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Media Files
Abstract
"Triggerhappy" is both a piece of practised post-structuralist literary theory and a comment on computer information processing. The starting point for the work by the British artist couple Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead is the classic arcade game "Space Invaders". Instead of shooting at a fleet of alien spaceships gradually coming closer, which was the idea of the original game, here the player aims his gun at quotations from the essay "What is an author?" by Michel Foucault, which disappear word by word whenever the player hits. The text, that critically analyses the figure of the author, is thus literally deconstructed. The work treats the text as a piece of animated concrete poetry in which the digital writing becomes a graphical object whose slow decomposition has a special visual attraction. But "firing" and "clicking" is also to be seen as a metaphor of "reading" in the WorldWideWeb, which more often than not also consists in aimless clicking on the Internet hypertext. A slightly modified version of the work, which is on show at the exhibition on a video console, can also be seen on the Internet.
(Tilman Baumgärtel)
Artists / Authors
- Jon Thomson
- Alison Craighead
Origination
United Kingdom, 1998
Submission
, Apr 13, 2004
Category
- artistic production
Keywords
- Topics:
- games |
- media art |
- media theory
- Formats:
- interactive |
- computer animation
Additions to Keyword List
- Dekonstruktion |
- Foucault, Michel