Category: Doodles

I was invited to a group exhibition in Marstrand earlier this year, and last weekend I travelled there for the opening. Marstrand is an island a bit up the coast from Gothenburg, part of the northern archipelago, and in the summer its population of ≈1500 swells to include thousands of rich people who like to park their boats and buy expensive art. Or rather, they like to dock their yachts and buy expensive windbreakers.

We were ten artist from the KKV graphic workshop who’d put together a show, and the day after the opening I was guarding the exhibition. Having put on my most charming T-shirt and demeanor, I welcomed fifty or so visitors during the day, answering questions about techniques to the best of my ability (having to admit that I know nothing about photopolymers) and generally being pleasant and accommodating to all prospective patrons.

I was out of my element. Most of the others exhibiting had done this before, but besides their experience I found the lack of irony the oddest. Most people I know would balk at titling their works “Revenge” or “Woman” and would certainly not expect me to keep a straight face if they did. Having said that, the works represent a tremendous amount of labour, because heaven knows lithography isn’t a time-efficient way of creating images.

I’m mostly doing screen printing — when you do it as an artist you call it “serigraphy” — and it’s a messy process prone to failure and general fucking-upingness. Last time, the paint I was working with was giving me lip, and with the addition of a poorly cured screen I only got ten good copies out of 10 hours worth of printing, and close to fifty large sheets of shieet.

On the day I was guarding the exhibition, I had to compile a new list of works and their asking price since some changes had been made, and I started thinking about how the prices related to the works. People who are not used to buying art might dismiss pricing as a result of wishful thinking and whims of artists, but there is a pattern to the pricing which I’ve been trying to suss out. On recommendation of Jazzin over at Faas I started in on Why are artists poor?, a book by economist and artist Hans Abbing. I’m only through the first few chapters, but his discussion on the value and pricing of art mirrors what I’ve been thinking whenever I take a step back from the screenprinting vacuum table, surveying the value that I’ve somehow added.

Except what someone would expect to pay for the materials — paper, screen, chemicals, paint, studio rent — I’m adding my own time and labour, as well as whatever skills and knowledge I can verify or we can agree upon. This is measurable and would be quite easy to put a price on using the same model as you’d use for evaluating how much to pay your carpenter, for two differences. It’s difficult to estimate how much demand there is for art, and there’s also very little to judge a “proper” artist by, allowing for an unlimited supply of people who would consider themselves artist. “I could do that, and so could my dog and therefore it’s not proper art!” so to speak.

So that which sets the work of an artist in general apart from a carpenter — the aura using Benjamin — is not appraised by traditional supply & demand if we’re talking fine art, but rather a gray area of value embodied. What is the value added that isn’t measurable straight on? (This doesn’t necessarily apply when it’s a particular artist who is in demand, since per definition those who hold that specific artist in demand view an art object by that artist as having a value intrinsic to that relationship, and there’s only so many works one person can produce.)

Regardless of what in a work that we like, we might divide our way of arriving at the value in a few different ways, which will put us in different segments of art buyers.

1. The work is beautiful in itself, with as little reference to the notion of “art” as possible. (–Seurat-Le Bec du Hoc à Grandcamp renders the cliff and waters beautifully.)

2. The work is good because is comments on itself and gives an interesting understanding of what “art” is or could be. (–Georges Seurat demonstrates how by viewing we create a coherent image)

3. The artist’s story or oeuvre is interesting enough to confer value to the individual work.
(–Let’s hang this sucker next to Renoir just to piss Seurat off!)

As an example, lets say that I take fifteen of the twenty copies that exist of a certain print, and staple them up downtown as “regular posters.” What the weather doesn’t destroy, some kids take home, and I’m now left with five posters out of a set of 20. For all intents and purposes I might as well just have produced five copies to begin with, which would have merited a higher price per copy.

But since the 15 copies that weather and kids took were not bought at my set price — in fact, the audience for “taking a poster off a wall home” and “buying fine art” doesn’t overlap much — this would very likely be considered by prospective buyers as an indication that I myself don’t accept the face value of my own art and I’ve now sown distrust among graphic buyers regarding my artistic credibility and/or the merits of my work.

There’s of course a possible positive corollary to this destruction: My stapling of the 15 posters could be considered as an “artistic action in itself” and indirectly increase the value of my remaining five posters.

