Under The Map

Alan Meades
Under the Map

Burton 3
Alan Meades Under The Map.indd 1 14/02/2014 15:06
Alan Meades Under The Map.indd 2-3 14/02/2014 15:06
I have always been a bad at playing games. Yet
despite my ineptitude, videogames have remained
an interest since my childhood summers spent
playing StreetFighter II in the seaside arcade in
my hometown. I still nd videogames deeply
compelling today, but free from the staccato
demands of coin-op games, I now play home
console games as spaces of relaxation and
contemplation. While I still play games to win
or progress, I take special care exploring and
orientating myself within a videogame space,
system or simulation making sense of its
boundaries, understanding its operation, and
sensing the extent of my new situated freedoms. I
have found that this often takes precedence over
the ludic, game aspect, or the sense of narrative
progression / completion, and for me it is whilst
doing this that games take on more meaning.
Ive found that once I become familiar with a
videogame, its rules, boundaries and expectations,
my fascination begins to translates into frustration.
I nd myself disenchanted and angered by its
hurdles, its rules, and as the shallowness of its
artice becomes apparent. When this happens my
play alters, it becomes begrudging, critical, and
counter to expected play. I challenge the game not
to progress, not to be complicit with it, but with an
urgency to locate the new and novel. I enjoy seeing
games as spaces of novelty and opportunity, yet
can only be as expansive as it has been coded to
be. When I become a counterplayer I want to see
what else the game might offer, how it might be
poked, prodded or cajoled into doing something
unexpected, and this boils down to forcing the
game to fail, to miscompute, to glitch.
Introduction
Under The Map
Over the last decade my research has focussed
around the varying ways that people play games.
My PhD, Playing Against the Grain, consisted of
an ethnography of grief-play, illicit modding,
hacking, and glitching groups on the Xbox 360
platform, while prior to that I conducted large-
scale international research, charting differences
in play style on Square Enixs Final Fantasy XI.
What has become apparent from my studies is
that there are many ways to play games, and there
are communities for which counterplay is their
primary way of enjoying videogames. I should
also stress that their approach is not necessarily
motivated by simplistic resistance, or rejection
of the games per-se, but instead a complex
and contradictory mix of seduction, notions
of entitlement and of curiosity. In doing this
research I eetingly became part of counterplay
communities, and familiar with the processes,
meanings and pleasures within.
Under The Map builds upon my experiences
within glitching communities on the Xbox 360,
in which I spent over two years playing alongside
and interviewing glitchers. Glitchers play with
games to purposely locate, identify, document,
distribute, and then exploit weaknesses, or
glitches, within videogame code. Unlike modders
or hackers they frown upon the use of any external
intervention into the games, and instead force
errors by interacting with the game through using
its conventional controls and inputs. While there
are many forms of glitch, such a those that alter
animations, subvert rules, or even duplicate items,
the glitches that resonate most strongly with me
are those that alter the players relationship to
Alan Meades
Senior Lecturer in New Media Theory
the gamespace: its barriers, its landscape, and its
map. The images in the exhibition and publication
have been created through a subversion of the
game map, the playable area, and the content
visible within a game through the use of glitches.
In particular these images make use of a certain
technique: falling under the map.
This body of work attempts to capture some of
the aesthetic pleasures afforded by glitching,
simultaneously working upon aspects of landscape,
the sublime, and the glitched. It presents
landscapes that sit in the liminal space between
the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Freidrich
and Joseph Mallord William Turner, and the digital
battle zones of Innity Ward and Electronic Arts. It
raises questions of the decorative, the sublime, and
of the meaning of landscape in a digital context.
Under The Map should also be considered an act
of praxis, an application of the ideas and concepts
raised through my largely theoretical work. It
represents the use of glitching techniques to
produce images that communicate something of
the contextual value and meaning of counterplay.
To reect this fusing of theory and practice I
invited two videogame academics, Professor Tanya
Krzywinska and Corrado Morgana, to enter into
discussion with me about the work here, and
between us to make sense of what it means to be
Under The Map.
[CM] The act of negotiating a virtual world
or game world is for me an act of exploration
and performance...nding the right location
and counteracting or working with its game
mechanics to produce the necessary
documentation. Is there a resonance here
for you?

