SwanQuake - the user manual
Edited by: Scott deLahunta
Essays by: Johannes Birringer, Helen Stuckey, Shiralee Saul,
Bruno Martelli, Ruth Gibson, John McCormick, Katharine Neil,
Alex Jevremovic, Adam Nash, Helen Sloan, Stephen Turk,
Marco Gillies, Harry Brenton & David Surman.
Published by: Liquid Press / i-DAT, 2007
ISBN:

Review by Rob Myers.

"SwanQuake - the user manual'' is a collection of essays regarding a major interactive virtual installation art project by Igloo (Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli) and their collaborators. SwanQuake is, as its name suggests, a meeting of computer game technology and dance. It consists of a series of interactive virtual environments built using the Unreal Engine 3D game system and populated by characters animated using motion capture techniques.

The environments of SwanQuake are archetypal; a city apartment, the alien desert of Mars, a country garden. These are the scenes that recur in news and fiction across the collective imagination of the mass media. In SwanQuake they are rendered using technology more often used for kill-or-be-killed twitch gaming than to facilitate reflection, making strange both the aesthetic content and the technological form of the work.

Progressive art has always availed itself of what J David Bolter called "enabling technology'', the defining technology of the age. When fire was new, lit caves and charcoal were high tech. Renaissance trade maths and 19th century French state-sponsored colour theory both found their way into art, as have the technology of mass and now digital media, such as computer game engines. Like charcoal, paint and video before them, the openness of game engines as a representational technology makes them ideal for artistic use.

The characters of SwanQuake are also archetypal; a deer-headed man, an Alice-In-Wonderland rabbit. As with the characters in Igloo's SummerBranch they have been animated using motion capture, a technology that Igloo have been involved in the development of as leading practitioners.

In movie animation the results of motion capture have often been as awkward as those of rotoscoping, its two-dimensional spiritual predecessor. Animation is a process of representation and evocation. Techniques that crudely trace or measure the movement of real life can suffer from the unpleasant "uncanny valley'' effect that several essays in the user manual discuss.

Dance, like animation, is a process of representation and Iglooevocation. It is reflexive, representing human movement and experience using the human body. Like art it often imposes the order of the age onto what it represents, such as the production lines of performers in SwanQuake's namesake or the post-atomic chance operations of Merce Cunningham's choreography.

Artistic representations of dancers and dance date back to antiquity, from pictures on ceramics through Degas' pastels and Matisse's abstractions to Warhol's screen print portraits of Merce Cunningham. But these representations do not themselves dance as those in SwanQuake do.

In SwanQuake, the dancers are represented as animated three dimensional computer graphics figures. They are animated by movement captured from dancers dancing carefully choreographed moves designed specifically for these unreal forms. This intentionally succeeds in capturing and working with the uncanny, rather than unintentionally falling into uncanny valley.

The essays contained in the user manual provide a cultural, historical and technological context for SwanQuake. Igloo's work is an excellent example of the adaptation of game systems to fine art and this means that the essays also serve as an informative (and very well referenced) entry point for current debates around "game art''.

Fittingly for a user manual, the first essay by Bruno Martelli is an introduction to creating game levels using Unreal's editor program. Given both the name and funding of the project it is a shame that the Free Software Quake III engine was not used rather than the proprietary Unreal Engine, but the long gestation of SwanQuake would have made this an impractical choice at the start.

Between the essays are a series of interviews collectively titled "pushing polygons''. These provide a good insight into the technical and social minutiae of computer game projects. Yes, game developers really do play computer games in the office when they are burnt out from developing computer games.

Scott DeLahunta and Adam Nash's essays detail the character and sound animation techniques used in SwanQuake. These essays function both as informative introductory texts for anyone interested in the practice of computer game production and as an insight into the unique challenges that the artistic content of SwanQuake raises for that practice.

Johannes Birringer and Helen Sloane's essays describe the cross-over between interactive multimedia, dance and art since the 1990s and situate Igloo's own history within this context. These are insightful and balanced art historical accounts of an exciting period of experiment and investigation in art and technology.

Shiralee Saul & Helen Stuckey's and Katharine Neil's essays tackle the contemporary status of games as art and game authors as artists. It's interesting to apply the taxonomy and economics that they describe to SwanQuake itself and see how it fits.

Stephen Turk's discussion of a virtual version of Duchamp's "Etant Donnes'' invokes Virilio and Deleuze and Lacan and Heidegger and Krauss and Benjamin and Bachelard and others. It also provides some fascinating anthropological insights into Cold War and Ancient Greek culture in order to give a social context for First Person Shooter games.

Harry Brenton, Marco Gillies and David Surman's essay (edited by Helen Sloane) and David Surman's essay concern the "Uncanny Valley'' effect that has recently gained renewed attention in gaming and robotics. The unsettling effect of near-perfect simulation is something that is a problem for games and movies aspiring to a supposedly un-ideological "realism'' but for Igloo it is an aesthetic effect that can be exploited as part of the historical tradition of the natural and phenomenological uncanny in art.

As an artist I always want to know how artworks are made, whether this involves finding preparatory sketches or downloading source code. "SwanQuake - the user manual'' is an excellent resource not just because of the insight it gives into an ambitious contemporary artwork but because of the broader context it provides. It is a testament to Igloo's work that SwanQuake is capable of attracting and sustaining such writing. Read the user manual for an unparalleled insight into SwanQuake and how it embodies and extends contemporary game and art practice, raid the footnotes for a wealth of ideas and reference, and fire up UnrealEd, GtkRadiant or Blender to apply what you learn along the way.

http://www.swanquake.com/


The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.