Pantalla Global: Virtual Platform (en) by Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

PANTALLA GLOBAL VIRTUAL PLATFORM

www.pantallaglobal.cccb.org

A co-production by:

In collaboration with:

With the support of:

The CCCB is a consortium of:

INDEX

PRESENTATION

HISTORY SCREEN

POLITICAL SCREEN

SPORTS SCREEN

ADVERTISING SCREEN

EXCESS SCREEN

SURVEILLANCE SCREEN

PLAY SCREEN

The creation of the counterpoint. Juan Insua

History and its screens Jordi Carrión

Politicization of art vs aestheticization of politics. Gonzalo de Lucas

The eternity of the phantom goal. Pere Bosch

Happiness. Iván Pintor

Alphabets of transgression. Jordi Costa

An all-encompassing view. Ana Luisa Valdés

Pixels and dopamine. Your other life on the screen. Mara Balestrini

PRESENTATION

THE CREATION OF THE COUNTERPOINT JUAN INSUA

The incubation phase of Global Screen offers a promising initial balance. The construction of a virtual platform, which began before the physical exhibition with a call for participation, is bearing its first fruits. Over one hundred videos on History, Politics, Sport, Advertising, Excess, Surveillance and Play confirm that processes involving co-creating with users form one of the decisive challenges in the new cultural scenario of the

1. Diversity of focuses, techniques and styles. The videos that fuel the exhibitionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s counterpoint reflect the emergence of an audiovisual culture free of prejudices, with a singular diversity of focuses, techniques and styles. Trivialisation of politics, oversights of history, criticisms of consumerism, the reality of fiction, the fictions of reality, the excess that leads to indifference or the fear of an Orwellian world, are some constants of

second decade of the 21st century. And they alert us to its richness, complexity and the dilemmas raised by this horizon. The role being played by collaborative digital technologies alongside the progressive democratisation of production and post-production tools reveals an outburst of collective creativity whose consequences are already as evident as they are difficult to predict. Meanwhile, it is possible to detect the zones of confluence and also the frictions suggested by the widening of the playing field of cultural and social creativity.

pieces that use remixing, animation, photomontage and stop-motion with ease. Despite the conditions imposed by their short duration, prevailing in nearly all of them are a healthy critical spirit, the intuitions of a shared poetic and a demystifying humour. There are videos that are embryos of more ambitious works, others could function as television spot commercials; there are ironies about experimental cinema, satires about videogames, exercises in style and denouncements of abuses of power. Each new video received increases the expectations of the counterpoint, in

other words: the creativity of the contributors and the dialectic tension that they establish with the point, i.e. the discourse of the curators and the theses of the exhibition. 2. Individual authorship and collective authorship. «A film is not the creation of one individual, but of a team of several dozen and even hundreds of people: cinema is by definition a collective art, despite the fact that the French nouvelle vague tried to impose later the idea of the politics of authors to confer upon the work a creative unity that technically it could not have. No other art is as indebted by its technical modernisation to collective contribution». This reflection by Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy raises a serious question for cinematographic criticism and the historians of cinema, but it also affects the notion of author in the age of the Internet and the proliferation of screens. The paradoxes are eloquent. On the one hand, the art house film cult is enjoying good health and the cinematographic canon is undergoing continual revisions; on the other, an intense collective audiovisual creativity is converting a growing number of citizens into authors. Academicist visions, the philias and phobias of the critics and the diverse styles of prescription, do not prevent the audiovisual ecosystem from continuing to incorporate new species, despite the hegemony still held by the multinational entertainment companies. In the midst of hypermodern exacerbation, cinema has ceased to be the epicentre of transformation, and while its spirit continues to be diluted on the rest of the screens, a legion of contributors are activating new forms of understanding authorship (individual and collective) as well as fuelling the debate on artistic elites and the democratisation of culture.

3. Exhibition and counter-exhibition. The Global Screen project is encompassed, therefore, within a broader transformation where the speed of change appears to be the only constant. The conversion of the world into screen, at the same time that the screen becomes a world, does not lead only to the implacable logic of entertainment, show business and stardom. The strength of the counterpoint suggests a growing number of emancipated views. New visions of a creative, active and critical citizenry. Lipovetsky, Serroy and Hispano, the exhibition’s curators, have been able to intuit the importance of this opening, allowing the public itself – or what was previously called the public – to create the counterpoint of their discourse. This is an important advance in the way exhibition projects are conceived and it affects all their phases: from creation of the script, including the documentation, production and post-production of audiovisuals, as well as the derived effects and collateral ideas that continually emerge in an open process which is disseminated via the social networks and aspires to become a platform for reflection on the mutations being suffered by the audiovisual galaxy in the 21st century. The second phase of the project which begins with the inauguration of the exhibition will allow the reconciling of point and counterpoint - the exhibition and the counter-exhibition, in addition to the challenge implicit in the digital version which, without straying far from the curatorial theses, can not be limited to a mere transposing of the physical mise-en-scène. The exhibition genre requires a language of its own in the virtual worlds; an as yet incipient formal autonomy, which technological changes and the pressure of the economic crisis could convert into a key sphere for exploration in coming years.

HISTORY SCREEN

HISTORY AND ITS SCREENS JORDI CARRIÓN

In the second episode of the fourth season of the series Breaking Bad, two of Jesse’s friends, high on meth, start discussing videogames. Comparing the virtues of different games, they end up talking about one where the player is faced with Nazi zombies: «Nazi zombies don’t want to eat you just ‘cause they’re craving the protein. They do it ‘cause they hate Americans, man. They’re

for centuries these and other similar words have been used to designate othernesses that were more or less similar to the eyes of whoever used them. Because language, which always has historical roots, tends towards a change of context, towards perversion and towards more or less unconscious fictions. An original reference point exists, more or less close to a (historical) reality;

the Talibans of the zombie world». Although the character is high on drugs, the logic of his discourse is not too far removed from popular logic. Because in the collective imaginary, the words Nazi and Taliban have gradually disassociated themselves from their historical specificity and, therefore, from their proper meaning, to end up both meaning something similar. And I say something because I am interested in the lack of specification of the indefinite pronoun. Barbarians, infidels, savages, Jews, Moors, Frenchmen, Cossacks, Spaniards, Nazis, Charlie, Talibans:

but between the first fictionalisation and that origin, a distance opens up that increases as time passes and, with it, the work gradually ramifies, diversifying and multiplying itself in readings and re-writings. If it has become - regrettably – commonplace to say that the Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are Nazi, it is because Nazi has become emancipated from Nazism. Carnivals form part of that slow mechanism of dissociation. While the miniaturisation of wars through little lead soldiers is not subjected to any moral judgement, meaning that shortly after the end of

