The second trend is the applied field of special effects that are ideally not supposed to be perceived on a conscious level, which was also the actual motor of their innovation in the 1970s. Just as in compositing, too - which is planned out before you shoot - and postproduction, computers are a pure tool whose effects are supposed to disappear seamlessly in the final product. What comes up short in my opinion is "computer graphics as a rhetorical device", where special attention is given to their strengths or weaknesses and they are appreciated as a means of expression.

As a third variation, I am looking for a visual language that provides the viewer of the medium with a convincing justification for its use. Perhaps the old school painters have helped me out in this regard.

In the 1990s in particular, computer games were characterized by crass stereotypes. To what extent do you deal - also critically - with this issue in your work?

I'm not sure I am in complete agreement here. I do agree that it is true for some stereotypes, but some surprising transformations were taking place at the same time. One important facet is, for example, that many of the graphic artists and animators of the time were autodidacts who had started out as computer scientists and developed their own programmes and corresponding user interfaces.
As in other fields, it is not seldom such "naive" operators who time and again implement established processes or artistic motifs in new ways.

I don't merely extract stereotypes from these games. When it comes to telling stories, they help me construct an image-symbolic consensus between the audience and myself as the author, which is a necessary condition of the stories' readability. The abridgement of ever the same processes or characters that describe our common wealth of experience, which both sides welcome, help me open viewers' minds to my - otherwise perhaps difficult - experiments. It is of course expressly desirable, or even necessary, to playfully exaggerate, but above all to break, this consensus and the expectations that go along with it.

You use the aesthetics of computer games not only in your film work but also in the static, classical medium of painting. To what extent have computer games fundamentally changed our perception of images and our visual language?

From my perspective, this is not an easy question to answer. Since I belong to the generation that grew up with these media, I have no comparison. Since our perception is being trained ever more comprehensively, from childhood on, in front of every kind of screen, this must have an enormous effect physically as well as mentally.

The influence of photgraphy/film, on the other hand - which can now be made out in these games as well, thanks to modern graphics processors - is incomparably greater. Since the arrival of this "objective" mode of representation, it is no longer inherently necessary that people who want to create effective images have their own will to form. Instead, even in these computer games - that usually have fantastical themes -naturalism again dictates its consensus of superficial accuracy.

"Game Art is any art in which digital games played a significant role in the creation, production, and/or display of the artwork. The resulting artwork can exist as a game, painting, photograph, sound, animation, video, performance or gallery installation". According to Bittanti's definition, your painting could also be subsumed under the term "Game Art". Would you agree?

No, on the grounds that it is only one aspect of my work. I would say that the influence of cinema, literature, music, and the history of painting are no less important for my work.

For you, it was painting that opened the door to computer graphics. You say that painting has paved the way for computer graphics from the very beginning. Can you illustrate this with an example?

For millenia, manual/analogue painting and graphics techniques were the only medium for saving visual information, and information of artistic content in particular. All the foundations of visual symbolism and composition were tediously formed and refined over countless generations and under the most diverse conditions.
After photography and film, the biggest revolution was no doubt that of fully digital synthetic images. This entire process was essentially completed in just a single century. Where did these - originally for the most part just technological - pioneers get their motifs and their orientation for their own canon of colours and forms?

The youth of computer graphics set out in an ellipse from the point where figurative painting had come to a partial and provisional end some 50 years before. In the styles of the time, New Objectivity and Figurative Constructivism, artists' efforts for more forceful expression resulted in reductions to the basic geometric shapes that have been mentioned.
By contrast, the - in my view successful - abstractions of early computer graphics were originally the upshot of technological necessity. When it came to display resolution, colour depth, disk space and other parameters, quantity had to be replaced by quality in order to cope with the comparative weaknesses of the machines.

The images that were generated, especially in the earliest days, are characteristic and the processes that made them are largely responsible for this high degree of sententiousness. Yet the rough framework or the substructure remain essentially unchanged. You streamline, compress, cut, rearrange and texture, and you end up with highly topical and artistically challenging solutions. But the questions of substance and of the eternal laws of form remain the same for both the short and the long term.

In one of your most recent works you deal with first-person shooter games. The viewer is addressed directly: "You" were held in a military prision and tortured. Until one night the tranquilizers didn't take effect. It ends in a first-person shooting tour through the prison. A primary sequence, in which the main character runs amok through the prison wildly shooting up the place, is punctuated by scenes in which he is most brutally tortured. This stirs up rage and hatred that almost seem to legitimate the deed. What is this work about for you?

This clip is part of an extensive new series of short films in which I deal with the medium of tv/movie ad spots and their semifictional products, or rather the marketing of them. I had started the scenes from the first-person shooter episode a few years ago, but at the time never found an acceptable solution. Finding a digestible way to prepare such an unpleasant topic is a big challenge.
It wouldn't be consistent with my art to communicate such messages in an accusatory or didactic way. The choice of a computer game (advertisement) as the vehicle, which displaces the scene into the fantastical, supplies the necessary link between the possible reactions of tongue-tied depression in the face of one's own powerlessness and the usual cynical ignorance. With the ingredient of absurd irreality, like in travesties of popular werewolf movies, representations of waterboarding or shootings can be perverted into universal metaphors.

The many atrocities shown in the film force one to think of the images that seldom surface from military prisons, in which prisoners are brutally and inhumanely tortured behind closed doors. To what extent can computer games (even if a film is not a game) be generally understood as political instruments? And practice critique?

As for the torture images from Abu Ghraib: for me those are painful icons of our time, comparable to Goya's etched "Disasters of War", or even the crucifix.

The images - which are today not so seldom at all - are freely accessible. But at the time when the images appeared of the scenes I cite in the film, I was still baffled and shocked at how something like that could leak to the public, even how it had been photographed at all. There is no contention about the role played by various modern entertainment media in the development of our notions of value, and it is becoming more important daily. This is potentially no different when it comes to forming political opinion.

Whereas in your previous works you worked a lot with antiheroes, and there was no way to "win", this film suggests a different outcome: If you play the game, in the end you get it all. You get to shoot everybody who has hurt you, escape, and last but not least you get a sexy dream woman. Time and again, first-person shooters are criticized for encouraging aggressivity and making people more prone to violence. Is the ending to be understood ironically? Is your film critical?

The challenge of this satire is finding an aesthetic balance between more serious tones, such as those of a critique of contemporary events, and on the other hand a certain escapist entertainment value, and grotesque caricatures are accordingly a part of this. As already described, I try to meld varying and often ambivalent statements, themes and styles into a harmonic, artistically motivated complex.