Videoludica (Matteo Bittanti) has posted on the work of Robert William Overweg, who is photographing “beautiful moments” in idealized but violent virtual worlds. From Overweg’s artist statement: “What I also find interesting in viewing the final results is that the experience you have while viewing a picture from my hand created in a game. Is in the beginning often not different from the experience you would have watching a picture created from the real world. The border between reality and virtual reality fades for a subtle moment.” As I have argued, aesthetic now tends to surpass the bias towards photographic “truth,” in which case the technical dynamics of the photographic process (light hit that thing) aren’t as important as the ability for the image to create a photographic experience. Combined with the simple fact that these images do, in fact, document (real albeit designed) experience (physical world fairly irrelevant on that point), and you have the game photograph: the difference really being the nature of the world, not the photo.

MORE DISCUSSION OF THIS POST ON gameCODE