the Civil War or the Second World War, the corresponding miniscule armies started to be sold, their representation in the form of fancy dress must still obtain social approval. For that reason Britain’s Prince Harry and magnate Bernie Ecclestone were reprehended for costumes they wore. The fact that they were fictions (i.e. fancy dress) didn’t exonerate them from having trivialised something taboo. We have not yet dissociated the swastika from the massacres. The distance that separates the historical event from its fictionalised version constitutes the first of the numerous screens that filter the increasingly distant reception of what was reality. En 1940, Charles Chaplin parodied Adolf Hitler in real time. With The Great Dictator he continued with a process that had already begun in caricatures and cartoon strips on both sides of the ocean and to which many other films would contribute during the course of the Second World War: the conversion of the German genocidal leader into a fictional character. On the first front cover of Captain America, which appeared in March 1941, the superhero was punching Hitler. Nearly half a century later, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon made the Escapist, the superhero created by the main characters, also enter the comic strips arena by punching Hitler from the very first front cover. A little later, Quentin Tarantino premiered Unglorious bastards, a film in which American Jews of the 1940s are in reality as hardened and vengeful as the Israeli Jews of the 1950s or 1960s, where Hitler appears for the umpteenth time. A version closer to that of Chaplin than to that of Downfall. By that time, the Nazis and their descendants had become a narrative resource, archetypes of evil, backdrops and reasons for serious exploration (Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom, by Pasolini) or blistering comedy (Mein Führer: The Really Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, by Dani Levy). They became something that maintains a very vague relationship with the terrible original source. Indiana Jones against the Nazis. Tom Strong against the Nazis. The porno film that Hitler filmed (in Deso-

lation Jones, the comic book by Warren Ellis). Captain Nazi, rival to Captain Marvel. Red Skull, ex-Nazi general and Hitler’s confidante. Nazis as secondary Fringe characters. As if the plan to clone Hitler, which a fictional character named Josef Mengele tried to carry out in The Boys from Brazil, had been successful, but in the fictional plane. One cell of Hitler in each fictional character that is inspired, to minimum or maximum effect, by Nazism. Nazi vampires, Nazi Amazons, sadomasochist millionaires dressed as Nazis, living Nazis and dead Nazis: Nazism as a Nazi army of viral icons infiltrated into all the twists and turns of Fiction, from sexual fantasies of mansions and dungeons to ultra-violent videogames, and not forgetting comedies featuring Nazi zombies such as Dead Snow. In the prologue to the US edition of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kiš, Joseph Brodsky writes: «Sooner or later, every revolt ends up in a work of fiction». This means that revolution needs testimony and magnification, chronicle and narrative. The destination of Reality is not only to be narrated in a historical key, but also to be transformed into a story, novel, comic, film, television series, videogame, Fiction. Journalism, history, documentalism, literature and cinema alike make use of texts, veils and screens to tackle the representation, direct or distorted, of what happened. At certain moments in human history, narrative artefacts existed capable of giving an agreed or predominant meaning to a historical experience. Just three years after the end of the Second World War, with all its complexity and its infinity of inter-crossing discourses, Norman Mailer’s book The Naked and the Dead was published, not only as the great novel on the Second World War, but also as one of the great war novels of history. Ten years after 9-11, no work on the attacks has met with a similar consensus. In our country, we often cite Soldados de Salamina as the start of interest in the last decade in cultural products linked with the Civil War and the Franco regime, but the truth is that for over seventy years there have been novels and comics

The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

published, and films premiered, that deal, in one way or another, with those conflicts. While it may be excessive having to go back to 1939 films such as Sierra de Teruel or Frente de Madrid or to 1970s comics such as Eloy to understand how

and which tackled the struggle: Butterfly (by Manuel Rivas and José Luis Cuerda, respectively). A little before or a little afterwards, other realist and fantastic films were released such as Land and Freedom, Libertarias, El laberinto del

the representation of the Civil War is configured in our consciences, I do think it is pertinent to think about the mass of texts including the novel by Javier Cercas, and the cinema adaptation produced by David Trueba. In other words, to think about the screen of screens or network of figurations in which the central element of Spanish history is represented in the consciences of the Spanish people.

fauno, Las 13 rosas and El espinazo del diablo. But these novels and films are no more than a part of the cultural products of 20th-century Spanish history that have gradually become rooted in our brains. In recent years, while José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s government promoted the Law on Historical Memory, the interpretations, versions and fictionalisations of different people were gradually being converted into nodes of the representational spider’s web that we call the Civil War. Vaguely, because often entering under that label are what we call The Republic, part of

Immediately before Soldados de Salamina, there was another book which also became a hit film

the Franco years and our perspective anchored in the Post-Transition period. Over the last decade, for example, it is difficult to find a pop album that doesn’t contain at least one song on the subject. Or a television series that, judging by the audience ratings of Cuéntame, has not dealt with the issues in one way or another, until we reach 14 de abril. La República and Temps de silenci. In Psicodelia y ready made (Adriana Hidalgo, 2010), German critic Diedrich Diederichsen wrote regarding May of ’68: «Its evocation serves, like all evocations of a generational community, for participants to assure each other in a flattering way that they were present at something major. Television documentaries such as Nuestros años sesenta continue to inform, decades later, about how long exactly it took the sexual revolution to reach the small city of Dinkesbühl or when the Beat movement disembarked in Dresden. It could be said that all these constructions help real people who lack any power to have the feeling that they did not live completely detached from the historical reality.» The same mechanism has been in action, in the Spanish case, during the last decade and a half. Screens have gradually convinced us that that history was our history, with a power of conviction much greater than the anecdotes and traumas recounted to us by our grandparents. In the last year of the 20th century, Peter Sloterdijk began a famous controversy with the paper that would later become Rules for the Human Zoo, whose thesis was: «modern societies can

The Screen is global because it is the sum of all cinema screens, television screens, computer monitors, mobile telephones, medical apparatus screens and GPS screens. Of all the pixelated representations that surround us and constitute us. But at the opposite pole to that of the global, we do not find, as is usually said, the local. Rather, we find the individual. The global screen only exists in individual consciences. And in these, the textual and the audiovisual coexist without divisions or easy discernment. It could be said that literature left its central place to cinema and that cinema was displaced by television, and that television has been ousted, or simply enhanced, by the Internet, at the same time that videogames were becoming a very powerful industry and one partly essential to the universal imaginary; but in the human brain, where the factual and the fictional are in perpetual contest, there is no centrality possible, above all because literature, painting and cinema continue to be the models which we read and watch. Representations are constantly amalgamated, into translations that partially forget the source language, that distort and adapt and impoverish their sources just as all discourses regarding the real do, whether documentary or fictional. Thus in our age it is difficult –if not impossible– for a synthesis capable of critical consensus to be in a work (whether this be a novel, an essay, a film, an artistic piece, a television series, a comic book or a videogame). The synthesis can only come later, through the discussion of works and products that are not conceived as an archipelago, but that the critic or reader can and

produce their political and cultural synthesis only marginally through literary, letter-writing, humanistic media». There is no doubt that the epical and the lyrical, in all their traditional artistic manifestations (poetry, theatre, painting, novels, opera and film), ceased to have the influential capacity that converts a synthesis into a central discourse.

must relate to each other. With the global screen we have access to the pieces of the puzzle, but only in the individual conscience can they fit together and find a meaning. Infinitely fragmented into often contradictory figurations, History waits for each person to reconstruct their archipelago. And to interpret it once more.

