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?