On Atari Series. An interview to Gee Magazine
Published on Gee Magazine, june-july 2008 deutch edition

GEE Magazine: Most of your paintings show organic structures like plants, fruits, or animals and people in motion. Why did you choose a minimalist videogame with sharp edges like „River Raid“ for your “Atari”-series? (Did you know that it is one of the first games designed by a female game designer?)

Alice: I'm used to choose pictorial references to my works based on my past experiences and memories, or also often, choosing images I'm simply caught by.

I've grown up in a little farm at Sao Paulo city neighborhood. My family, like many others who had emigrated from Japan and established in Brazil, used to earn living by planting and selling vegetables to supply Sao Paulo's distribution markets. Those times were the early eighties, and, of course, in the middle of lettuces, cauliflowers and chicken feeding memories, there were Atari 2600 and the favorite game River Raid, all taking part of my present repertory.

But memories apart, I've also chosen to start these new works based on Atari games due to two specific motivations:

a) I've been interested to reflect on this sort of spreading new-xenophobia and the sense of isolation and belligerancy nowadays. Not only among countries, but specifically, in my day-to-day I see common people, friends, even my family, feeling more and more often scared with anything or anyone who simply thinks different from themselves. There is something like a growing sense of fear, of violence, of intolerance to differences. I see people grouping themselves by affinities into guettos, like "if you think like me, so you are welcomed". As narcisistic as: "you are like my mirror, so it's ok to be with you". What kind of lonesome society are we living?

b) I always have been painted large-scale sized works, and I'd like to exercise working in smaller canvases, but continuing to stress a research on virtual spaces and color that I've been working so far. However, I've realized that just painting those "organic structures" at smaller sizes did not function as well. I had to find another approach.
 
Having those points in mind, I've rescued River Raid and other Atari games from my memories and started to research on some snapshots from the net.

GEE Magazine: You are using a lot of pastel colors in your paintings. What fascinates you about that specific color-palette?

Alice: I've been researching combinations of colors not to so easily recognizable, identifiable. Unfortunately, this is something you could only experience when looking face-to-face to the work, something to take your time, not capturable by photograph. Meantime, this point is something that really pushes me into painting, considering we are living in an instantaneous image-mediated era. In that sense, I'm inspired by the work of belgian painter Luc Tuymans, brazilian Alfredo Volpi and japaneses Yoshitomo Nara and Hiroshi Sugito to cite a few.

GEE Magazine: For your work “Quimera” you transformed a whole room into a piece of art. Did you every think about designing 3D-worlds or rooms in a videogame? Or bringing your work to a virtual place like “Second Life”?

Alice: "Quimera" (or "Chimera") in dictionary means fiction, ilusion, a mythical greek animal, or also a deep-sea fish specimen.

As an immersive installation held in a commercial gallery at Sao Paulo, "Quimera" was a proposal of transforming a room (originally expected to exhibit works of art for sale) into a kind of "non-place".

Answering your question, to put my work into a virtual place like "Second Life" would be something like the opposite strategy I'm trying to exercise. I'm trying someway to "bring" virtual spaces into the real physical world and reflect on these move. I have a special interest to think on the blurred boundaries between the notions of real and fictional nowadays. And as a former computer engineer who has been immigrated to visual arts, I have a particular interest to think on those moves.

GEE Magazine: What do you think is visually / aesthetically interesting about videogames?

Alice: I always have been aesthetically fascinated by River Raid itself. I don't know to explain clearly well. I love those large field colour areas generated by randomic algorithms. The colour combinations, that noisy sound. And I think that destructive solitude is a very contemporary feeling...

GEE Magazine: Could you describe the process of transferring the images of an old videogame to a painting? Which techniques did you use?

Alice: I start collecting snapshots from the web. Then I try possible compositions and colors using Photoshop. Finally, I draw the composition in the canvas and start to paint figuring out the palette of colors in relationship with the scale of the drawing and the size of the canvas. This phase is critical and time-consuming. I paint manually without tape-masks.

GEE Magazine: Your “Atari”-paintings seem to celebrate the pixel itself, and the large monochromatic space between and around those pixels. Could you elaborate on the way you structured your paintings and chose the compositions?

Alice: The composition depends a lot on what I'm thinking in that specific moment and in the relationships I have to conciliate so far: the scale of the elements, canvas size, colours. They have to be linked altogether.

GEE Magazine: Do you play videogames yourself? What is your position on the whole videogames as art-debate?

Alice: Today, I do not play very often, but I've played "Zanac" a lot at my late MSX Z-80 and the "Ultima" series at my first PC XT.

About videogame as art-debate, I think the real point is: does it still makes sense to discuss if "something" is art or not? What importance has this sort of questioning when contemporary art is so abroad, so multidisciplinar?

I believe things today are not so classifiable, not so generalizable.

In fact, is there any meaning an affirmation like "yes, videogame is art" or "no, videogame is not art"? I think it is so reductive... I prefer to think that each experience (in any field) is a single experience - if artistic or not, it is relative, depends on each one's context and mindset.
 

---

Texts:

© alice shintani, 2003-2008. all rights reserved.