POLITICAL SCREEN

POLITICIZATION OF ART vs ESTHETICIZATION OF POLITICS GONZALO DE LUCAS

Forms change when they change speed. In the demonstrations by the 15-M movement, the contrast between the traditional news media (printed press and television) and the digital media used by the participants in the protests generates a temporal friction: suddenly, the media used by the powers that be are inefficient and even obsolete, slow to react and incapable of suffocating the counter-information generated via digital videos that were uploaded and immediately went

era, cannot react in synchrony and, in the gap caused by that delay, it seems clear that there may be some effects of their manipulation. Why wait, in that case, for the news programme? The crisis of the traditional media is due, in part, to the fact that their ideological resources continue to depend to a large extent on the speed for which they were created.

viral across the Internet, as shown in the disturbances caused by police intervention in the Plaça de Catalunya, in Barcelona, on 27 May 2011.

press as far as possible the radical aspect of live broadcasting by rehearsing –in the recording studios– the most efficient methods for ordering and planning programmes, trying to eliminate any possible risk or chaos, or the unforeseen cropping up. In this sense, some light may be shed on the subject by political analysis of the film by Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujica Videograms of a Revolution (1992), where it shows the moment in which Ceaucescu’s regime is overthrown, but no new regime has taken over, so the television communicates or broadcasts from the interval,

In contrast with the controlled broadcasting of information in television news programmes, these unplanned videos surge forth at a different speed due to an immediacy in the production and dissemination of such audiovisual materials that the spectator identifies as a more live, direct, urgent reaction; the traditional media of the powers that be, still aligned with the habits of the pre-digital

Television, for example, has tried to control or re-

the break or uncertainty regarding the most suitable or convenient ideological forms. When the people take over the state channel, and in the midst of a complete –or apparent– lack of technical control, what starts to be broadcast above all is surplus material: shots off centre, bumps, jumps, grainy or snowy images, disconnections, interruptions. That was the live image of a revolution, of the transition from one political system to another; that raw – or uncooked – interval has traditionally been the great key of politics in the cinema, knowing how to situate oneself between systems. Moreover, these kinds of off-centre images, exiled from traditional television, form part precisely of the digital images that are being created on the websites, also at a previously unseen or noncustomary speed. In that movement, the hierarchies or controls of dissemination via cinemas and museums on what is valuable or worthy of exhibition also end up subverted: websites such as Ubu and Prelinger allow people to see or get hold of materials that until now were very difficult to access (advertising films, artist films, sub-productions, books, documents, etc.). The idea of a history of the cinema or of art without signatures – also in detriment of the author’s rights– becomes

materially more reasonable, due to the possibility through editing to associate a canonical film and an industrial documentary and see what appears in that collision. Politics also passes through that production, that friction. The main commercial and promotional objectives of the Internet force a multitude of windows that hinder ideological control of the transit of the videos: when attempts are made to erase one, it simply reappears with another name or on another website. These are the Internet’s blank, empty, interstitial spaces or openings. The same thing happens with piracy and the costly and fruitless attempts to stamp it out. What is important about these changes is the knowledge of how to introduce some degree of chaos. In the interior of each system one also finds the creation of its vulnerability or fault line. All political power, whatever its ideological condition, instates a formal system (in communication, in customs, in laws, in fashions) whose survival is rooted in the persuasive and propagandistic strength of its collective propagation and the difficulty involved in changing it individually. That power is exercised above all through technical tools developed with economic and control objectives.

Videograms of a Revolution (Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujica, 1992)

Already back in the 1920s, Paul Valéry was warning that cultural changes belong to science and technology, and not to the poets as is usually believed. At the present stage, it seems clear that the iPhone and other screens invented by Steve Jobs have transformed forms of expressing love much more than any Hollywood screenwriter. For this reason, before the proliferation of screens designed to quantify or multiply with greater ease habits or images of consumerism, all work and thought that is aesthetical, political, or goes against the powers that be, must influence the development of technical instruments to give them other angles and uses, perhaps not functional, excessive or unforeseen. Politics in this respect must not be virtual or abstract, but materialist and starting from below, from the object (the keys on the keyboard, the camera): from valuation and awareness-raising regarding what is disdained, considered unworthy or cheap. Poetry, painting and cinema do this work of amplifying the ways of seeing or speaking. It is important to remember, at this point, that cinema originated far from the Academy and the forms legitimated by high culture, through popular genres such as the burlesque, and that recovering part of that wild character is an urgent task, as cinema has spent decades subjected to jargon and academicism. That was also the fighting front of the Dizga Vertov Group in the post-’68 era (and their famous motto to make political films politically, which implied undoing what was considered well done or –by militant filmmakers– well thought) or of the anti-colonialism of Glauber Rocha (extending the possibilities of direct sound and ideological discourse to the shout or howl or noise – equivalent to the sound of the grainy image). The videos that have been uploaded featuring the different revolts by young people are not so much interesting as singular works, or much less finished works, but rather because they are integrated into a collective and anonymous network or archive that is full of all the permutations and

critical set-ups possible. In this phenomenon, salient points are the manageability of the image and the sense of protest assigned to it, the liveliness of the circulation of images and sounds. By freeing itself from collective and industrial mechanisms, the video is used as a direct and spontaneous expression, a reaction. Perhaps mobile telephone cameras are the most symptomatic tool of this process. The majority of teenagers who have felt some artistic concern have opted traditionally for writing poems. In contrast, these days one more frequently sees young people choosing video –now converted into a domestic tool– rather than literature for showing their experiences. In that choice, the appearance of mobile telephones with integrated video cameras proposes an everyday and immature writing, simultaneously with a development of the diary on video, self-portraits and other previously peripheral forms. The mobile phone is not a medium for emulating the conventional modes of producing films, but for investigating other modes, and freeing oneself of straitjackets and legitimations, avoiding long waits and paperwork in order to get money. These cameras allow for an immediate adjustment between the experiences as they are lived –even before they are understood– and their recording. Upon freeing themselves of the pretension of immediately constituting a work, perhaps these shots also create new narratives and recover the vision in which forms are in vibration. The political alternative would be rooted in the fact that videos on mobile phones (and other screens) can be destined to a mannerist and mimetic selfabsorption –as a toy for tourists or daydreamers– or alternatively show –forcing them to go against the neutral technique of the manual– images that could only have been recorded through that camera, thus making new apparitions of the real emerge in digital processes. We either all move at the same pace –and with the same image– or the pace has to change.

