Fragile fantasy: Photography and critical responses to 3D video game images

Abstract

This practice-led research project examines how the 3D video game image is constructed and understood within photographic frameworks. Through artistic practice and scholarly research, this project unpacks the ways that computer-generated and photographic images are interrelated, how their processes generate meaning and affect, and how artists can deconstruct and reimagine the potential of these images. The thesis specifically examines theories of photography and new media to analyse artworks by Jon Raman, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parenno. These artists, as well as my own practice, appropriate and redeploy 3D video game images to investigate how their emotive, symbolic and narrative qualities reinforce dominant modes of representation. Through my own practice, I combine analogue photographic processes and digital, 3D imaging technologies to redirect the expected affective outcomes of the video game image. Together, the thesis and artistic practice interrogate the ways that the technical structure of computer-generated 3D video game images draw directly from photographic technologies. This project argues that the link to photography is crucial in understanding not only how 3D video game images reproduce the affective, symbolic and narrative possibilities of photography, but also how artists can intervene and reorient these patterns of meaning and affect.