Halo Corpse Alphabet; or When Play Becomes Art

A couple days ago, Boing Boing posted a link to the Halo Corpse Alphabet and I was tickled. Halo3screenshots.com came up with an interesting and creative idea and managed to muster up their community to join in and keep their eyes open for corpses that land in the form of a letter or number (even some punctuation!) and screen capture it for the sake of the project. What resulted was, indeed, the Halo Corpse Alphabet font (yes, they edited the images to be used as a font, accessible by all from the bottom of the page).


One of my favorite things, I must admit, is when gaming and art come together. Games have often been looked at as art themselves (for their great graphics, programming, animation, etc.), but what interests me is when it's the user that takes the game to create something with/through it, whether it be a live in-game performance (especially in MMORPGs/MMOs/MPFPSs etc), video, or two-dimensional piece. While dabbling in the World of Warcraft (yes, I played that godforsaken game) I couldn't help but look to various in-game activities as performance or, more specifically, Happenings (such as nude gnome runs). As with other large scale participatory events like these, players document them (as a screen capture or multi-media video) suggesting that something has “happened” and was worth recording for others to see. Like with the Happenings of the 50s and 60s, these are often pointless, with no plot or direction other than what the main action should be. It becomes about the experience: of artist, audience, audience as artist (participant), and artist as audience.

Screen capture also takes on the role of photography (a good example being the above Halo3 screen capture site), so much so that already in 2000 it became the focus of the game Pokemon Snap (N64), where points were collected based on how well your photos came out. Artists have also been using the screen capture aesthetic as medium or inspiration for a few years now, such as Jon Haddock's Isometric Screenshots (also 2000) which illustrate classic moments from film and history using the third person view reminiscent of the Sims or Grand Theft Auto 3. (I'm going to mention here that I'm not even going to bother getting into Second Life, there's at least one thesis that can come from that ball of digital confusion)

Now with blogging and Net Art moving into the realm of online image collection and curation, as Tom Moody puts it (in response to the - first two installments of - online essay/curatorial project IMG MGMT), "We Are All Surf Clubs now." So indeed, "what makes [the net artist] special if everyone can do this?" What happens is that any user with the curiosity and creativity to engage with their games (or the internet in general) in an artistic manner, and then share their experience/product with the world wide web, in essence becomes an artist. It's no longer about the game-as-art, but the game-as-medium applied by a user-as-artist, where the internet (the original art as it's meant to be viewed on your own computer screen!) becomes the art gallery.