SPORTS SCREEN

THE ETERNITY OF THE PHANTOM GOAL PERE BOSCH

45 years on, it remains one of the greatest controversies in footballing history: did Geoff Hurst’s shot really cross the line in the 1966 World Cup Final? The Germans and the English are still at loggerheads, nearly half a century later, over the decision of Swiss referee Gottfried Dienst and his Soviet linesman Tofik Bakhramov at Wembley. The dispute has united the prehistoric era of television with the contemporary era of the Internet. Because, to defend their arguments, both sides can only show images from four different cameras, the sole evidence from the match. That day, 30 July 1966 (the first year that the BBC broadcast in colour) is now simultaneously very distant in time yet very close in the collective memory. The controversy over Hurst’s decisive shot still lingers. So how long does a football match last? These days it is indisputable that the game’s narrative and its protagonists spread themselves far beyond the regulatory ninety minutes. The build-up is drawn out over days and

even weeks before major occasions. The 24/7 cycle has led to a saturation of the sporting press, which has turned to sensationalist and celebrity news formats to fill the space generated, a continuum only interrupted by the short space occupied by the match itself, from which an entire new series of debates is generated. The discussions can drag on for eternity, as in the case of Hurst’s goal. And all over a fraction of a second, one frame which people theorise about ad infinitum. Following in the same vein, in recent decades audiovisuals have dissected with great precision everything that happens in a sporting scenario, multiplying the locations and precision of the cameras. But in spite of all this, it seems that there is never enough. Only in a few cases has this close interconnection between sport and the audiovisual reached the point at which the image has an absolute value: an increasing number of disciplines incorporate the video judge figure. The appearance of slow-motion,

Goal of Geoff Hurst in the 1966 World Cup Final

frame by frame replays –introduced by ABC in 1967 for a downhill skiing competition– meant, for the first time, that the sportsperson could be seen in closer detail by viewers from the comfort of their own homes than by the spectators paying to watch the event in situ. The arrival of slow motion responded to purely aesthetic criteria, but it raised a new layer of reality with its own value, capable of modifying the meaning of what was captured by the human eye. From that moment on, its strength has increased ceaselessly. In tennis, not even players dispute the verdict of HawkEye. The screen possesses the absolute truth on what has really happened on the playing field. The evolution of the audiovisual narrative in broadcasts has allowed sports fans a close-up of events giving them access to extremely rich detail. The briefest moment can be recreated and analysed, raising new layers of reality. This is the blossoming of sport as an aesthetic discipline, incapable, however, of eclipsing its competitive aspect. In fact, despite the creative development of the way in which matches are reported, the important part continues to be the game itself, beyond its television narration. The quality of the image is merely a support. The important thing is to be able to see a good match on any medium –on the screen of a mobile phone, if necessary,

even if we lose definition–. The narration of the sporting spectacle does not only involve aesthetic enjoyment, but always provides new criteria for evaluating competitor performance. It may be an art, but it is one for mass consumption, and one without any time for digestion: its filming reaches millions of homes around the world, live. Recognising the competitive disadvantage for spectators at the stadium (expensive tickets, less quality of image), many clubs include the screen as part of the experience on the playing field. Football grounds have filled up with video scoreboards and giant, high-definition screens with exclusive images of the players and statistics in real time. At the same time, however, videos expose so many details that many federations try to prevent the game being watched via the video scoreboards of the stadium where it is being played: the aim is to limit the spectators’ field of knowledge, leaving them in the dark so as to avoid, should they see a refereeing error, their protesting too loudly –and for good reason–. This fracture between club and supporters is increasingly being overcome by the screens of mobile phones, where the images are reproduced virally. And, in spite of everything, spectators continue getting up from the sofa –where they can now

see matches in 3D– to pay for increasingly expensive entrance tickets and go out to suffer the cold or the heat of the terraces. Despite the evolution of the television narrative, the experience of seeing their idol in person continues compensating thousands of fans every weekend. The screenisation of sport is just another crutch for this interest, a support that lengthens the experience, but never the origin. Visibility, in any case, is basic for any sports communication project. Nowadays there are many sporting federations that pay for television broadcasts out of their own pocket as a promotional tool. And, if necessary, television operators are allowed to change norms and introduce time out at will in order to insert well-paid advertising. Without the screen, you do not exist. If you are there, however implausible it might seem, you can start to build up an identity. In fact, the great majority of professional teams have their own audiovisual department in order to control as far as possible the message received by their supporters. At the opposing extreme, however, the spectator has ceased to be a simple consumer of images. First of all he started to give opinions on what he saw. And as soon as it was possible, he himself became a producer. Why? Why does one think that he would prefer to relive sporting moments through his own, low-quality recordings, rather than through professional television images? For some reason, this audiovisual subgenre has had a great deal of success on the Internet. Despite the mass industrialisation of the sporting machine, the relationship between fans and teams continues to be very close, personal, with nuances and different stories to those of the spectator in the next seat; the small camera on their mobile phones allowing this unique bond. This relationship between fan and idol reaches its definitive union on the screen of videogames. The child who imitated his favourite player in the school playground can now, for once and for all, be as skilful as the world’s best. This identifica-

tion becomes supplantation to create a new reality, an endless championship at the whim of each individual. The emotion of sport is transferred to the home through the screen. And, besides the videogame, this also happens on mobile devices from which we can control sporting bets or our fantasy league team. The screen enriches the fan’s experience, he is no longer a mere supporter but can also start to control new layers of reality generated in the sporting event. The fan wants to put himself in the player’s place because in no other sphere does the cinematographic figure of the star have so much power as in sport. With the repetition of legendary moments, idols are built, heroes to be admired for their performance. The power of the image may, on occasions, exceed the purely competitive factor, and generate interest in sporting events, even when no great title is at stake. The Harlem Globetrotters were the first example, a sporting version of the travelling circus show. In the 21st century, one of the season’s highlights for the NBA is its All-Star weekend featuring the Slam Dunk contest: an aesthetic enjoyment for the spectator which has no bearing on the outcome of the League. The paroxysm of this protagonism acquired by the sporting fan arrives with the talk shows. Sporting discussions have made them leap from coffee time to the radio and finally, to television, where they have become a show in themselves; the offer has multiplied exponentially in recent years. In the most successful cases, it does this with a new subcategory: the sports programme that has no match images. The objective is to convert the discussion into a character in itself, into a polemicist capable of generating philias and phobias, as much or more as the sportspersons it debates. Aggressiveness has been transferred off the field, and jumps out from the screen to trap the spectator. The football match, definitively, lasts longer than ninety minutes. It doesn’t matter if we have no better images of the phantom goal by Hurst. Even if they existed, the argument would remain alive.