Absolutely, for me glitching consists of three
distinct phases: rstly theres the identication of
glitches, in this case the testing and deciphering
of the exploitable processes within a game;
secondly theres the documentation and sharing
of glitches with other players, this is deeply
performative and conscious of the demands and
expectations of its audience; and nally there is
the use of the glitches, whether for competitive
advantage, for the exploration of game space and
creation of imagery, or whatever else. The point
here is that the rst is deeply exploratory, the
second predominantly performative, the third
(of which the artwork here is based upon) can
be either performative or exploratory. While
I recognise the diagnostic feedback loop of
performance/exploration when identifying or
ne-tuning glitches its largely absent in this work
(Under The Map) many, but not all, of the images
utilise glitches that I did not identify personally,
so my role here was much more to perform and
explore purely within the realm of the aesthetic
what locations could I reach, how could the maps
be further subverted, and how would the engines
graphically resolve my challenges. For me the joy
of glitching is also found within the explorative/
performative feedback loop, but Im not convinced
that this is expressed strongly within the images
here, instead Ive used glitches in order to be able
Alan Meades in discussion
with Tanya Krzywinska
and Corrado Morgana,
December 2013.
to produce these images, these become an
output that hopefully works on a different level
of interaction and signicance (the sublime,
Friedrich, Turner, Bauhaus).
[CM] Many artists working with technology
especially video games adopt a situationist
strategy of detournement. It can be argued that
appropriating and over turning existing tech
recuperates it and takes ownership. Does glitch
work in your practice seek to reclaim in any way?

When I initially began to explore glitch
production and counterplay communities the
idea of detournement was very much in my mind.
I was inuenced by Espen Aarseths Transgressive
Player article, where he presents what he calls the
tyranny of games the notion that videogames
support a reductive range of ways of playing,
forcing players to adopt these or fail to benet
from their pleasures. I liked this idea as it
resonates with the frustrations I feel with
games, and I hoped that glitching and glitch
art might represent an overt act of resistance
or detournement.
However, what I found was that the people
I met, interviewed, glitched, modded and hacked
with, werent especially motivated by a will to
deect, undermine or address other perceived
inequalities, but that they were motivated by a
genuine seduction with the materiality of the
games. My frustrations over a lack of the resistant
were eventually replaced with a sense of awe
over what could be presented, I saw a Red Dead
Redemption glitch video by (glitching team)
ChaoticPerfection that subverted the game but
retained the expansive landscape iconography and
the sophisticated environmental and geographic
effects. I felt that the engine had the capacity to
be so much more than just a game (Im not placing
a value judgement there), and I felt compelled to
do more. So, while I feel an element of excitement
over the intentional reappropriation of the game
spaces Im not sure that it extends to taking
ownership or if it is, the ownership is precarious
in the extreme. Glitches are xed over time by
developers, and there is the pervasive feeling that
as a glitcher you are an invader, a temporary
trespasser, and that ownership or reclamation
is eeting at best. The reclamation that might be
there is the retraction from the ludic aspects of
the game, a successful glitch normally abstracts
the player from the mechanisms that control play
(such as enemy AI routines), and once Id conducted
a glitch Id often be struck by the silence and calm
that descends on the game. So, for me it feels
more of an evacuation, an exodus, rather than a
claiming of ownership, Im therefore unconvinced
that it is a detournement.
[TK] The concept of the sublime is regularly
used to describe an encounter that Zizek
might consider, via Lacan, as a brush with
the Real (in this sense meaning that which
is remaindered by the symbolic). Does this idea
resonate with your evocation of the sublime
in these glitched landscapes?