Actions such as the one above will affect your status among artists and buyers. But price seems to have a particular place in how some kinds of buyers value works, and it seems possible that if your prices are too high you are pricing yourself out of the market, but if your prices are too low, you are pricing yourself out of a market. In other words: If you’re too expensive, your patrons will wait until you lower your price — the demand is still there but it doesn’t agree or can’t meet your price. But if you price yourself below a certain level, you can’t easily hike your prices up again since you no longer have the same market available to you. Your “price slumming” has left you tainted, as it were.

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Back again to the “creating value” part. If “art value” only is “social value” then we still should be able to agree on what exactly it is that we’re valuing. And here I guess that people have different understanding of what art is. Many people have an understanding of art as something that has to do with pure æsthetics. Ignore the notion that æsthetics are socially constructed, and you have people talking about beauty and form and colour and so on. Listening in on the conversations at the show, many people expressed their approval of certain works as being very “energetic” or “pleasing”, and having read over the descriptions of the work (someone wanted to express their interest in dancing, for example) they could judge a work on how closely the work aligned with their own ideas of how dancing might be represented.

I think my works failed on the expectation that proper graphic art shouldn’t be too funny. “Funny” means that there’s a joke that you have to get, and if you don’t get it you’d have to pretend-laugh and you don’t want to be found laughing at a fart joke, and so you don’t laugh and then the work’s not good. (I could be over-thinking a bowl of sour grapes here.)

No-one asked for prices on the three graphic works I participated with. No-one bought anything at all while I was there in fact, but did check out a few of the other works and asked for prices. No-one was thrown by the prices, and this could have three possibilities.

1. They agree to the worth of the work in itself. (This is worth 3000SEK to me)
2. They know the graphics market and know that the prices are within range of what could be expected. (This would usually cost around 3000SEK)
3. They don’t want to admit otherwise, for personal or social reasons. (I don’t want to seem uncultured, but Jeezus Christ on a crutch I wouldn’t take it if it was free)

I’m thinking of tiering some works as an experiment, and see that might work out. When you’re working with print you can do drastic changes in material without changing your matrix, so I’m thinking of doing a set of more expensive prints alongside cheaper ones, without losing any artistic aura in the process, but stratifying them socially.

The show was a learning experience, and I’m even more motivated than previously to make good work and let it find its market organically rather than shoehorning it into a pre-existing mold. And of course, if you’re interested in acquiring a poster, get in touch.

My awesome mother gave me an ebook reader as birthday present, which sorta proves that if you bitch, whine and drop hints like a rabbit shits, someone will give in. I have tons of stuff which I’m slowly transferring to the Nook, and reading is encroaching on my podcast listening which is a good thing. There’s no app for organizing your documents on the computer, so I’m using the competent but ass-ugly Calibre for this. I might not be paying enough attention, or I might just have low tolerance for stupid interfaces, but using Calibre isn’t very efficient. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. I’ve found an app for syncing Instapaper articles which works like a charm though. (Ephemera)

All in all, I enjoy using the Nook. It’s easy enough to use and once you get used to reading on a computer device in broad daylight you’ll be annoyed with all the gadgets which aren’t legible in direct light. E ink is awesome and very pleasant to read — not quite like paper but miles beyond LCD screens. (Although if you spend your days in murky settings you might go for the backlit iPad.) It’ll be interesting to see how the usability will change once winter and darkness comes.

I jailbroke the Nook but had little use for it. Using Internet over 3G would be useful if there was a good RSS app and/or syncing with a desktop app like Evernote, so jailbreaking might become more interesting once the proper Android apps are adapted for the Nook LCD.

The battery only lasts some 400 page turns over three days, but Barnes & Noble seem to consider it within acceptable levels. I concede that it’s not an undue burden to charge the thing every other night, but it galls me that they’re advertising it as lasting for 10 days with “normal use” without mentioning that “normal use” is “up to one hour per day.” Their support personell is quick to respond but are writing straight from a flowchart — I don’t know if it’s corporate culture or unmotivated kids, but if they replaced them with scripts they’d still improve on service and “the human touch.”

Because I’m a positive and creative person I express my disappointment through poetry in odd meter. If you can get someone to read this with a deep voice and British accent I will send you a present. Until then, imagine Ian McKellen doing a dramatic reading:

Quite a device, my Nook
it’s swell in the sun!
People stop and stare,
it fails to impress no-one.
As long as it works,
it works rather fine.
So I’ve grown quite fond
of this Nook of mine.

