Bridging Worlds is a series by LA-based artist and VGT guest author Eron Rauch about the blurred line between games and art. These articles are intended as conversation starters about the burgeoning intersection between the fine art world, academic studies of games, virtual photography, and video game creation. This essay follows up on his thoughts here.
We live in a world of screens, simulations, rendered representations, and hybrid media. The deluge of digitally-generated spaces are all-pervasive in our businesses, in our media, in our hobbies, in our leisure, and in our relationships. Underpinning all of these virtual places are complex systems of code and hardware that create the rules of that particular feigned reality. The physics, the lights, the textures, and even the rules governing the rendering of perspective, are all crafted to seamlessly let us experience the space as being as visually real as possible.
The virtual photograph, whether it is a screenshot from a video game or from a Google Street View scene, is particularly compelling in our time regardless of whether it features a glorious moment of beauty or a jarring glitch precisely because it is leveraging one of the simplest ways we know and share in the Instagram age, photographs, to directly explore the immensely complicated systems that produce the myriad of digital realities that swarm around us.