ADVERTISING SCREEN

HAPPINESS IVĂ N PINTOR

In contemporary advertising, the gestures of happiness generated by film become confused with forms of melancholy. In front of the advertising lens, jumps, kisses, caresses and open arms no longer aspire to invest the product or brand with joy. They do not even guarantee the value of a specific pleasurable experience. As they have multiplied through an increasingly large number of screens, the smiles, jingles and ties with which products were endorsed in early cinema and television advertising have gradually drilled holes, intervals from which to instil in the viewer a single desire: to enter into the world once more, not to be but to await, remaining permanently in the tense eagerness to embrace all experiences without missing a single one.

tures filmed by cinema always speak about the historical life of the human being, of the trace that it leaves on an unrepeatable time, the twenty or thirty seconds that a commercial lasts imprison that temporary recording in a loop that simultaneously affirms it and denies it. There is time in advertising images, but there is no memory, and gestures, in their frequent beauty, are mirages from which it is impossible to go back in history. How does one glimpse an origin for the twirling of the hair plaits that change from head to head in one of the H2Oh! drink commercials that won at the 2011 Cannes Lions? What root does that gesture have when it tries to erase any impurity from itself to proclaim its abstraction, a single concept before the viewer?

At every moment, from the television screen or through portable devices, advertising promises a constant entering into the world, and, if the ges-

A substantial part of advertising has gradually abandoned specific things to become the propaganda of a single invisible gesture, as happy as it

is unattainable. In the same way as melancholy, which is not so much retraction due to the loss of something, but the capacity to make an inappropriable object appear lost in order to possess it in a definitive way, contemporary advertising uses images to surround the empty centre of a happiness out of time. With its concise messages, it defends a fleeting experience that, ultimately, reveals the poverty of post-capitalist society to manufacture singular gestures of happiness. However, it delimits that empty place well, as if its purpose of selling were insufficient and it were anxious to convert itself besides into an authentic metacriticism of itself.

turing of the gesture over the framing, in the same way as recordings in Super-8 by the Beat Generation or films by filmmakers such as Stan Brackhage and Jonas Mekas. However, whereas each shot by these filmmakers is celebrated as the capturing of an instant robbed from time, the place from where someone looks, the opening of the image of the BMW spot does not second the construction of anyone looking.

In one of the commercial spots for the Mano (Hand) campaign, launched by car manufacturer

There is nobody looking at what is seen and that blindness becomes the symptom, reiterated in campaigns as brilliant as those by BMW, of the state of intermediate attention that is encouraged by the proliferation of screens, the global screen. The three privileged spaces of contemporary life: the highway, the supermarket and the

BMW in 2001, the motto Do you like driving? is expressed in a single gesture, that of the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand, which, contemplated from his own subjective viewpoint, emerges from the window in a gesture of caressing the landscape that passes alongside the vehicle. Over electronic music by Catalan duo La Crem, the shots are juxtaposed with a rhythmic montage that prioritises the cap-

sofa confronted with the domestic screen, align themselves in this extraordinary commercial, which cinematographically manifests a slightly rough edge, giving the sensation that it might have been recorded on a mobile phone or alternatively an amateur video camera, the impression of being the result of a private experiment. For that precise reason, the roughness makes its

TV spot from BMW (Mano [Hand] campaign)

appearance, as the effect of a looking between things and inside the character that JankĂŠlĂŠvitch called intravision, which, however, fades away as soon as the commercial ends and is freed to the infinite variations on the campaign. If the nature of the cinematographic gesture is also that of the ghost, which means that it never stops returning, leading to echoes and contaminations in new gestures and images, the gestural contingent that advertising makes migrate from some screens to others becomes, like advertising itself, an autonomous interface. It creates forms but is not capable of breaking them, so, at its limit, it invokes the need for a counterweight in which the image measures its value by its capacity to provoke major cuts, stoppages. The fact that it did not need to emancipate itself from any religious aspect is, for Lipovetsky and Serroy, a trait that makes the origins of cinema unique. Advertising, however, has matured together with the pseudo-religious condition towards which late modernity pushes all individuals, due to the mere fact that they occupy a place in society. Because, in effect, capitalism reveals itself as a cultural devotion, the most important that may have existed. Everything within it takes on meaning in relation to the observation of a cult, that of consumerism, without any other dogma or idea to cloud it. This imperishable cult, that does not recognise working days or holidays, overlaps work and celebration in one single, never-ending day. And it does not contemplate the redemption of blame, but rather it yearns after the blame

itself, this being its driving force. Unlike any other religious form, consumerism is configured as not an expiatory but a blame-apportioning cult. Just as the gestures that the different religious traditions have carved into their paintings and sculptures encourage a reassuring knowledge, advertising reminds the spectator of the perpetual exaltation of his desire before an ever-delayed object whose attainment does not guarantee compensation of any kind. So what does contemporary advertising sell then? The totemic deity that speaks through the voices of advertising is not just consumerism, blame or melancholy but the stopping of history. Advertising gestures dislodge any attempt to proclaim Iwas-here. The historian, as Benjamin points out, is the herald that invites the dead to the party and the figure of death is the only image that does not find a place either in the mechanics of consumerism nor in advertising logic. Without the untimely gesture par excellence, death, in which language is incarnated, there can not be any true gestures of happiness, only a single and final adolescent identity in which muteness and melancholy are strung together. From the press, through mailings and RSS feeds on the Internet, on the global screen, the images of contemporary advertising show a fascinating desire to colonise life and afford, perhaps, the opportunity to undertake a true search, to think about contemporary society as a great spot commercial which has undergone the erasure of any trace of the product advertised, any specific happiness.

EXCESS SCREEN

ALPHABETS OF TRANSGRESSION JORDI COSTA

A certain logic exists in the fact that Herschell Gordon Lewis, the father of gore cinema, matured to become a voice of reference in the field of advertising marketing. As a paradigmatic example of a man capable of achieving excellence in two completely different lives, Gordon Lewis is, for some, a world authority on direct marketing, the author of such books as The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion (1974) and How to Handle Your Own Public Relations (1977) and, for others, the Godfather of Gore, director of titles such as Blood Feast (1963) and 2000 Maniacs (1964), where formal disorder was compensated by a pioneering daringness to transgress taboos of representation. If one stops to think for a moment about the matter, the

amputated limbs had little to do with transgression: it was rather a case of satisfying a market demand that was uncatered for, and, at the same time, of marking out a territory for exploitation that had remained virgin up to that point.

fact that Gordon Lewis and his producer David Friedman invented a film subgenre that found its identifying mark in the rhetoric of spilt blood and

thers of the first dating websites in Spain or the leisure managers that, at a certain moment, after the successive intuitions of Apocalypse of 9/11