Quite a device, my Nook
it’s nimble and fun!
People stop and ask,
and I recommend it to some.
As long as it works,
it works rather fine.
So despite Barnes and Noble
I’m fond of this Nook of mine.

I have no pictures of the weekend before midsummer because my skills failed me. Or in more practical terms: I relaxed the crap out of myself and couldn’t be arsed to take pictures. Sara, I and Petter left for the countryside for a couple of days, staying at his cottage an hour north of Gothenburg. I slept until late noon, had a breakfast consisting of more than oats, and then sat with a coffee on the porch, forcing my way through the shittier parts of the Nights Dawn trilogy.

The whole experience was such a sensory overload of idyllic post-card super-reality it had me giggling. It’s difficult to take such an experience seriously. It’s not only that I’m slightly high-strung and can’t really relax properly, but also because reading a book for five hours straight is something so unproblematic by body doesn’t know what to do with itself. This hasn’t happened since I was a teenager, and since then relaxing into a book has been rather more difficult.

Had Bambi showed up and fallen asleed in my lap it wouldn’t have made the place and experience any less extreme. This kind of existence is what is allured to when advertising a product which is supposed to appeal to a sense of Sweden. Only the hangover on Sunday reminded me of home, but even that was soothed by wind, water and dozing off on the porch.

Apparently, my cracking knuckles found their way into Saras snoozing. I would make for a really poor ninja, but we knew that already. Polish people aren’t ninjas, we dress in fur hats and kill people from horseback. Failing that, we charm our friends into helping us in the garden.

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Remember that allotment garden me and Olle were queuing for last summer? Well, three weeks ago I got a call with an offer to sign up for a 46 m² lot. It’s been left fallow for a year, so except a few raspberry bushes there’s not much there except w a whole bunch of weeds. I took some pictures and posted them to ask.metafilter which yielded some answers, and I’m constantly asking other people for advice, with the hope of actually learning something here.

As things stand, and with Olle away on vacation and leaving me with dictatorial power, there will be heritage potatoes, unions and possibly tulips here. Failing that, whatever will take.

— Mateusz, you handsome devil, what is it that you do for a living?

I get this question more often than you’d think, even though the phrasing might be slightly different. My mother, for example, might sigh “Have you got a proper job yet?”

Every once in a while I go through an identity reassessment, especially when sketching a new version of the blog or a business card, or when I stumble upon a piece of insight like Merlin Manns “Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion” — the premise of which is that we hang our identity on old merits long after those merits have ceased to be relevant.

What got me thinking was my first ever end-of-semester gift I received from the students at Chalmers.

I teach courses in photography at community collages in Gothenburg (Folkuniversitetet & Medborgarskolan), and I work as a guest tutor at the international Master of architecture and urban planning studios with Ana Betancour at Chalmers and KTH, teaching people how not to fuck up public presentations, discussing the value of film as an analytical tool in architectural practice and generally asking future architects stuff which I wouldn’t ask if I’ve had architectural schooling.

Many of them don’t seem to know why they want to be architects, nor is there any consensus regarding what an architect does, so the area is ripe for someone like me to come in and ask what they think they are doing — it’s great fun.

The photography courses present a rather mixed crowd, from people who’ve taken pictures their whole life and who just want to learn the digital end of it, to people who’ve become parents and want to document their toddlers with the shiny dSLR the friendly salesperson sold them. I draw diagrams of focal length and JPEG compression algorithms.

That’s the tofu and potatoes of my life, and it’s pretty awesome. Teaching keeps you on your toes and I’ve learned to draw on the eclectic knowledge I’ve amassed, working with people to reach interesting conclusion and alternative angles to problems. The work description could be “talking with people” but in my more interesting moments, and with enough caffeine pills, I become an apophenic Eliza, channeling the on/off-lined world.

I haven’t done freelance media work for a while, but should anyone want to give me money for recording their seminar, proofread their dissertation or photograph something I could give references and manage it. So the question of how I make money is easy enough to answer, but the problem arises when it bleeds into my understanding of who I am, especially when there’s a discrepancy.

For example: I’m not paid to do art. I occasionally apply for grants, which in a sense amounts to spec work, and I do art works and publish them on/off-line, but I’m not getting paid for it. I do it, and my formal art-education opens up related fields (e.g. the urban architecture courses) but it’s not my livelihood per se. I know that this shouldn’t bias me against seeing myself as an artist, but I have always had the notion that one is in part one’s job description, and ones job is the thing one does for money. So if you describe yourself as someone who does something for which you’re not getting paid, the jump to describing yourself as monetarily worthless isn’t big. It’s a way of thinking which is hard to shake.

