As I had watched this video prior to Monday's lecture regarding Machinima, Cory Arcangel's "«Super Mario Clouds», 2002" appeared to be a meaningless video to me, as images of clouds slowly drifted across the screen... silently... for 5 whole minutes. The meaning was utterly lost on me, and like many of the people leaving comments below the video, to be quite honest I was left bewildered as to why it even existed. However after reading through several more of the comments, I learned how Cory Arcangel, through modifications and hacking techniques specific to the NES game console, took the original game and deleted everything within it save for these white clouds on a blue sky. I now recognized the familiar Nintendo graphics, yet without Mario, the labyrinth, any enemies or obstacles, the entire narrative structure of the game had vanished and I was still left with more questions than answers.
After our lecture however, I understand now how only by taking the context of the video's creation into consideration can this piece really be appreciated. Machinima, or the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production, usually generated by video games, is a form of art I had never really encountered. Machinima has boomed because of its large fan base, the rise of game culture, and because it is widely accessible and fairly cheap to produce. The virtual worlds and spaces are already provided; and this allowed for a lot of focus on the narrative arc that was being created.
So Back to the clouds.
After further researching the original artist's statement regarding "Super Mario Clouds," I found a quote by Cory, where he wrote:
"I knew that the clouds would be simple enough for people to latch on to, and I knew that in order to make art that dealt with technology, you had to, in a way, have the art not directly be about specific technologies. I mean, we think everyone played Nintendo, but really, hardly anybody played Nintendo. Now looking back on it all – it's about… what do these pixelated clouds represent? It represents the whole progression of humans, communication and technology. But I couldn't write that down. And it became a meme slowly. I put it up and it took years for people to see it, but it worked…"
This to me was an incredibly powerful statement. To take video game art, something meant to just be part of a backdrop, something taken in but not really focused on, and shine a spotlight on it, was brave. And I can definitely understand how it could totally fail, and did at first - but that makes it even more fascinating. Rewatching the video multiple times, my train of thought explored so many different aspects~ from its creation to its meaning to random thoughts about clouds themselves. However, I did realize that while this particular art piece was rather smooth, others are more jagged and rough, perhaps due to the way in which they are made. With such a stark contrast to some of the smooth gameplay video games offer nowadays, I think that it really makes the impact seem larger.
A thought to explore in the future however, could be the question of what will machinima artists do if (when) games transform permanently to be VR games or AR games? Will it still be possible to make these creations?
I find that the medium through which Machinama is created is essential to its existence as a narrative and artistic creation. It is sorta weird how in «Super Mario Clouds», the cinematic content of the short "film" was inseparable from its roots in the Mario franchise video games. Like, film directors can film anything and present it as their own independent work that to some degree has its own self-contained narrative and purpose, but when it comes to Machinama everything HAS to be in relation to its originating platform. It's not just clouds in the short film, its specifically 'Mario' clouds.
Watching this video, I also thought what the use of the clouds could mean to those watching them. I came to the conclusion, that they allow the viewer a chance to escape their reality and think about being in a different environment. With this escapism, the viewer is able to forget their problems as the world fades away and only this world and the viewer exists.
In regards to your question connecting VR and Machinima, I can definitely see VR opening up new forms for machinima artists to create stories. Similar to how VR transforms the first person perspective and amplifies its immersivity, FPS games in VR and even multiplayer versions of these, would enable stories to physically be re-enacted by the players themselves. This introduces the notion of player movement and Machinima, asking the question of whether or not the art would be produced by what the player sees on their screen, or what an outsider sees. Ultimately, I believe your question is very valid because the possibility space for Machinima in VR is unbelievably vast.
I wonder what Arcangel meant though by "in order to make art that dealt with technology, you had to, in a way, have the art not directly be about specific technologies." I would think that, to engage in an artistic dialogue about something, you would need to relate it to that something, and indeed, I would say that he did. He's making a statement about how no one's ever actually "played" Nintendo and invokes that idea by abstracting the concept of Nintendo's work by bringing the unnoticed into the foreground. He's directly invoking the technology of the SNES and following consoles, referencing them by using the very art from the game. How is that not dealing with the specific technology?…