7000 euros is a lot of money for a screenshot of a game that you could play on PS2 but that’s the amount you’d have to shell out for Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG’s suite of pictures from the brutal first-person shooter game, Half Life. The shooter on canvas is physicist Dr. Gordon Freeman who tries to escape an underground facility where botched research experiments have been conducted on teleportation technology. The prints, uncluttered and markedly different from the bloodbath you’d expect, capture scenes of tranquillity. The mise en scène varies in each print but is minimalist with the shooter, usually solitary, taking a moment as if to reflect on the dystopia that he has briefly escaped.

Of course art that draws from online and gaming cultures is not the kind that many might want to wake up to, given the reservations people have about what ‘art’ constitutes. The Half Life series works on many levels; unlike works that try too hard and gain only in obscurity by offering contrived and clichéd explanations, Half Life easily picks up on reality and raises existentialist questions. And the interior-scapes with their modernist themes and Hopperesque quality have a sense of quietude. “On some level, the viewer can co-relate the images to classic a rt forms such as portraiture, pop art, a sort of quiet melancholic realism and even Dutch landscape painting,” says Ranjana Steinruecke, director of Galerie Mirchandani + Steinreucke which brought their exhibit Traveling By Telephone to India. Those looking for avatars and the influence of more conventional manga anime can find their big-eyes-save-the-world in the Annoying Japanese Child Dinosaur portraiture series.

Eva and Franco have been pioneers in net art but with artistic landscapes constantly stretching the boundaries, even the newest mediums become blasé overnight. Something about their work has arrested contemporary sensibilities world over. “They completely get below the skin of their chosen medium – the Internet – and are able to use it for their creative expression just as another artist would use a brush or a chisel or a camera. It’s a mind-bogglingly detailed, intricate process,” says Steinruecke.

It’s a painstaking process getting these digital prints though. First the artists have to become ace players. “It takes hours to make a shot because I must avoid all the radioactive traps and the goddamn aliens trying to eat my face,” says Franco. Once they capture the shot all traces of the game like the targets, numbers and weapons are removed. Having experimented with different software they get detailed shots which are then digitally printed (and attain remarkable clarity) on canvas by print-maker Jean-Yves Noblet in New York. The canvas is finally layered with varnish for depth and texture.

And who’s to say this doesn’t qualify as high art? Art thrives on intertextuality. If Quentin Tarantino could go the way of Japanese graphic novels in Kill Bill Vol 1 why can’t artists do the same? At a time when Mark Rothko’s Homage to Matisse can sell for more than anything Matisse himself created, it is evident that art has reached a phase where constant tributes, borrowing and referencing are becoming an accepted if not celebrated norm.

Marina Abramovic has been heard grumbling for failing to out-think Eva and Franco to their synthetic performance, Renactment of Imponderabilia. The video references the original performance in which Abramovic and Ulay had stripped down and stood at the entrance of a narrow door through which patrons had to pass. Avatars of Eva and Franco do the same in Second Life, a virtual world that they replicate, and their patrons include Hello Kitty. These avatars are synthetic representations of the artists themselves or people they find interesting. “When we see an avatar that we want to photograph, we ask him or her to pose. We choose a set and we start shooting. We take hundreds of photos and print (one) on canvas in big format. At the end they look like some sort of freaky paintings, like wrong portraits,” declares Franco.

The heavy influence of virtual worlds gains popularity because of the way we engage with these technologies. “Bytes themselves become a form of expression. The whole spectrum has been explored and the web world has become fodder for art…. Art is created as a response to things around us and these affect change. It’s a relevant view of the world and one that breaks barriers and prejudices,” believes Abhay Maskara curator of Gallery Maskara.

Abhishek Hazra who also delves into cyberspace in his works, echoes this conceptual juggernaut, “I see my engagement more in the sense of a thought experiment where I try to borrow from the intellectual and theoretical resources of these technologies to sharpen my own understanding of the world.” In Codework an animated short in two parts, Abhishek took PHP, a software code, to engage with programming on a larger cognitive framework. The Deictic Garland explores technological dysfunction. “It’s interesting when things don’t work smoothly, when they slip out of their designated orbits of functional efficiency. And this ‘thing’ can take a range of forms and contexts; from an abandoned soviet space station to these new plasma screens. But for me, the thing can also be something more abstract.”

Brazilian artist Felipe Cama, one of the few older artists exploring this medium, extracts binary codes from pornographic spam that finds its way to his inbox. By enlarging the pixels, he creates graphic mosaics in works like Delicia, Japa and Baby Doll that subvert the manner in which technology is being misused. His lenticular prints viewed at different angles give you three distinct views the binary codes, the original source image and the mosaic pixel. “There are layers to it if you will,” says Maskara, “It’s an innovative way of using technology that infiltrates your mailbox. And it’s encouraging to see artists buying artists.”

The Indian market has just got a foot in the door with this form of art. Helping it in its nascency are domains like Sarai’s Cybermohalla, a space that conducts dialogues on contemporary media and our place in cyberspace. Shilpa Gupta has created online artworks like blessed-bandwith.net exploring cultural issues on the web while Kiran Subbaiah explores computer viruses as forms of art. But one has to wonder if originality is on the wane, as we constantly sift through a vast labyrinth of computer codes and gaming cultures looking for ‘art’.

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