Gordon Lewis, the first person who showed, on a screen, in splendorous colours, how an arm was severed or a tongue pulled out, did not belong, then, to the spiritual descendants of the Marquis de Sade or the Comte de Lautréamont – the true agents provocateurs: founders of new paths of knowledge beyond Moral and Reason – but, probably, was closer to the logic of thinking of the characters that inhabit Otra Dimensión, the first novel by Grace Morales: the founding fa-

and 3/11, decided that the last word in feelgood nocturnal offerings would be liberal partnerswapping clubs –another way of habilitating a lubricious trench (the evolutionary succession of the anti-atomic shelters of the 1950s) in the midst of the inferno: a space for not being and being other(s), although without being able to escape the existential dander, whether one’s own or someone else’s–. Before gore, both Gordon Lewis and his sidekick David Friedman were making a profit from another genre: the “nudies”, those films of naked people that, originally, to be able to show more flesh than the regulators’ codes allowed, used the pretext of presenting themselves as documentaries on the emerging naturist camps of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Friedman had, in that context, what could be considered a brilliant idea: in one of the films, he decided to shoot one of the naturists jumping on a trampoline. This particular intuition for the mise en scène meant that his film contained a glandular dynamism that, to a large extent, was an entire premonition of the body language of the porno films that had not yet given rise to their lucrative industry. The example of David Friedman and Gordon Lewis offers, then, an idea that deserves to be taken into consideration: at one of its departure points, the Excess Screen is not transgression, but simply a functional, almost administrative, response to the question of what the audience wants to see. If gore cinema was born with Blood Feast, it could (and perhaps should) have died with Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992), a film that advanced as the development of a mathematical proposition on the escalation of excess and culminated in the (apparent) death by implosion of the subgenre. In one of its scenes, the main character found himself forced to flee a horde of zombies (or infected humans) through a room that had already been the scenario of a previous mass slaughter: a room bathed in blood, with its floor dotted with cut-off heads. In order to avoid a slip that, given the circumstances, could be fatal, the protago-

nist decided to cross the space to his (provisional) salvation by jumping on the heads as if they were something like a path of stepping stones on a river of blood. In the promotional interviews, Peter Jackson mentioned as a reference the films of Buster Keaton, with Seven Chances (1925) and its amazing final chase scene at the head. The reference was pertinent: after all, if gore were related with any pre-existing form, its most direct antecedent would be slapstick. A slapstick where the custard pies would have been substituted by cut-off heads, as left perfectly clear by some moments of Re-animator (1985) by Stuart Gordon. «What Sennet said over and over again was that comedy was not about being funny. It was about being desperate. What, besides desperation, could make a person walk on a telephone wires thirty feet off the ground, then smash through a skylight and bang off a busted mattress, twenty feet below?» writes Jerry Stahl in I, Fatty, a novel disguised as an autobiography of Fatty Arbuckle, the star of slapstick who also became the first media martyr of a Hollywood that started to forge its own dark legend through sensationalism, crime reports and gossip columns. If we take note of what Stahl explains, we have no other remedy than to consider slapstick as an aesthetic form that is potentially more dangerous –for its practitioners– than gore: after all, in slapstick, the sense of entertainment is supported by its condition of reality –the actor could, literally, cripple himself– while gore is, always, a choreography of a simulacrum. Let us revise, then, some old acquired prejudices: slapstick is closer to snuff than to that gore cinema with which, always in a picturesque way –as in the cases of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Guinea Pig (1985)– people have wanted to relate it. Here is, then, one of the paradoxes that arises from all paranoid views of the Excess Screen: a form traditionally considered harmless –slapstick– has more to do with the death wish than a form traditionally misinterpreted as perverse –gore– and the hospital case

Braindead (Perter Jackson, 1992)

histories of acrobats of excess such as Harold Lloyd –who lost two fingers and a fair chunk of his hand when playing with a bomb that he thought was just a prop and that turned out to be a real explosive– or Buster Keaton himself can certainly vouch for it. «We watched the Mondo Cane documentaries, where it was impossible to tell the fake the images of false atrocities and executions from the real ones. And we liked it like that. Our voluntary complicity in this blurring of truth and reality in the Mondo films alone made them possible, and was taken up by the entire media landscape, by politicians and churchmen. Celebrity was all that counted. If denying God made a bishop famous, what choice was there? We liked mood music, promises that were never kept, slogans that were meaningless. Our darkest fantasies were pushing at a half-open bathroom door as Marilyn Monroe lay drugged amongst the fading bubbles», wrote J.G. Ballard in the pages of his autobiography Miracles of Life. The writer credited the docu-

mentary by Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi with an important role in the most radical and visionary work of his literary oeuvre: The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a seminal text from an era governed by the subjective appropriation of a violent imaginary and its recycling as the painted –and sexualised– wallpaper of our subconscious. In fact, that touch of distinction of the mondo cinema that, based on the 1962 film, would develop into an entire subgenre was not so much in the pulverisation of taboos of representation, but in the mixture of the brutal and the trivial, harmonised through an off-screen narration that, playing with the registers of sensationalist language, ended up affirming an essentially distanced and cynical look at the totality. The mondo films no longer exist, but their sensitivity has infiltrated our lives: in those gossip programmes that play on the perpetual delay of the Great Revelation, while off-screen voices pour sarcasm on the dignity of whichever celebrity has become their latest prey,

or on those YouTube videos where the memory of slapstick is denigrated to encourage the giggling typical of stag nights or the company dinner unleashed to alcoholic chaos. The Excess Screen no longer occupies the space of the transgression –if, as such a screen, it ever did occupy it– but rather it is the matching decor (of the spirit of the times) in our multimedia habitat. In such a context, perhaps it is a good idea to ask about the space of the true transgression and, in any event, consider whether transgression continues being, in fact, possible. A Serbian Film (2010) by Srđan Spasojević is the latest film that, through the rhetoric of excess, has managed, somehow, to cause an uproar, generate debate, encourage dynamics of

lynching, converting public opinion into a mob illuminated by the torches of disinformation: in a television programme on a generalist channel, there was a guest who considered that the Ministry of the Interior had to intervene in response to the provocation caused by having programmed A Serbian Film at a festival specialising in fantastic and horror films. Spasojević’s film can be included within the tradition of that gore cinema that, effectively, did not die with Braindead: after a phase in which horror movies made the odd return, under the influence of the oriental tradition, to the poetics of the suggestion that they were moving between a Val Lewton-type purity and resorting to what could be called post-production fright, gore has been reborn uniting with explicit imagery the desire to relate itself to differ-

