren't ideals that should be slavishly adhered to in order to create an experience for the masses.