How to Win at Photography
If you think videogames are just for sweaty nerds with Quaver-dust-encrusted keyboards, then The Photographers’ Gallery might just smash your preconceptions into a million pixels. Its new show explores the artistic potential of videogames, and there’s a lot more to it than how they made Pacman such a nice shade of yellow. The gallery isn’t saying that videogames are art. Because they’re not art: just like cinema, videogames are their own thing. Instead, this is about how artists exploit the mechanics of gaming to create works.Cory Arcangel probably sums it up best. In one video here, he’s removed everything but the clouds from the original ‘Super Mario Bros’, in the other he’s left nothing but the road from ‘F1 Race’. He’s taken gaming out of games, leaving tranquil, 8-bit minimalism. It’s about finding beauty where everyone else finds entertainment Justin Berry and Joan Pamboukes take similar approaches, the former screenshotting beautiful mountain vistas, the latter focusing just on the sky in otherwise violent games like ‘Metal Gear Solid’, creating flat planes of meditative colour out of worlds of gore. It’s all classic Duchampian recontextualisation, using the artist’s eye to reframe images from one of the most pervasive bits of modern aesthetic culture, finding beauty where everyone else finds entertainment. Downstairs, the art is all about memetic reproduction. Lorna Ruth Galloway replicates Ed Ruscha’s famous photos of gas stations but in GTA V, and Roc Herms creates