BK: What games have influenced you?
YP: Honestly, I’m not a gamer at all — I’ve never really played. What fascinates me are the mechanics of the visual novel. Serj once spoke about this in a lecture on the museumification of games. The visual novel is a very accessible medium for artistic expression, yet it’s still undervalued.
What surprises me most is how little games are represented in contemporary art. The games industry is, what, five times larger than the film industry? And yet while many of us grew up playing San Andreas, we hardly see video games taken seriously in the art context.
Serj believes this underrepresentation is only temporary — that the game medium is a growing trend. He reminded me that just five years ago, you could count the number of scholars working in so-called game studies on one hand. Now, there are major conferences around the world — including in Russia — dedicated to exploring video games as a language of social and artistic expression.
BK: That’s a very sharp and also quite difficult question.
In the 1990s, installation art played a crucial role in contemporary practice. An installation is a form that allows one to move from the exhibition space into an inner world, while still remaining distinct from it. If we think about game mechanics in this light, my favorite example of a “total installation” would be Palle Nielsen’s The Model. There’s now a great deal of scholarship on this work. Originally presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1968, it was a children’s playground where adults were not allowed. Children could do whatever they wished, organizing their own society through play, while adults could only observe. That boundary was central to its meaning as an installation.
Video essayism developed along a similar path. At first, artists like Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, and Jean-Luc Godard created film essays. But when television funding dried up, they moved their practice into exhibition spaces, where the video essay took on an installed form.
The relative underrepresentation of video games, in my view, has to do with how the gaming experience unsettles the dialectic of internal and external space. The player both participates directly in the process and remains at a distance through the interface. I haven’t seen a game quite like Tatly before, but I’ve often come across work in the “in-game” vein — in-game photography, in-game essays — such as Harun Farocki’s Serious Games. In another remarkable work, Parallel, he reconstructs the history of video games and digitalization, examining them from the outside, again through the format of an installation.
Let’s consider the form of this work and what makes it distinctive. As with any video essay, the key element in a film essay is writing — not writing as a finished product, but as a process, a personal and subjective practice. In this case I see a kind of writing that takes on the qualities of fiction. And what is fictional writing, if not a return from the future to the present? Here it takes the shape of a science-fiction hypothesis, one that allows us to view the present differently. Marker’s films — especially Sans Soleil — are classics of this kind of essay.
If we speak of game essays, the game itself assumes a conceptual function. It mobilizes aesthetics — or, in the case of Tatly, a particular mechanic — to produce knowledge, even to become knowledge. This is a fascinating move, expanding the post-conceptual tradition in art, which at the moment is in something of a decline. Video essayism, too, no longer has the prominence it enjoyed in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Another aspect that struck me was the visual dimension of the game essay. Strangely enough, it reminded me of Personal Shopper, the film by my favorite director, Olivier Assayas, starring Kristen Stewart. Her character makes a living by selecting, trying on, and purchasing clothes for celebrities. Running through the film is this thread of conversation about ghosts, about life and death, and about what might be called “labor in vain.”
It seems to me that with Tatly you’ve created something similar — a Kafkaesque, gothic game essay.
These three elements together allowed you to produce not just a game, but a work of contemporary art — one that extends and reanimates the post-conceptual tradition.