Book review: "Artists Re:thinking Games", edited by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and Corrado Morgana, 2010,

Artists Re:thinking Games, edited by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and Corrado Morgana, 2010, FACT, ISBN: 981846312472.

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"Artists Re:thinking Games” is a collection of essays edited by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and Corrado Morgana in collaboration between FACT and Furtherfield.org, published in connection to the exhibition “Space Invaders: Art and the Computer Game Environment” which opened 18/12-09 at FACT Liverpool. The exhibition will soon reopen at Netherlands Media Art Institute, 28 August – 6 November 2010.

For this anthology, artists and theorist have contributed with articles and interviews examining games that push and expand the boundaries beyond the realm of entertainment. In the introduction, Corrado Morgana frames Game Art in the context of art history, comparing it with the Situationist practice of détournement, i.e. overturning of the established order which “overthrows conventions to create new meaning by appropriating and juxtaposing”.

The relative scarcity of critical texts about Game Art and art games makes Artists Re:thinking Games a welcome contribution to the field. The book provides a good introduction and overview of the contemporarary Game Art scene, featuring the works of such artists as Tale of Tales, Jermey Bailey, Alex Galloway, and Bill Viola. The interview with Viola is particular interesting in this context since Viola began his artistic experimentation with television, in the Fifties, and gave a significant contribution to a new form of artistic expression in the Seventies known as video art. Viola turned the popular video mass medium into an established and well recognised art form. In 2010 Viola released “The Night Journey” an interactive art game developed with USC that allows players to explore a virtual landscape. Viola is now contributing to the field of Game Art. In his remarkable interview, Viola states: