Frame from Synchromy

Now that bump mapping and real-time shadow rendering are common vernacular, 3-D modeling is a career path to aspire to, and the consciousness of the gamer/consumer has been invaded by industry buzzwords and comparison charts, we often forget that the visual representation of the video game centers around a single element: the pixel, the simplest graphical unit by which all manners of computational drawing were first based. These literal building blocks (although “shapes” is a more accurate term, because you don’t dare call them squares) represent all that is good and right with modern media: a fixed system of creation that produces an endless variety of forms.

Severe technical limitations ensured that the first video games would have bare and almost laconic presentations, but, as Mark J.P. Wolf notes in “Abstraction in the Video Game” from The Video Game Theory Reader (edited by Wolf and Bernard Perron), the blocky and abstract visuals of the early games, while primitive by today’s standards, served as an educational tool as well: it was a way to wean people onto the different skills of manipulation that had to be mastered in order to succeed at the machines they were trying to play. With less ornamental distraction, one could better concentrate on the task at hand, namely, objective and input: What do I have
to do, and how do I do it? Without gamers even being aware of it, the pixel quietly and seamlessly taught them how to properly partake in video games, sharing in the interactive experience without becoming confused and disillusioned.

After the arcade machines of gaming’s infancy—and the graphics they introduced—laid the foundation for this new, interactive method of media reception, the first console systems began to appear in homes, signaling and embracing the convergence of abstraction, engagement, and technology. In a way, these pieces of hardware were the apex of post World War II consciousness, with counterculture, escapism, commercialism and raw information desperately trying to be contained into something compact and palpable, something that the average person could obtain—for the right price, of course. And what better way to distill modern thinking than through an equally modern and purchasable device that can also be switched off when things get too overwhelming or difficult?

It would be very easy to see these video games—and personal computers, which were tracing their own congruous path—as the first embodiment of this cultural merger, seeming to arrive suddenly and fully formed…but that’s not to say that other forms of art and media weren’t conceptualizing the forthcoming digital age. A few years ago I discovered the wonderful films of artist Norman McLaren, and I find such a close compatibility in his work to the notional quandaries that game scholars would later pose that I dare call McLaren the spiritual predecessor to electronic gaming, “pixelating” our world before anyone knew what the digital revolution would actually come to represent.

Born in Scotland in 1914, Norman McLaren immigrated to the United States after graduating from the Glasgow School of Art, where he tinkered in set design, painting and filmmaking. After a few years of working on various commissions for table scraps in New York, McLaren was asked to lead the National Film Board of Canada’s animation division, with the purpose of making educational and utilitarian films for the greater Canadian population. McLaren remained at the NFB until his death in 1987, making movies that ranged from war time PSAs to arithmetic primers for schoolchildren, all while retaining a prolific creativity that thrived via the different and wildly inventive production techniques that he created for himself. Some of the more “systematic” films, such as Canon (1964), show McLaren’s fascination with creating an aesthetic from complex sequences and parameters. For him, the means did not merely justify the ends and create something clever to watch; the means, and the patterns they created, became the ends, the finite materials of artistic existence.

One of McLaren’s works, Mosaic (1965), deserves particular attention. The film is actually the result of two previous films, Lines: Vertical (1960) and Lines: Horizontal (1962). The optical combination of the two works, and subsequent selective masking of portions of the frame, birthed something wholly unique and extraordinary: a lone, tiny square, the film’s own building block, bounces around the frame while splitting and multiplying again and again, creating a varying tapestry of configurations before condensing back down into a singular form:

When I first watched Mosaic, I was instantly reminded of the shifting swaths of rectangular shapes in the games made for the Atari 2600, the first home system that achieved true mainstream status, and the first that my family owned. Those games also relied on abstraction to convey their meanings and engage the viewer; the box art and title provided the semantic starting point, but after that it was pure imagination.  A visual symmetry is present in both McLaren’s Mosaic and the Atari 2600’s titles as well, allowing for freer, more adventurous thinking and interpretation. Granted, with the system, it was a processing restriction—as Wolf points out in “Abstraction,” the graphics could only be drawn on one side of the screen and then either copied or mirrored on the other side—but the resulting designs were not only pleasing to the eye (or, at the very least, not taxing to comprehend), they helped reflect a sense of scale and spatial continuity that bred creative supposition. A cross-view of a castle, for instance, is hardly ever used as an iconographic way to represent it: its grandiose scope is better conveyed when looking at it from the front, with towers on both the left and right sides equally completing the shape, focusing our eyes all the way across its expanse before bringing them to a final elevated point. The fluctuating squares in Mosaic can be interpreted as all sorts of things, of course, but the film encourages that same kind of whimsical engagement: it’s a self-contained fantasy that never falters or lags, and the viewer, in turn, is likely to be captivated—and stay captivated—regardless of the stark synthetic visuals being presented.