As a fan of John Carpenter lms, Zizeks brush
with the Real resonates nicely. If it is inviting us to
take into account not only what is said, but what is
implied, then yes there is a link. I hope that these
images, partly through their stillness and then
through the glitched errors that creep in, invite
the viewer to go beyond what is apparently
conveyed and consider what exists on the edges
and beyond the frame. I guess that itd also be
useful for me to situate my reading, or perspective
on the sublime as well, with the reasoning that
the brush with the real is for me at least a brush
with the sublime.
For me the sublime works around the concepts
of vastness, and transcendence. It is something
unknowable that is attractive yet elicits a kind
of terror. This is something that the romantic
painters like Turner and Freidrich worked with,
and for me it has resonance, especially when
contrasted with objectivity and truth presented
by other landscape depictions. Even within games
theres an anchoring around the objective,
whereby emphasis is placed on life-like locations,
such as when Im screaming around Prague in a
sports car in Forza 4, or storming the Reichstag in
Call of Duty: World at War. I appreciate that these
arent landscapes in their conventional painterly
respect, but they still say something about our
relationship to place and space, and by extension
can say something about the sublime.
I think that what Im trying to get at is that
Ive a suspicion and scepticism towards the
apparently objective, and feel a tension within
the vast, the unknowable, and entropic. I think
that once you remove the symbolic, and this body
of work generally adopts the iconography and
conventions of landscape painting, what is left is
a nod towards vastness, and the chaotic. I hope
that theres a gradual unpicking of destabilisation
going on. These landscapes might initially appear
conventional or of resonating with the decorative,
but this is a bit of a ruse. The adoption of
objectivism is partially in consideration of
exhibition and to create a textual link between
this and the other Burton Press releases, which
have presented relatively objective photography
that then facilitates a discussion of meaning (and
I guess the real). So while these images ostensibly
appear to be about landscape and objectivity, for
me they are about the creeping entropy of the
systems the sublime as the chaos and vastness
shown by the disorder and very glitchiness of
the systems.
[TK] Thats approaching what I understand by
Zizeks conceptualisation the Real; something we
struggle to speak about, escaping categorisation
and unable to be mastered (which is what we
expect in a game) and which puts us outside of
ourselves and our comforting myths. The glitch
images are representation of course by there
is something here that escapes the sureties of
generic expectation and cliche. These holes
in the world leave me with a sense of vertigo.

Yes, its that vertigo that Im looking for too. The
tensions created by the holes are the important
bits. For me the pleasure and mischievousness of
this work is the tension between the sublime (as
entropy) and the apparently ordered and objective
(the landscape symbolism). Aside from this there
is the use of romantic landscape themes imagery
within the works themselves the nature of the
subject matter: vast geographical, swirling mists,
and skylines. Then there is the way that the works
additionally break down in series as we progress,
moving towards the increasingly irrational,
vertiginous and for me, sublime.

[TK] Landscape painting has often struck me
as unhinged because it cant escape serving a
decorative impulse; perhaps all romanticism
suffers from such. It seems to me though that
your glitch work makes a different use of
decorative quality precisely because they are
the result of a mistake. How do you regard the
role of the decorative in your work?

I think that landscapes can become subordinated
by the decorative, that they can lose something by
their objectication. But, as the point of this work
is, for me, to chart a progressive expansion of the
glitch, of the unknowable and sublime disorder,
then the decorative works as a mechanism. It is
a place to start that prevents the viewer from
stepping immediately away from the image due
to its digital or videogame origins, and hopefully
is something that can then be challenged as the
works progress. The move from the pastoral to
the urban, and the (relatively) objective to the
precarious and glitched serve to challenge the
decorative. For me the work is about inviting the
mistake, the error, the glitch, into the decorative,
and then allowing it to expand to the point that
it dominates, or inhabits the frame.
I really just wanted to play another game, to
convince some viewers that this was a series of
decorative, painterly works, - channelling Turner
and Friedrich in order to do so, and then introduce
successively irrational or problematic elements.
[TK] Representation is mostly by nature
objectication, but some representations seem
to have the power to circumvent that. I know
this dates me and also suggests an obsessive
compulsion, but I keep coming back to the
photographs of Peter Witkin - his images of
dead people and animals posed as still life. The
transgression here certainly made strange the
decorative, breaking the frame of representation
very powerfully. But what does this in your
images is something more fragile and harder
to pin down.
With Witkins work the transgression is naturally
written large in the frame, and for me, gains
much of its power and resonance the interplay
between the macabre and beautiful. I fear that
with his work the tension between aesthetics
and emotional response is too great, and I feel
the vertigo that you mentioned earlier. I nd his
work really challenging. By contrast the images
in Under The Map are by no means as bold in their
subject matter or intent, but I think that they
still work with contrast and tension. I think that
perhaps its the case that these images fail to
challenge strongly, resulting in unease as opposed
to Witkins powderkeg, and Im not sure that I
have a problem with that. I still nd my eye drawn
to the edges, to the errata, and knowing that they
are there is enough to introduce that tension.

[CM] Does the work really represent glitch
or appropriate its aesthetic? i.e. are we being
exposed to the subtle inner workings of an
engine, the backstage of a theatre that we arent
meant to see or are the effects the emergent
computational misrings as spanners are
thrown in the works?