All this doesn’t interfere with what I actually do, as I’m doing more art now than before, but it’s a shift in perspective which I’m adjusting to.

It dawned on me yesterday that I’m becoming that guy. I bike wherever I go and show up with a sweaty t-shirt, fanning myself and going “boy was that a climb! I’m all drenched here, phew-e!” not realizing that it’s the tenth time in a row that I arrive like that, and it has become the norm rather than the exception.

I’m the dude with a manic smile and rolled up pant leg, and even though I’m not wearing bike pants, an image of tights would show up on an aural image of me. If the country wasn’t so eager to promote a “healthy lifestyle” I would be beaten for showing up to work in this state long ago, and probably deserve it.

I would like to apologize in advance to those commuters whose personal space I will invade with au de wet dog and would you please let me know when the sweat dripping onto your blouse becomes annoying.

Incidentally, public announcements regarding my crotch have gone up dramatically, and I disperse the status of balls and ass freely and without prompting. Sorry about that, but that’s probably how things will be from now on. I’m really sorry.

We told the R&D guys they could come up with anything they wanted, as long as it could be thrown together from existing ingredients, cost less than 40 cents to make, and looked enough like dog shit that impressionable lardbutts like you would get a food boner the first time its commercial ran on whatever basic cable reality show keeps you from killing yourself for a week.

→ Kung Fu Grippe, Merlin Mann: A new brown thing you’ll totally eat

Crappy Taxidermy is a visual blog dedicated to exploring the bizarre world of taxidermy. The pictures within are exceptional examples of the strange, the grotesque, and the awful. Though our title may say “crappy” we respect the dedication and talent of the taxidermists who created the works pictured within.

→ About: Crappy Taxidermy

I would kindly like to inform you that I’ve been a vegan for ten years. Unless you count the Snickers bars I ate out of economic necessity when living on in Iceland (where vegetables are paid in installments) in which case I have one more year to go before reaching ten. Ok, let’s rephrase: I decided to switch to a vegan diet ten years ago, and initial Snickers bars notwithstanding, I’m doing well.

To recap: When studying in Karlstad I ran a weekly radio show modeled on Frispel (mentioned previously) where I’d put together a one hour show on a whatever topic I pulled out of my arse. I interviewed a dentist who did hypnosis, a priest about the onthological proof of Gods existence, and this one time I started doing one on milk.

I had spoken to a chef who mentioned that unless the lactal enzyme in our guts have a constant supply of lactose, they disappear and you’re left intolerant. This, he argued, explains why proportionally large number of people in parts of the world are lactose intolerant — milk and other dairy isn’t widely consumed and we producing the enzyme as a result

This is more of less accurate. The enzymes are developed by you own body when you’re young, but with age you stop producing them. Supposedly, this is so that we can be breast-fed as babes, but with the anticipation that we stop drinking milk after we’re weened off it. Historically, milk hasn’t been a staple of human diet so intolerance is common. A majority of all adults in the world are lactose intolerant as a result of the stuff just not being in the food chain.

The first dietician I tried to interview scolded me for not knowing the difference between allergy and intolerance, so I plowed through two books on nutrition and health and return two days later for the interview. I called the Swedish Milk Council (Mjölkfrämjanded, a pro-milk lobby. Originally, named “The Swedish Milk Propaganda” — Wikipedia: Mjölkpropagandan) as well as the National Food Administration and had them comment on a study of osteoporosis prevalence among a group of nurses. Seeing as the report was hosted on MilkSucks.com their reaction was predictably not favourable. (I think they criticized poor methodology)

I barely touched on the whole animal rights issue. As so many others I hadn’t given the question much thought, and found the environmental and health aspects of dairy more interesting. Somewhere in the process of doing the show I came to the conclusion that the only environmentally conscientious thing to do was to switch to a vegetable based diet, which also seemed to be a healthy way of eating.

Of course, now I know that “vegetable” doesn’t always equate “environmentally sound” nor necessarily “healthy” if you take processed foodstuffs into account — even skirting the necessity of B12 supplements. If you are an omnivore who eats with moderation you might not experience the adverse effects of cholesterol and whatnot, and locally raised beef might have a smaller environmental impact than a soybean transported halfway across the globe.