Mondo Cane (Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1962)

ent sources of the transgression discourse (with frequent turns of the screw on the religious: see the notable Martyrs [2008] by Pascal Laugier). Even those film experts most in agreement with the portrayal of the extreme counter their defence on the freedom of watching A Serbian Film with a negative valuation of the excellence or good quality of Spasojević’s film. A Serbian Film is a horror movie that, in turn, wants to be political cinema: its most debated scene is that showing the rape of a baby at the very moment of its birth. Little is said about the end of the film: the moment in which the bodies of the protagonist and his family are taken to a place off screen that we will never see. That off-screen place is, supposedly, the shooting of a necrophiliac porn film using those corpses. Spasojević’s political thesis is not especially subtle, but nobody could accuse him of being opaque: from cradle to grave, the Serbian is pornographic bait. We could broaden the thesis: not just the Serbian... There is an edifying exercise that all internet users can practice: detecting in the visible and safe parts of the web, some mutations of pornography. For example, the kind of videos that YouTube does not penalise as pornographic and that, in consequence, allow the following to be uploaded to its site without any viewing access restrictions: spit fetish videos, of Japanese female students mutually licking each other’s faces, foot fetishism videos, videos involving playing games with food… In short, all belonging to the world of what has traditionally been considered sexual perversion, with the displacement of the focus of attention outside the strictly genital as a common denominator. Other forms of post-porno on YouTube would have fascinated J.G. Ballard: such

as educational videos by Brazilian doctors who instruct users on how to proceed to catheterize the female bladder. The only possibility for one of the identifying features of old porno –a close-up of an open vagina– is thus passed off as medical representation, through a disturbing mannequin doll: a post-organic pornography, which evokes the fetishist imaginary of, for example, Pierre Molinier. But there are more routes loaded with surprises: for example, the one that allows users to discover, in something as apparently harmless as the Wish Lists of an online store such as Amazon.com, a territory for a kind of de-sexualised mutation of prostitution. Wish Lists are usually the place where a new archetype –the Financial Mistress: a dominatrix who only aspires to be financially fêted by her admirer– talks with her client through something that is not even a barter economy: there can be no greater satisfaction than that of buying a present for someone who has promised to ruin you, wear out your credit card and extinguish your savings account as the last word in sexual domination fantasies. The interesting thing is that these new forms of pornography have managed to be, directly, pornography without pornography, sex without sex, transgression for the user without the hassle involved in the old languages of transgression. In summary, the type of satisfaction of a guilty desire that one find day was articulated by Gordon Lewis and David Friedman through the invention of gore cinema with the coldness, cleanness and calculating attitude of a competent sales agent. Of course, in this cynical anti-utopia, it is necessary to prepare a space for the scapegoat: Srđan Spasojević or the man who took too long to realise that the alphabet had changed.

SURVEILLANCE SCREEN

AN ALL-ENCOMPASSING VIEW ANA LUISA VALDĂ&#x2030;S

I live in a perfect panopticon, from the terrace of my apartment on the top floor of a building in Montevideo, where I have moved after an absence of 34 years, I can see the whole city. There are no surrounding buildings to bother me; I live in a neighbourhood with low-level houses and lots of trees. From my iPhone I look at my emails dozens of times per day; this total ubiquity allows me to stay abreast of what is happening in Sweden, where I have lived throughout my exile, and in the countries where I have friends who matter to me. Thanks to my iPhone, Skype and Twitter, I can follow what is going on in Damascus, in Gaza and in Stockholm. I am totally connected and my virtual presence often feels more entertaining and interesting than the one which I live in the everydayness of real life.

When I started playing virtual games, Ultima, Everquest, World of Warcraft, I very quickly noticed that the emotions and feelings that they aroused in me were difficult to emulate outside the games. The adrenaline, which reached dangerous levels when a monster was chasing me, the fight, the sense of loss when my avatar was dying or injured, all those sensations were infinitely more powerful inside the game than outside of it. Even virtual eroticism reached levels of communication and abstraction that often beat any IRL (in real life) encounters. However, I also know that this extreme virtuality that I live makes me vulnerable to mix-ups and to the disappearance of the body and of its sensual and sensorial dimensions. The mediaeval mystics, San Juan de la Cruz and Teresa de Avila,

reached ecstasy through prayer and suggestion, they always wanted to transcend the limits of the body, escape the prison of the senses, reduce the signs that mark hunger, thirst, libido. Today it is games or simulations that make us access the post-human dimension. In Matrix the heroes connect to machines and databases that allow them to instantly acquire the knowledge or skills they require to pilot aircraft or speak unknown languages.

earth finished there and the sea that surrounded it ended up in an abyss from which nobody could escape. British writer Terry Pratchett, creator of the hilarious Discworld books also uses this formula, the planet is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, are standing on the shell of a giant turtle, Great Aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Tuin.

The altar of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin shows in an immense high-relief frieze the struggle between the gods and the giants; the fight is presented there in one plane and the eye can see even the most insignificant details of the bodies

Also thinking about that flat world controlled by an all-seeing eye, was British scientist Jeremy Bentham, who, at the end of the 18th century, designed a model prison in which a giant eye could control all the inmates: the panopticon, which would later be the great metaphor of George Orwell in 1984.

in movement. This was how the world maps of Mediaeval times were presented too, the earth was flat and had an end, Finisterre, the northernmost cape in Spain, was not a metaphor, the

Theoretician Michel Foucault also used the panopticon as a metaphor for society in his book on prisons, Discipline and punish, in which he de-

Pergamon relief (Pergamon Museum in Berlin)

fined our modern society as a society in which the norm implies the intrinsic acceptance of individual rights, the right to subversion, the right to dissent.

emotionally compromises it and leads it to its death, by making it fail partly in its function».

The major social structures in European mediaeval society were the castle and the convent, two models of production and control that created bonds of vassalage and inter-dependence. Feudalism combined the most perfect decentralisation with its complex system of relations of obedience and total centralisation of the figure of the king, the sun, around which the world revolved.

Surveillance and control are not reduced to machines and screens that control our space and that may determine our position on a virtual map of increasing complexity. In addition to the satellites that circulate around our planet and that send information on storms, earthquakes or road accidents, there is a surveillance and a control exercised by states that apply what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called the State of Exception.

Uruguayan literary and film critic Alicia Migdal writes thus about the panopticon present in a large part of the films produced by Hollywood,

The state applies laws that were passed in case of war and repression of riots, then those laws that reduce the civil rights of citizens and that

as in the Bourne film trilogy: «Bourne, the amnesic agent, was programmed to react to every dangerous stimulant as well as to think of strategies. The character will have to deconstruct that machine they turned him into, to discover who he is again and not only what he is, in other words a machine for predicting and killing. In that journey to the deepest part of his identity, he will have to confront the totality of the panopticon that constructed it. In other words, he will gradually discover, first, that such a panopticon exists, that he was formatted by that system and that his progressive knowledge must act in reverse. By de-walking the path, having all the information in his visual and conceptual field, Bourne will reach the heart of his identity which is the heart of the system. The dizzying trilogy is the deconstruction of that panopticon. We can also think about the different way the theme is represented in the German film The Lives of Others, in which State control is personified through the real eye of the Stasi civil servant who personally, physically spies on the pair of lovers, and how that personalisation

give the state total authority become permanent laws, and the state generates a situation of permanent alert.

In a short stay in Cuba a few years ago I discovered that the state did not need sophisticated machines or surveillance devices to control the lives of citizens, that the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution have becoming centres for informing on and reporting people, where the lives of those who live in Cuba and of visitors are closely monitored. Talking with fishermen and taxi drivers they all said to me: «in this country we make love like crazy and we drink and we smoke because they are the only places where the State cannot control us». Tonight I will make my avatar transgress all the laws of the virtual worlds of others, it will climb mountains, fight dragons and make love with tenderness and passion, as love should be made in virtual worlds and in all others.

