So, we all love the latest Zelda game (Tears of the Kingdom - TOTK), and so do the critics. But now that we and the game journalists all have hundreds of hours of playtime under our belts, have any thoughtful, well written critical takes on Nintendo's latest masterpiece been written? I know at the beginning there were a few knee jerk reviews that tried to stand out. I am looking for well written, thoughtful, but ultimately critical takes on TOTK. People who have more to say than just gushing about Ultrahand. People who have perhaps done a thoughtful comparison with BOTW at a design level, and come out with some negative feedback on the game overall.

This is not because I don't like the game - far from it - but I would love to read some balanced analysis before I venture my own (potentially critical) takes on the game.

Thanks

A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people. High culture is a precarious achievement, and endures only if it is underpinned by a sense of tradition, and by

So ArtForum have launched a special September issue investigating the, lets say broader, relationship between new media, technology and visual art.* Of worthy mention is the essay Digital Divide by the art world's antagonistic critic of choice Claire Bishop, a writer whom a little under 8 years ago,

Art historian and associate professor at New York’s CUNY Graduate Center Claire Bishop has taken to the pages of Artforum’s September edition to issue a kind of rebuke for contemporary art. She argues, in an extended essay that only briefly detours into egregious artspeak, that though the new realities of technology and the internet provide the fundamental context for art currently being made, art and artists have failed to critically confront this context and are too content simply to respond and adapt to it. Bishop writes simplistically of digital art that “somehow the venture never really gained traction,” and that “the appearance and content of contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution.” Is it really the case that art has been so nonreactive to such a huge change in our world?

Bishop rightly notes that, “Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption.” Like any time in history, artists have taken to contemporary technology, adapting computers, portable projectors, and server networks as art-making materials (see Stan VanDerBeek’s 1963-66 “Movie-Drome” at the New Museum’s Ghosts in the Machine exhibition for one such example). Yet the author goes on to cite contemporary artists who aren’t exactly the names one immediately comes up with when considering the avant-garde of digital art. She considers Frances Stark, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Ryan Trecartin as artists who do make some effort to be technologically engaged, but Bishop fails to acknowledge other artists who truly confront digital technology, both appropriating it and reflecting on it critically.

The BBC children’s television programme Teletubbies is, evidently, based upon an SF conceit. But how meaningful is it to call it SF? Whilst conceding science-fictional elements to the show, most viewers, I suppose, would not think of it as belonging to the SF genre. And yet there is a point in making the identification.

The Teletubbies live in Teletubbyland, a sort of hi-tech hobbiton of green fields and hills, dotted with coloured flowers and grazing rabbits, under a bright blue sky. The four Teletubbies themselves live in a sunken dome, tended by technological gadgets of various sorts: a robotic vacuum-cleaner called ‘Nu-nu’ who cleans up all messes, food-producing and other machines, and periscopes that rise spontaneously from the turf to talk or sing to the Teletubbies.

The ’tubbies are differentiated from one another in various ways, and each has a favourite toy or prop. They are, in descending order of size: Tinky-Winky (who is purple, his antenna a triangle shape, his favourite ‘prop’ a handbag); Dipsy (lime green, his antenna a straight-up phallic thrust, his favourite prop an enormous black-and-white top hat); La-La (yellow, her antenna curled like a pig’s tail, her prop a ball); and Po, the littlest of them (red, his antenna a circle, his prop a scooter). The show’s conceit is that these curious space-alien-creatures represent toddlers at different stages of development, such that Tinky-Winky has the greatest (although still severely limited) linguistic capabilities, and Po talks in baby-talk. They are also differentiated in terms of character: they all have racially ‘white’ faces and hands, except for Dipsy who is racially ‘black’ (quite apart from his pimp hat, Dipsy adopts rather patronisingly stereotypical hip-hop dance postures). La-La likes to sing. Po likes to ride around on her scooter. All four of these beings have television screens inset into their bellies: which is, of course, the feature that gives the show its name.

“Look,” Thomas Kuhn said. The word was weighted with weariness, as if Kuhn was resigned to the fact that I would misinterpret him, but he was still going to try—no doubt in vain—to make his point. Kuhn uttered the word often. “Look,” he said again. He leaned his gangly frame and long face forward, and his big lower lip, which ordinarily curled up amiably at the corners, sagged. “For Christ’s sake, if I had my choice of having written the book or not having written it, I would choose to have written it. But there have certainly been aspects involving considerable upset about the response to it.”

There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the attempt to achieve the impossible very often – if not always – has huge costs. Even if a project has good intent, its colossal cost always outweighs its reasonability, as we saw in Iraq. What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was extremist, but now we have the utopian idea of building democracy in Libya or Afghanistan. So the utopian impulse – the impulse to achieve what rational thought tells us is impossible – has migrated to the centre of politics. That is connected with humanism and the idea of progress.

Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of avant-garde filmmaking techniques. The films are linked through their interest in using and reassembling the fragments of the past—recorded on film and video―to try and make sense of the chaotic events of the present. I first met Adam Curtis at the Manchester International Festival thanks to Alex Poots, and while Curtis himself is not an artist, many artists over the last decade have become increasingly interested in how his films break down the divide between art and modern political reportage, opening up a dialogue between the two.

Digital games are important not only because of their cultural ubiquity or their sales figures but for what they can offer as a space for creative practice. Games are significant for what they embody; human computer interface, notions of agency, sociality, visualisation, cybernetics, representation, embodiment, activism, narrative and play. These and a whole host of other issues are significant not only to the game designer but also present in the work of the artist that thinks and rethinks games. Re-appropriated for activism, activation, commentary and critique within games and culture, artists have responded vigorously.

Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod (see full list of participants on the web site) with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.

Since then, Chto delat has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to engaged culture, with a special focus on the relationship between a repoliticization of Russian intellectual culture and its broader international context. These newspapers are usually produced in the context of collective initiatives such as art projects or conferences.

IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited artist, Seth Price presents an essay challenging the traditional photo essay format.

1. Ritualized Unknowing People keep trying to get a handle on what’s happening. There’s a fear that others are hastening to make startling connections among the raw material, tracing lines between points we didn’t even know existed. Exacerbating this anxiety is the fact that despite its supposed insistence on the consolidation of knowledge and the worth of information, the Internet produces ritualized unknowing. You could say, however, that this is a good thing, for it provokes a desire to remystify the frenzy of technological change through ritual, through a personal and allegorical rehearsal of what is perceived to be a manic and distorting increase in density, a compression exponentially telescoping in reach and magnitude.