Die Veteranen
Written for the Utne Reader, December, 1995
Reviewed by Scot Hacker
Die Veteranen
Produced by Systhema
Distributed by Vade Mecum Publishing
1-800-690-1669
email: 102216.1562@compuserve.com
Take four German avant-gardists who consider themselves veterans of analog art forms, share a dissatisfaction with establishment forms of entertainment, and who have taken to the digital age without sacrificing a shred of their artistic integrity. Give them a pile of state of the art hardware, a great programmer, and a year. The result? I’ve never met before a CD ROM more difficult to describe. Neither game nor gallery, Die Veteranen is a total artists’ environment, a mental space to simply lose oneself in. Meandering with only hints of navigational assistance, one can soon forget that the computer is a machine; that it is instead an extension of the imagination’s deepest abstractions.
So what happens? Modern impressionist paintings move, fold into one another, blend into and out of the background. Sounds blurt forth in otherwordly tongues, corresponding or not to the visuals. Images dance about wildly or placidly – you can only guess whether clicking on them will lead you to other areas or not. Movies hang in mid-air, awaiting your input for further manipulation. Works become a launching pad for other forms of works, which in turn lead to other artists. And to its high credit, much of Die Veteranen has a loose, painterly quality that doesn’t leave the metallic taste in your mouth you get from so much digital art.
There seems to be a deeply seated randomizing engine working behind the scenes, which not only keeps things interesting, but makes it difficult to return to areas you want to revisit. No matter – there’s always something else interesting around the corner, like the sound-looped interview snippets with modernized natives from around the world, or the dynamically interactive paintings which evolve as you move, drag, or click your mouse, flipping color pallettes and intricately abstract subject matter around in both peaceful and frenetic modes. Like the minimalist line drawings that react to mouse clicks with syllables of English and German, appearing to be a game, but having no apparent object, or the thousand-layered abstruse QuickTime movies that are good enough to simply sit back and watch. One section even responds to input from a microphone attached to your sound card.
The biggest drawback I found was a slight bugginess running on different PCs: occasionally the sound would drop out, or the system pallette would solarize. Interestingly, these bugs could be accepted into the experience, even enhance it, fusing channels of luck, computer frailty, and fine art into a truly multimedia universe that brings real artists and hardcore programmers together very successfully.
[Writers] [Birdhouse]