PLAY SCREEN

PIXELS AND DOPAMINE. YOUR OTHER LIFE ON THE SCREEN MARA BALESTRINI

Of the broad range of screens that make up our everyday life, there is only one on which you can die and be reborn. You can be honest or a villain, an alien, an artefact or a human, a winner or a loser. Only on one can you control the outcome of a fantastic world as if the complexity of the universe depended on your ingenuity and ability. It is not the screen that defines its observer as a spectator. It is not the goggle-box used to look out at reality by the couch potatoes that Sartori disparagingly called homo videns: a passive mass of remotely controlled zombies. As part of the spell, the game screen exorcises the spectator from a passive role and converts him into a gamer, into an inter-actor. Without the actions of the player, there is no plot and no outcome: interaction is the whole point.

The game screen, now also mediated by artefacts such as Wii and Kinect, calls upon the user to intervene in the narrative in a physical and cognitive way. It forces him to think, move and gesticulate in order to lead his avatar in a world of graphic animation where everything seems possible. Things happen to the gamerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own avatar, not to an actor with whom the gamer may identify or may not. As with all screens, the game screen also arouses hatred and admiration, inspiring legends and certainties. If twenty years ago it was supposed that videogames only interested teenage males with disorders such as a desire for escapism, today it is possible to say that this is the most important industry in the world of entertainment, where companies such as Nintendo, Square-Enix,

Ubisoft and Blizzard are disputing a throne that is constantly changing in line with the new horizons discovered by technologies and creativity. The numbers are categorical: according to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2010 alone consumers spent over 25 billion dollars on games, hardware and accessories. The average player is 37 years old and has been playing for 12 years, and the gamer community is 42% female. Sensation and intellection are combined at the heart of the game screen, which has ably made use of all the other screens to generate its story and has brought back famous characters and feats to popular culture, from Mario Bros and Pacman to Halo, Counter Strike, Call of Duty and Dead or Alive. The game screen is the screen of 3D, that of a reinvented world that is increasingly mimetic in technical terms yet fantastic at the same time. The videogames screen shares with the advertising screen a lack of innocence in its fight to seduce. It is a recipe that cooks to perfection a world of fantasy that has much more to do with human nature than with fiction. Its producers know that those characters with large pupils and paused blinking are perceived as more sociable and attractive (D. Weibel, et al. 2009) and that gamers represented by more attractive avatars usually conduct themselves with greater selfconfidence due to the so-called Proteus Effect (N. Yee and J. Bailenson, 2007). They know exactly in what way they must design their characters, on the basis of theories such as that of the Uncanny Valley, which explains the limits at which an animation with humanoid features generates within us tenderness and empathy or repulsion and uneasiness. The game screen has fine-honed its success by making use of research in the world of cognitive sciences, psychology and person-computer interaction to understand the way in which we perceive, how we make decisions when we are carried away by emotion, how we learn to manage

resources, to collaborate with others and even the timing relationship between sight and hand movements. It is likely that the game screen is putting under the scientific magnifying glass some of the ideas that Hitchcock practised through intuition and Aristotle had already described centuries ago regarding narrative composition. The concepts of presence, for example, the importance of the surprise factor when managing to immerse spectators in a plot and cause a positive or negative emotional response in them. And what is the key to seduction for this screen? A pioneer in research into games experience and design, XEODesign carried out an experiment whose results suggest that people play, not so much for the game in itself but for the experience that this creates: adrenaline highs, an imaginary adventure, a mental challenge: or the structure that the game offers, as a moment spent alone or in the company of friends. People play games to create spontaneous experiences, such as the overcoming of a difficult challenge that allows them to escape from their everyday worries, or simply to dedicate themselves to what designer Hal Barwood calls ÂŤthe joy of resolving somethingÂť. Cases of hit games such as World of Warcraft or the more recent Minecraft have shown that games exist for all kinds of gamers and motivations. It has been said that the fascination with impeccable 3D graphics and the complex plot of infinite action keeps videogame players in a world of their own. So, how does one explain such a premise when faced with phenomena such as that of Minecraft in which the idea is to construct your world made from Lego-type blocks to take refuge from impious monsters that attack at night, without any further storyline or aesthetic effort? Games are the oldest form of education and playing is one of the vital functions of any crea-

Minecraft

ture with a capacity for learning. By playing we learn without realising, we experience sensations and put our intellect to the test. As Allen S. Weiss, CEO of NCH Healthcare System assures, being immersed in a videogame, having the brain stimulated, can encourage the emergence of creative solutions and adaptation to circumstances. «These ideas and thoughts can be applied to real-life situations. The results can be surprisingly positive for individuals, communities and society overall». While all the others screens show that some of the models upon which our world is sustained are in decline, as scenes of ecological, financial and political collapse repeat themselves, optimists exist of the stature of Jane McGonigal, who consider that games will help us change everything. For the author of «Reality is broken. Why

games make us better and how they can change the world», playing videogames is productive: it generates positive emotions, stronger social relations, a sense of achievement and satisfaction and, for those gamers that are part of a community, the opportunity to construct a sense of purpose. For McGonigal, reality is broken and for that reason millions of people dedicate many hours each day immersed in videogames through which they achieve a sense of happiness that they cannot find in the real world. In these environments, users collaborate more and better, they become committed to resolving complex situations and make an effort to triumph. Games always make us better and could help us in the adventure of improving the world, if the fiction revolved around real-life problems such as curing cancer, fighting

against hunger in the world or stopping climate change. Thus, legions of gamers with skills that are hyperdeveloped thanks to hours of entertainment in the virtual world could resolve the problems that affect humanity with the skill of an expert. After all, as Malcolm Gladwell says in Outliers: the story of success, ten thousand hours of practice make a virtuoso; a teenager who plays at deactivating nuclear plants every day would end up being an expert technician in a short time. There are 8,765 hours in a year approximately; there are currently 500 million people worldwide playing online games for an hour each day. And a young user accumulates on average some 10,000 hours of training upon reaching the age of 21. This is almost the same amount of time that we spend in secondary school. Implicit and explicit interactivity, technologically mediated alternative realities: it is thought-pro-

voking that given the crisis of the current model, an education for the future could be configured in this way. Similarly, an increasing number of medical treatments use games in immersive environments to offer patients more attractive rehabilitation therapy. In fact, at the Pompeu Fabra University there is a project being run by research group Specs, called the Rehabilitation Gaming System, which uses games in virtual reality environments so that patients can recover mobility in their upper limbs after suffering a stroke. We are not going to overlook the side-effects of the game screen. A brain flooded with dopamine (responsible for making gamers feel happy when they play) and with peaks of adrenaline, could develop addiction and there are still no conclusive studies explaining the relationship between violence in the virtual world and the real world. Now, as with all the other screens, the challenge lies in designing contents indicated to generate dependency and placebo or remedy and vitamins.