The fairest response would be to say a little bit of
both. Some of the glitches here show the backstage
elements, or, more precisely the on-stage elements
from the perspective of the backstage crew (or
understage!), and specically the curious way
that certain objects and stage elements become
transparent from one perspective but not the
other. However, there are other images here that
emerge from the misrings caused by my spanner-
throwing. In these cases Im playing with the
upper-limits of available system memory and
calculations. For example, in many of these
glitches where I leave an area through an
unexpected route, the system never receives notice
to stop rendering or processing all of the elements
of that area. The enemies, graphics, 3D objects etc.,
are still being tracked and retained in the system
memory while simultaneously my exploration of
other areas forces the game to display more
content as best it can with its remaining resources.
What then plays out on the screen is the tug-of-
war between the elements as their priority is
changed and they are loaded into or out of memory:
buildings, mountains, walls, oors, ash in-and-
out existence, or are replaced with successively
abstract and rudimentary alternatives. For me it is
the interaction between the two the stage elements
seen from behind, and the outcomes of the battle
for resource allocation that has the capacity to
surprise and create fascinating juxtapositions.
TK I keep wondering what type of transgression
a glitch is or if it is at all? Does it make sense to
claim a glitch as transgressive? Or is it simply
transgressive when it is used as such?

I dont think that a glitch is transgressive, its an
operation of code, constrained by the physical,
computational and simulated limitations of a
system, I only really use the term due to the way
that glitches and glitchers (i.e. the people that nd
and utilise glitches) are primarily framed by those
that produce and distribute games. A glitch should
be no more transgressive than a mathematical
operation, or a statement, but in relation to
videogames a glitch has the capacity to expose the
precariousness of the simulation. A glitch, applied
in a specic manner can play a transgressive role
undermining and challenging the entirety of a
system, breaking and subverting a multi-million
pound system. In the case of these visual glitches
the same might be true they transgress the
boundaries of the simulation, exposing the void
or inconsistencies that lay beyond and therefore
the security of the entire artice.
These glitches are therefore only transgressive
when one has the need to see videogames as
immutable or secure and those that are producing
and selling them as experiences naturally do so.
Perhaps its best to think about glitching as being
transgressive in terms of boundary maintenance,
it tests the edges, draws their territory, and serves
to reinforce their solidity.
[TK] Isnt there some way in which they are
inherently transgressive because the creation
of virtual worlds is driven by a psychological
demand for holism and realism?
Videogames work perceptually because of the
commination of gure and ground, and I guess a
cybernetic feedback loop. By exposing the cracks
in this, introducing noise or latency, you might say
that the glitches challenge holism. But saying this
we seem quite adaptable when irregularities are
encountered, they can be swiftly normalised
(Im thinking of something like rocket jumping
in Quake, or reload cancelling in Call of Duty, or the
sneaky way that Ive found you can turn off the
water reection obscurity on Skyrim by angling
the camera...) these go from being something that
challenges the realism of the game to part of the
same system, adopted by players as core functions.
I think that our understanding is mutable and
adaptive, and whether we understand them as
transgressive is dependent on their application.
Also, I have problems with rationalising a aw
of the system as being somehow critical of the
system itself its it. Once again the transgression
for me becomes an external label.
[TK] Friedrich often included bodies or even
symbols in his images, perhaps to communicate
a sense of scale. I was wondering why you chose
not to include any bodies in your images.

I spent time in Berlin while I was working on these
images, where the National Gallery has a large
Friedrich collection. There are a number of his
paintings, such as The Monk by the Sea, Man and
Woman Contemplating the Moon, Moonrise by
the Sea, and Morning in the Riesengebirge, that
combine gures and landscape, to commutate
scale and perhaps to emphasise the fragility of the
human in relation to the sublime. I spent quite
some time looking at The Monk by the Sea, and
Morning in the Riesengebirge, because for me the
gures made little sense. It felt as if they were
unnecessary intruders into the frame, making the
symbolism of the paintings too literal the
juxtaposition of the French Chasseur against the
dark enveloping woods, or the still monk dwarfed
against the steely grey sea sky. I felt that the
tensions created by the paintings were between
the viewer (i.e. me) and the landscapes, and I
found the images that lacked gures were the
more striking.
There are also pragmatic reasons why Ive
generally avoided the inclusion of gures within
the images here rstly the nature of these
glitches would suspend or interrupt most game
functions, therefore the routines that control
entities such as NPCs or other gures are broken.
While some do exist in some of the images, theres
a tiny pixelated soldier and some pedestrians in
another, generally they would remain somewhere
else beyond the normal play area in a dormant
state. Aside from that I was concerned that the
inclusion of too many gures would make the
reading of the images as game-grabs to easy, and
that would scupper the artice of the decorative
to glitched.

