The fine art of the video game

LIKE set designers in feature films, video game artists rarely get their due. Instead, they toil away in relative obscurity creating the environs that make games such as God of War and Guild Wars so popular.

With next week’s “Into the Pixel” exhibition, held in the Los Angeles Convention Center’s Concourse Foyer on Wednesday through May 12 during the Electronic Entertainment Expo, that lack of recognition is slowly becoming a thing of the past. The exhibition, which is in its third year, will feature 16 still images created specifically for video games.

Given that computer and video games are a booming business, the annual E3 trade show, which presents what’s hot and new in the industry, doesn’t exactly need another reason for people to attend.

But Doug Lowenstein, president of the Electronic Software Assn., which runs E3, says the three organizations involved in putting the exhibition together -- E3, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the Prints & Drawings Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- wanted to provide a forum where “video game artists could be recognized for their excellence, not just by the gaming industry but also from the traditional art community.”

To that end, “Into the Pixel,” which is one of the few things open to the public at the generally trade-only E3, is a juried exhibition. The 150-plus submissions this year were judged by gaming industry professionals along with curators from fine-art institutions, including Kevin Salatino at LACMA, Cynthia Burlingham at the UCLA Hammer Museum and Louis Marchesano at the Getty Research Institute.

Submissions came from all over the world -- the U.S., Canada, Britain, Poland, Germany, Japan and more -- and after an initial cull, the jurors came together for a 2 1/2 -hour conference call to hone their selections to the final 16.

“It was an interesting process -- we swayed them [the video game people], and they swayed us,” says Salatino, the exhibition’s lead juror and LACMA’s curator of prints and drawings. “We approached the material from a traditional art history perspective, looking at the quality of the execution, composition and lighting, while they looked harder at the technical aspects -- how the images were created.”

Salatino declined to say how video game art would measure up if looked at exclusively through a fine-art lens. Instead, he says, “it’s our role to educate people, raise the standards of visual art and push the envelope a little further, if we can. It’s important for museums like LACMA to be involved in something as important as video game art, given that we live in a world that is more visual than ever before.”

Looking at the art from a video gamer’s perspective was juror Ryan Church, who was the concept design supervisor for the last two “Star Wars” movies, “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.”

“I expected a given level of technical ability, so the most important things for me are the idea they’re trying to communicate, how it was presented and its originality,” he says.

As an example, he cites “Titan’s Head,” created by Eduardo Gonzalez for the God of War video game. The concept piece features the head of a felled giant surrounded by elephants and flying horses.

“This was a piece that made my initial cut list, and the technique is such that there are no digital artifacts,” Church says, referring to the work’s lack of telltale signs that it was created on a computer.

“It also conveys a sense of scale and emulates pastels very well.

“The other thing that appealed to me is that video games tend to cluster around darkly themed subject matter, and what jumped out in this piece is that it had a higher-key, exterior-daylight palette.”

Other pieces that will be on display at E3 and online at www.intothepixel.com include Tyler West’s aerial perspective of a rooftop for the Godfather game and Stephan Martiniere’s “Chicago Train Graveyard” for the upcoming game Stranglehold.

FOR Martiniere, a visual design director at Chicago’s Midway Games, this is the second year running that one of his pieces was chosen for inclusion in the exhibition.

“It’s definitely an honor to have a piece selected, but what matters to me the most is to be recognized by my peers,” he says. “At the same time, as an artist it was also rewarding to have the quality of the art judged in a broad sense” by experts from the fine-art world.

In addition to being judged by the establishment, the art in “Into the Pixel” is also receiving fine-art treatment. Each of the 16 pieces is being framed and printed by L.A. printmaker Richard Duardo on paper measuring 40 inches by 30 inches and, sometime after E3, will be auctioned off to raise funds for LACMA and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

“The prints are gorgeous, and when you print them big, you’re able to see all the detail that you can usually only see when you’re zooming in on the computer,” says West, a concept artist for Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles office and who also had two of his pieces displayed at last year’s show.

“Blowing the art up is also important at a show like E3, where everything needs be big and flashy to stand out.”

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‘Into the Pixel’

Where: Los Angeles Convention Center, Concourse Foyer, 1201 S. Figueroa St., L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. next Thursday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 12. (Note: On Wednesday, the images from “Into the Pixel 2005” will be shown until 5:30 p.m., when the 2006 images are unveiled.)

Price: Free

Info: www.intothepixel.com