Yummy or Crummy?

8 BIT: a documentary about art and video games

Our friend Shi Kai told us about this movie, so we checked it out together at Northwest Film Forum this weekend. I thought I knew what to expect, because in the last year or so I have seen a good amount of works inspired by old-school video games, mostly in the visual arts category. I remember seeing an artist featured in Readymade, and in most cases I see these things through forwarded links from friends and co-workers, probably because it’s a subject that resonates with many people my age and the hipster DIY culture.

So I thought this would be like a collection of all those links and articles, showcasing the pieces and the artists, and talking about their motivation, etc. Well, the documentary did that, but it went much deeper.

The movie treated this kind of art as a new movement, something that takes us beyond modernism and post-modernism. Sadly I’m not familiar enough with the official definitions of these terms, so I can’t write intelligently about the validity of the claim that Marcin Ramocki (the director) makes. But it was interesting to sit through the post-screening Q&A with Ramocki. Basically the meat of his claim is that this is no longer part of modernism or post-modernism because we live in a world where reappropriating previously existing work has become an acceptable (almost encouraged in some cases — he pointed to object-oriented programming as an example) medium for working, including art. So reappropriation is no longer a taboo, and it’s certainly not a criticism of the original work. It’s something we have yet to define academically, and he seemed both excited and discouraged about that, like we are screwed because we can’t keep up.

While I would have been happy enough to see a slideshow of cool art inspired by nostalgia such as Atari and Nintendo, I was even more pleased to have caught this film in its limited showings. My only criticism is that it was a bit heavy on the scenes about the chip music, which tends to get annoying after a while. But Ramocki did admit that he loves this stuff and that it was already cut down substantially. When you love something, I guess you can’t hide it!