Does this all seem familiar? Could the shimmering and shifting grid of squares in Norman McLaren’s Mosaic be the forerunner to the modern pixel—which, coincidentally, was establishing its own identity and moniker around this time? Well, if that film piqued your interest, then consider Synchromy (1971), which is even crazier:

(A higher quality video can be found here.)

In Synchromy, McLaren not only creates a complex network of shape and color, but employs sound as the means through which those patterns are created. To briefly provide some background: celluloid film has a narrow strip running alongside each frame where the soundtrack is placed. This soundtrack is optical, meaning that recorded sound is rendered as an image that is then “read” by a sound system synchronized to the film projector, and finally output as sound again. For Synchromy, McLaren has taken the image that normally goes on the optical sound strip and replicated it exactly onto the frame itself, visualizing what  usually is only heard. What’s even more amazing about this film is that McLaren created the sound entirely by hand: after calculating what pitch a series of rectangles would create when “read” by a projector, he painted the corresponding pattern onto a card and labeled it, filing away six octaves of notes and corresponding volumes—size and spacing dictate volume and pitch, respectively. From there, he would select a card, place it onto an animation stand, and “compose” the resulting note. Synchromy was created in this manner, one frame at a time.

I was reminded of this particular McLaren film after reading about blogger Leif Chappelle’s recent foray into chiptune making. For his post, I commented that so much of the creativity involved in composing good chiptune music isn’t necessarily in what note is composed, but rather in how that note corresponds to the others on a song’s overall discernible timeline—much like the manner in which a single pixel means nothing until it combines with others to create a “readable” image. It very much requires a lateral appreciation, since each note is a singular, contained and uniformed unit, the exact opposite of the organic, fluid entropy coming from human musicians. Every nuance of sound that a chiptune produces is crucial to its overall enjoyment; due to computational restrictions and strict playback methods (chiptune music is very much a self-contained production cycle), compositions have to exist exclusively within the abstract, so our ears seem to work double-time in order to connect each bleep musically. The possibilities that emerge from this system, however—from the dichotomy of the digital—is where true artistry is forged and why the best video game music moves us, no matter how archaic the technology used to produce it may seem in retrospect.

McLaren’s Synchromy doesn’t just anticipate this new method of music making, but illustrates it, allowing the detail of those informational gaps and their on/off duality to be revealed to us in a way that no iTunes visualizer ever could. As a gamer, watching this film triggered a kind of epiphany that made me reflect on how games exist on several levels, the material (the ephemeral sounds and images that we scrutinize with almost obsessive detail) and the notional (the thoughts and feelings that our interactions evoke), and through our very real and pleasurable engagement with these games, we have an acute understanding of both, a kind of mutual reverence. McLaren realized this relationship with a different medium, naturally, but it cuts to the very core of what “gaming” means.

So, is McLaren the father of the pixel AND of chiptunes? No, at least, not historically: avant-garde filmmakers and animators were experimenting with optical soundtracks before McLaren, and many branches of abstract and expressionist art use their own base units of construction, creating the expansive whole from the meager singular (Pointillism, for instance). But the timing of McLaren’s works and the boom of video games that was a few years away—and in the case of Synchromy, made in 1971, it was quite literally right around the corner—shows that, at least to me, the abstract filmmaker was more prescient than anyone probably thought. Considering the trendy revival of retro titles, it would be easy to just fold the Atari 2600 and other early systems in with our stock instruments of nostalgia, but from an evolutionary standpoint, these first audio/visual modes of interactive expression were absolutely crucial in planting the critical and analytical seeds that seem to be sprouting in the minds of thoughtful players today. The fact that there were similar conceptual questions being asked and explored in other artistic fields—like the groundbreaking and “play”-ful films of Norman McLaren—shows that maybe the “game as art” debate has been around longer than we initially thought.

 

(Adventure screenshot courtesy of VGMuseum. I’m not one for pimping, but the
DVD box set of Norman McLaren’s NFB work is a must-buy for all film lovers. The NFB also
has a selection of McLaren films on their website. Begone Dull Care is required viewing.)

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on May 8th, 2009 :: Filed under Features
Tags :: Adventure, Atari 2600, Bernard Perron, Chiptunes, Cinema Studies, Mark J.P. Wolf, Music, Norman McLaren, Pixelation, Video
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