The question of food and where it comes from is very complex, and if you are so inclined I encourage you to read the The State of Food and Agriculture 2009, the yearly report from FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) or why not just skim Wikipedia: Environmental effects of meat production. Of course, once these folks get in vitro meat going we might satisfy the tastes of everyone except those bent on organic food.

Having written that, today it’s the animal rights issue which is the deciding factor for me. There’s overwhelming proof that we’re causing suffering and pain to animals directly by using them for food or other products, and there’s secondary misery caused by the environmental impact of rearing animals. You could do worse than to read All animals are equal, by Peter Singer as a more well-put introduction to “animal rights” than I could give.

It took me 21 years before reaching the conclusion that veganism is a step in the right direction, and I don’t remember anyone else influencing me one way or another, so I try not to preach, but every once in a while I get into a debate on animal rights. It can be fun, but is more often a losing proposition, as illustrated by a thread over in Metafilter, where the subject usually turns into an anti-vegan dogpile for some reason: Operation Pancake.

Also, I have a standing bet with a chef friend that if he can make me a human steak out of someone who hasn’t suffered and the eating of which wouldn’t cause anyone grief, I’d eat it. Rather disgusting, but that’s what you get when debating veganism drunk.

Over at We Make Money Not Art, there’s a brief description of the work Hello Process which is being exhibited at the Process Becomes Paradigm show. In a related vein, Rhizome just published an editorial by Jacob Gaboury on the art collective JOGGING which are all about process instead of product. JOGGING are indeed mostly interesting in terms of process, as most of the documentation / made for net / performance, is undistinguishable from a Onion parody of art, or perhaps a Mcsweeneys piece.

While each piece may seem unimportant on its own, when viewed as part of a growing collection of work unconcerned with the materiality, permanence, or the importance of the individual piece, any insistence on the auratic quality of the object itself falls away. Indeed the content of each piece is doubly immaterial. Not only do they exist in passing, as documentation, or not at all, they are also unconcerned with the question of quality or importance, and are relevant as process rather than as product.

→ Rhizome, Jacob Gaboury: Immaterial Incoherence: Art Collective JOGGING

It’s through editing we make something beautiful appear. This Youtube choir, bringing together 185 individuals in a performance is inspiring — despite the slightly cheesy look of the stage and conductor Eric Whitacre — not because it resulted in this particular musical arrangement, but because there is a sense of universality to the participant’s ambitions. There’s a common denominator which becomes visible exactly because it’s mediated through a webcam, each video independently recorded. It’s the audience performing for itself.

The arrangement of the singers and panning over their individual videos in faux 3D also changes the interpretation of the piece; Compare the feeling of this version to the previous experiment he did, Sleep, in which all videos are arranged on a flat grid. The edit of Sleep creates a monumental feeling of the choir, whereas Lux Aurumque seems made up of individuals acting in concert. [Via The Technium]

As an aside, my name appears in an Excel file at one of the largest dairy producers in Sweden, Arla, since I sent in a bogus recipe containing cottage cheese to a competition. I don’t know if I’ve won anything, but judging from the other entries (all visible in the same document) I’m not the only one who’ve fibbed a love to that product. Twohundredandeightysix other people filled sent in their recipes to win whatever it was one could win. Imagine if you could get 287 people to spend those five minutes working doing some work for you, paying all of them fractionally more for their time than they stand to gain on average from a competition and thereby creating a win-win! What would you do with those 24 hours of labour? Or is an XLS-file with slogans enough?

It’s odd what will make you sad.

Between 1998 and 2004 I ran Hotline and KDX servers, dedicated to political material and whatever else I fancied. In a time when online storage was expensive and legally risky, running a small server with files on your home computer felt safe, and if you managed it well you got to know people who would log on to your computer regularly and chat for a bit. I still have chat-logs of conversations ranging from trite bullshit to discussions on abortion and propaganda…

What sets places like a KDX server apart from cloud-hosted communities (Facebook, MySpace, Betapet) is that you actually feel like you’re at someone’s place when you log in. When I was running the Tiny Socialist Server I had a rule that you had to greet everyone who was logged on before downloading anything; It’s common courtesy to at least say “hi” when entering a house, even if all you want to do is to sit on the couch, so I started to kick people out if they logged on and downloaded stuff without greeting the other users. Anarchism requires you to have some fucking manners.

The other day I needed to transfer 7 GB of video so I brought the KDX server back from retirement.