[CM] Do you use existing tools, console codes,
trainers or other exploits to produce your work?
Are you willing to discuss your sleight of hand?

None of these images make use of any external
hacking or modication processes, instead they
utilise exploitable weaknesses in the game
environments instigated through normal
gameplay operation. For example, nding a way
of jumping onto game objects, such as boxes,
walls, and then rooftops, to then allow the player
to exit the intended gamespace. Its important
within glitching communities that these exploits
are done without any intervention into the game
code, and therefore within this context hardware
or software modications are completely
inappropriate. I wont say specically which
images were triggered by what techniques, but
I used conventional up-and-over out of map
glitches and these then allowed me to get under
the map. In one game I simply walked through a
wall where the developers had forgotten to specify
it was impermeable. In another I leaped out of the
urban battle zone, sprinting through and beyond
a timed return-to-game area before it respawned
me. Here the developers had underestimated how
far a player could run when setting the boundaries
of the barrier. In another I am run-over by a tram
in a very specic location, this pushes me through
the oor and under the map. There are two other
cases that use another interesting technique,
accessing a deloaded version of the game level.
Deloaded levels contain low-delity placeholder
content (this is used to minimise system memory
usage), and therefore lack much of the visual
sophistication of their loaded equivalents. For a
glitcher, deloaded gamespaces are a treasure trove
of graphical and procedural inconsistencies. In
addition to this Ive used post-production to remove
the identifying user interfaces, my concern being
that these acted as a distraction, as an obstruction
between the viewer and the glitch image.

[CM] How signicant is the original world/game
text to its appropriation?

I think that glitches are fascinating irrespective
of what the original world/game context was,
although the games were selected here in an
attempt to touch upon a pastoral/landscape
painting lexicon. As this body of work is primarily
exploring landscape, or making reference back
to landscape painters, Ive selected games that
present vistas and geographical elements. These
are either rst-person-shooters or third-person
adventure games. The nature of the original text
is therefore important as I selected games that
enabled a certain type of image, but aside from
this for me there is an exhilaration attributed
to the surprising way that a glitch can open up
contrasts and contradictions exposing a tension
between what should take place and what is being
invoked. I guess that for me this is the attraction
of glitches: the exploration of and rationalisation
of this gulf of possibility between what is intended
and what an engine is capable of. While this body
of work doesnt necessarily explore the range or
depth of that gulf, I hope that it still says
something within it.

Alan Meades
Alan Meades is a lmmaker, graphic designer and
educator. He is Senior Lecturer in New Media Theory in
the Department of Media, Art and Design at Canterbury
Christ Church University, UK. He holds a PhD from
Brunel University exploring transgressive, oppositional
and subversive modes of play within videogame
environments. Alans research utilises ethnographic
and netnographic methods to study videogame
communities, including those who generate artwork
as part of their interactions. He is currently working
on videogame and ethnography related User Experience
Design projects. He is keen to continue to explore the
intersections between creative practice, videogames
and notions of ownership.
Tanya Krzywinska
Tanya Krzywinska is an artist and Professor of Digital
Games at Falmouth University where she is currently
developing a suite of undergraduate and postgraduate
programmes in Digital Games. Shes an advocate of a
Humanities approach to game scholarship, has published
many articles and books on games and cinema and is
currently working on a monograph entitled Gothic
Games. When time treats her kindly, she likes to poke
around Weird Fiction and experimental games.
www.falmouth.ac.uk/games
Corrado Morgana
Corrado Morgana is an artist, curator and sometimes
musician. He is currently programme leader for
Computer Games Design at University of South Wales at
Newport where he teaches both practical and theoretical
components. Sometimes his students win awards.
His research examines arts and videogames crossover
practice, specically transgressive and subversive
production within existing game engines. He also
enjoys glitches, blue screens and streaming errors.
He has co-curated national exhibitions exploring game
spectatorship and independent and experimental
production and has been involved in various large
scale collaborative media arts curatorial projects
First published in 2014
by Burton Press
Canterbury Christ Church University
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Broadstairs
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CT10 2WA
Copyright Burton Press
All images copyright Alan Meades
Texts copyright Alan Meades
ISBN: 978-0-9571637-4-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or
otherwise, without rst seeking the written permission
of the copyright holders and the publisher.
Designed by Dean Pavitt at loupdesign.co,uk
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