Clickistan

Clickistan may be the craziest thing I’ve seen recently. It’s an abstract online art game by Ubermorgen.com, which is also and simultaneously a promotional game for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2010 annual fund. The Whitney commissioned Clickistan, which they describe like this:

a work of computer game art that references early net art and classic coin-operated arcade games such as Space Invaders (1978), Donkey Kong (1981) and Pac Man (1980). As you move through levels, you’ll score points in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. The retro feel of the games will inspire the inner gamer in many, and for those visitors who are knowledgeable about the history of net art, the visit will be even more rewarding.

The game’s levels are inscrutable in a net art sort of way—in fact, the curator suggests that the work is “an homage to the net art of the mid-90s.” Personally, I find it less homage and more recapitulation, adopting all the wacky impenetrability of net art without any of the synthetic experience of more contemporary attempts at structured bewilderment (take Cactus’s Tuning as a counterpoint).

In that respect, the cynic might see Clickistan as nostalgia rather than homage, wistfulness for the “golden era” of net art. But at the same time, the game literally operates as a fundraising tool: once the player reaches the end, the game actively encourages contribution. So we can also interpret the game as a tool that undermines current traditions of digital art, particularly the traditions that galleries and museums like the Whitney have embraced (whether by choice, inertia, or politics). Perhaps Clickistan suggests a new openness to art games among the art world, a call to end the 1990s at long last. But, then again, perhaps not.