As a teenager John Klima spent his allowance at the video arcade, plunking quarters into Donkey Kong in a relentless quest to defeat the evil ape. Now Klima, a New York artist, is playing a different sort of game, using the visual language of computer amusements to depict the not at all amusing war in Afghanistan.
Although Klima's online artwork, The Great Game, is based on news events, it is among the first Internet projects to address Sept. 11 and its global impact in an aesthetically creative manner rather than in a strictly documentary one.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
As digital artists finally start to produce works inspired by the terrorist attacks and their political aftermath, the documentary efforts may be becoming more provocative, too: an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has a plan, which may or may not be realized, to send a robot into Afghanistan to do the on-ground reporting he says the Pentagon is not allowing the press to do.
In Klima's Great Game (http://www.cityarts.com/greatgame), he has built a digital relief map of Afghanistan. Its mountainous terrain has been rendered with the cartoonish verisimilitude of a standard computer "shooter" game, realistic but not real.
Reflecting the actual state of the war
Yet the map is merely a blank canvas or an empty game board. Since Oct. 7 Klima has been monitoring daily Defense Department briefings.
Each morning, as he learns the most recent locations of armed camps, bombing runs and Taliban-held cities, he updates the map, marking it with brightly colored game pieces, like a military version of Monopoly.
Visitors to the site initially see the map as it was on Oct. 7. Every minute or so, though, it automatically advances a day, eventually arriving at the present. Over time the digital skies fill with blue bombers, and the green Taliban strongholds within the country's red-limned borders vanish.
More significantly, the map is in 3D, which means that viewers, as they witness this history unfold, can actively change their perspective. What they cannot do is control the action; all they can do is watch it as it occurs. As Klima said, "You can't actually play the game."
War is no trivial pursuit, and Klima risks reducing a flesh-and-blood conflict to a danger-free diversion. But, he said, The Great Game is intended to dramatize how the limited amount of information flowing from the region restricts the ability to visualize, and thus understand, what is happening there. It appears realistic but remains unreal.
The slick graphics and interactive 3D environments of computer games come easily to Klima after his video-game adolescence. At 36 he is part of the first generation of artists to grow up immersed in an entertainment medium that with US$8 billion in annual sales is as large as the film industry. Although game makers clamor to have their products recognized as art, digital artists are turning the tables by incorporating the look and feel of games into their work.
For Klima this is a natural development. From movies based on the Lara Croft character to simulated military exercises that resemble a round of Doom, computer gaming's influence is increasingly pervasive.
"On the news last night," Klima said, "I heard somebody referring to the state we're in now as the endgame. The language of gaming has become part of culture."
Still, Klima is hardly original in applying the game metaphor to a geopolitical hot spot. The Great Game takes its title from the 19th-century struggle between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. The war in Afghanistan, Klima said, "is not the first time that an empire has tried to manage that particular corner of the world. It's never worked in the past."
At the moment the war in Afghanistan is widely considered to be a just cause, so his reminder is not likely to be well received. Of course artists often voice unpopular opinions, and the Internet's immediacy may allow digital artists to express them first. But in the weeks since Sept. 11 and the start of the bombing, the digital equivalent of Picasso's antiwar painting Guernica has yet to emerge.
Joy Garnett, a New York artist and editor of the Newsgrist.com new-media newsletter, said topical works have been slow to appear on the Internet because digital artists are still unsure what the appropriate creative and political response should be. She said a debate on this issue, taking place in a number of online discussion groups, was dividing the Internet-art community.
Pacifism takes an artistic back seat
One contingent, especially strong in Europe, advocates pacifism. On the other hand American artists, especially those in New York, have been so jolted by the attacks that they are reluctant to join such a protest.
"Suddenly," Garnett said, "the locus of geography and of cultural baggage is back after all that utopian theorizing about the Net abolishing such boundaries."
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Computing Culture group in the Media Lab at MIT, is more concerned with crossing borders. Like Klima he is disturbed by the dearth of information from inside Afghanistan. Without detailed news reports on military action or first-person accounts from that nation's people, he said, "I have no idea what's going on there."
Unlike Klima, whose new work comments on this problem, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-sent-me-HI-yee) seeks to solve it. Last week he began to build the "Afghan eXplorer," a remote-controlled robot modeled on the Mars Pathfinder that he intends to send into Afghanistan in January. The four-wheeled, solar-powered gizmo will have a video camera and a satellite-enabled Internet connection that will transmit live images and sounds from the foreign land.
"I thought, `Why not develop a technology that will allow me to get personal information from Afghanistan?'" he said. "After the Pentagon clamps down a news hold, it's as if Afghanistan is as remote as Mars."'
Artist wants to send in a robot
Csikszentmihalyi, 33, insisted this was no hoax. He is working with Middle Eastern arts groups to arrange a way to release the robot into Afghanistan. Once inside, the robot's chest-level video screen will display a human face, to make it more approachable. He has enlisted Afghan students at MIT to act as translators so that he can conduct interviews with anyone the robot meets. They will be viewable at a Web site at compcult.media.mit.edu/afghan_x.
"I'm expecting it to get shot fairly quickly," Csikszentmihalyi said. This is artist as social provocateur. Even if the robot does not survive, "its actual mission is with the military and public opinion about war reportage," he said. "The secondary mission is the one in Afghanistan."
Everyone, it seems, is playing games, or something like games, these days.
RETHINK? The defense ministry and Navy Command Headquarters could take over the indigenous submarine project and change its production timeline, a source said Admiral Huang Shu-kuang’s (黃曙光) resignation as head of the Indigenous Submarine Program and as a member of the National Security Council could affect the production of submarines, a source said yesterday. Huang in a statement last night said he had decided to resign due to national security concerns while expressing the hope that it would put a stop to political wrangling that only undermines the advancement of the nation’s defense capabilities. Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) yesterday said that the admiral, her older brother, felt it was time for him to step down and that he had completed what he
Taiwan has experienced its most significant improvement in the QS World University Rankings by Subject, data provided on Sunday by international higher education analyst Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) showed. Compared with last year’s edition of the rankings, which measure academic excellence and influence, Taiwanese universities made great improvements in the H Index metric, which evaluates research productivity and its impact, with a notable 30 percent increase overall, QS said. Taiwanese universities also made notable progress in the Citations per Paper metric, which measures the impact of research, achieving a 13 percent increase. Taiwanese universities gained 10 percent in Academic Reputation, but declined 18 percent
UNDER DISCUSSION: The combatant command would integrate fast attack boat and anti-ship missile groups to defend waters closest to the coastline, a source said The military could establish a new combatant command as early as 2026, which would be tasked with defending Taiwan’s territorial waters 24 nautical miles (44.4km) from the nation’s coastline, a source familiar with the matter said yesterday. The new command, which would fall under the Naval Command Headquarters, would be led by a vice admiral and integrate existing fast attack boat and anti-ship missile groups, along with the Naval Maritime Surveillance and Reconnaissance Command, said the source, who asked to remain anonymous. It could be launched by 2026, but details are being discussed and no final timetable has been announced, the source
CHINA REACTS: The patrol and reconnaissance plane ‘transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,’ the 7th Fleet said, while Taipei said it saw nothing unusual The US 7th Fleet yesterday said that a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait, a day after US and Chinese defense heads held their first talks since November 2022 in an effort to reduce regional tensions. The patrol and reconnaissance plane “transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,” the 7th Fleet said in a news release. “By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations.” In a separate statement, the Ministry of National Defense said that it monitored nearby waters and airspace as the aircraft