Abstract
This paper examines early videogames as part of a tradition in twentieth-century art. Looking at Pong (Atari, 1972) alongside works of Barnett Newman and Nam June Paik, I argue that this tradition grapples with the problem of attention: how to engender a deeper relationship, or an intimacy, between a playing body, mediating spaces or technologies and a pictorial surface. It is this relationship which is the locus of aesthetic practice - flattened, abstract depiction grounds experimentation with new media in visual, cognitive and haptic consumption, production and, progressively, co-production. Shading this with ambiguity is the consideration that games, and the rest of the tradition, can be seen as part of a disciplinary reconfiguration of attention along the lines of postindustrial production.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.