While I was at it, I decided to find an old KDX hangout on which I knew some people, the Documentary Archives. This server was a giant in its time, with scores of users, many of whom I considered some sort of friend. My old bookmarks didn’t work, so I logged into another server — one of the few remaining — to ask if anyone knew where I could find DA or what had happened to it. The response I got was:

[netfreak] I’ve heard of that place but never was on it

I felt both excited and depressed at the same time. Excited because something which I had been a part of now was considered “history” by the newcomers, and depressed because I missed the place; I’ll never find the fragmented, reformatted, erased or mothballed harddrive sectors I remember hanging out at.

Is this how people felt when FidoNet servers started to drop out in favour of WWW, or when their favourite MUD/MUSH shut down? Considering the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours I put in to make my server run smoothly, chatting with people from all over the world, and nesting in general, I feel a personal sense of betrayal that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page dedicated to KDX, to say nothing of the Documentary Archives, only a mention in the Hotline article.

For a time I nourished the idea that I should be logged in somewhere at all times. By running my own server, I could be online and present at a place where others could see me, and often I would log in to servers or join an IRC channel just to be somewhere while I slept. Even though you are not conscious of your surroundings when you sleep, you still exist; And it felt important to think of myself as existing online, not only to me, but as a proof of the possibilities that the net embodied.

This wasn’t about being connected 24/7, but rather an acknowledgement of that you belong at one place at a time — that even if you’re jumping across continents from server to server, your attention is still mediated through a sense of place; Running servers and visiting others’ servers helped me establish who I was — and still am — online.

The feeling of sadness and loss is pure nostalgia though; Today, my presence online isn’t defined by a logged in piece of software, but rather though the ubiquitous connectivity afforded me by my cellphone — alas, the nerd I has merged with the physical me, and we’re once again meat and fat wrapped in a sack of skin, only with a smartphone stuck to the side of the head.

Thomas Bey William Bailey over at Vague Terrain has an analysis of Modern Warfare 2. It’s a bit too uptight for my taste, but it balances the lavish superlatives I’ve heaped on the game quite nicely. His objection is that because of the extremely compelling narrative of games like these, we’re fed a bunch of propaganda and taught a manufactured history of the world. This is completely true. Thomas critiques isn’t limited to this game but rather highlights the possibilities for nefarious uses which the medium can be put to. The FPS Americas Army is in its third iteration, and they have spun it off into a graphic novel as well — the first story unironically entitled Knowledge is Power — but they get a free pass since it’s an obvious recruitment tool for the US army.

As Walter Benjamin mentions (in an essay you might have noticed lately) film, like architecture, is an art form which you learn to appreciate by habit and osmosis, rather than contemplation. Computer games have the grandiose scenarious of movies, as well as the tactility of architecture (since you’re able to navigate the world and develop an appreciation of the physics of the place.) so they really act as a multiplier of knowledge and narrative. (Regardless of their relationship to fact, mind you)

The exciting thing with photo-realistic games isn’t that we might end up with a Matrix-like scenario where we won’t be able to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘not-reality’ but that our memories of events will be messed up. Are you remembering something which you experienced in the ‘real world’ or the surreal world? We don’t have to mess up our physical perception of things for this technology to be scary, only our remembrance of things. Look at how much importance we place on photography as an external memory, and multiply that.

I know that I have created historical narratives based on nothing else than the tech tree in Civilization, so obviously I give more credence to a story than to static statements of fact; And since we experience the stories of computer games first hand, we might absorb the sentiments expressed even more readily. MW2 is a kick-ass game exactly because it fits within the narrative which the West has spun, and which countless action movies has reinforced — it’s “as close to reality as you get” exactly because it’s a narrative which is fictionalized from start to finish.

To paraphrase: Guns don’t kill people. People who live in a world where guns are seen as necessary responses to certain crises, kill people. Political action is necessary if we’d like to change the story, and it would be awesome if computer games could be a change for good, instead of only mirroring an already dominant narrative of how the world works and who we are as humans.

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A more upbeat rider to this story comes from the podcasting world, where fictional parallel universes are less flat and predictable than in MW2:

Myke Bartlet has continued writing and podcasting stories in the Salmon & Dusk universe. The latest short story, Yesterday came too soon, is a nice introduction to his stuff if you don’t feel like starting on a longer series. As previously mentioned, Mykes reading is half the enjoyment of his podcast, not cause the stories are so-so, but cause his tempo and timbre is excellent. Go listen.