Sé Curioso — TED-Ed. (2016, February 5).

¿Por qué son obras de arte los videojuegos?

I'd like to ask you to raise your hand if you believe that the image behind me is a work of art.
There's not much room for doubt, is there? What about this other one? It could impress us more
or less, depending on our aesthetic tastes, but nobody will be horrified by the sight of a
Mondrian in a museum. What happens if I show you a urinal? Here come the first doubts. It's
not just any urinal. 'Fountain', presented by Duchamp for entry into an art exhibition where all
works of art were to be accepted. And this one was left out. The other commissioners charged
with deciding what would be included left it aside. Duchamp gave up. A conceptual, irreverent,
politically incorrect work of art. Because sometimes art can be all these things too. What about
this one? A box of washing powder, and not even a real one. A replica. But what if I told you it's
a Warhol? The faces are starting to change. A name with value. Another work of art, a
20th-century avant-garde icon. In this case, art which talks to us about what is happening, about
commercial art versus art of the elite. Why? Because art isn't always pretty. Art isn't always a
canvas. In fact, in its origins art was much more than that. Art was a ritual. Art was politics, it
was communication. That's why art can sometimes be fleeting, it can be brutal, it can horrify us,
like Marina Abramovic and her 'Performances' which seek to move us, which seek to comment,
to tell a story; which are political, social and at times religious declarations.

Or art can team up with science and create a rabbit like Alba, a fluorescent rabbit who sparked
debate over whether her true 'parent' was the artist Eduardo Kac or the laboratory which
commissioned her. Is this a breakthrough? Is it a work of art? With this in mind, who would say
that a picture like this could be art? That maybe video gaming is one of the new avant-garde art
forms. Just like Duchamp in his day. Or like Warhol in his. And it's not me who's saying this, nor
a group of fanaticized geeks who play video games 24/7 and who know all the tricks in the
book. No, this is something that is happening worldwide. And which is being validated by
institutions: institutions of art and of technology; and museums, like the Smithsonian, which this
year dedicated a several-month long exhibition to the history of video gaming, the cultural
influence of video gaming. The decision of which works were to be included in the exhibition
went to the public themselves. Or, for example, a museum of technology like the one in Berlin. It
has a wing dedicated solely to video games. From the first console up to modern-day
productions made by artists who work with gaming devices. And why not festivals too? Like
ARS Electronica, a festival which takes place in Austria and which is characteristic of art and
technology. It has a category called Interactive Art which for a while has been assigning awards
to video games. Commercial video games, independent video games, devices created by
artists. These are all different ways in which the video game can come to be considered as an
art. I'm not saying that all of them are art, but some are. And it happens, and it was inevitable
that it would happen because art is something unique to man. Art is a way we have of
expressing ourselves, of communicating, of transmitting emotions. Art keeps on changing with
the ages; with each society it uses different tools. Technology was inevitable in this century and
video gaming is one of the many faces it can assume.

And these are some of the many faces behind these creations. These people could be the next
Warhols. They are the ones who walk among us. We are the ones who will say: "Yes, this could
be art," or "No," and time will tell if we were right or wrong. I suggest we take a quick look at six
examples of video games which are probably not quite Mona Lisas, or Warhol's Brillo Boxes, but
which are paving the way for what is to come. Perhaps the easiest art form to liken it to is
cinema. The video game goes one step further, from the seventh art to the eighth. Now we have
interactivity, something which some branches of art has been striving for since it left the canvas.
To remove the other from the place of the observer, to hook them in, to make them the
protagonist. By its very nature, video gaming has all of this.

Take Assassin's Creed, for example: a 'mainstream' video game which could be outdone by the
more 'indie' ones but which has a lot going on behind it all. It took three years of work, 500
people developing it, departments dedicated to photography, to character design, to narrative.
Here, Renaissance Italy has been reconstructed. They worked with historians, architects,
specialists in this era. It's the only method we have today to explore these places. A while ago
there was an exhibition in the Museum of Decorative Art on paintings from that period. Line after
interminable line waiting for a glance into that time. It's the same thing here. We're being taken
along for a journey where we are the ones who travel through the story. We are the protagonists
of this tale.

And just like Hollywood has a flipside like Cannes festival or Berlin's Golden Bear, with entries
which try to tell another story, transmit another experience, which have multiple meanings; video
games have that too, with companies which present themselves as purely artistic. This is the
case with That Game Company, a Californian enterprise which says it develops video games
which are like interactive poems. This is its most recent work, Journey. The journey of the hero,
present in every narrative. Every book and every film talks about this journey. Perhaps a journey
unique to each player. We wake up in the desert, alone in the vast emptiness with nobody to
keep us company, and a light to follow. In Journey, the meaning will be different for every player.
You enter into a painting, you enter into a poem. You are the one who walks among the verses.
And sometimes another character appears, which is someone who is online at that precise
moment, who is undertaking their own journey, their own destiny, and who connects with us
through sound. We don't have a familiar language, we can't chat, we just emit sounds. We sing,
we communicate, we keep each other company. And when the other player disappears, he
takes away a little token... and we're left alone to continue our journey.