I watched the movie Hugo last night and I enjoyed it. I especially liked the magician / film maker who was at the centre of the plot, and it got me thinking about the past, my grandmother, art, fantasy and games. Recently the cultural program Víðsjá on RÚV in Iceland had a special program dedicated to the memory of John Cage in celebration of the fact that he would have become one hundred years old sometime around now. I love Cage, not so much for his music, but for his methods and character and the attitude towards art expressed in his use of coincidence ..... and 4.33 has to be the weirdest piece of music ever.... It seems to me a very interesting fact that JRR Tolkien and Cage were more or less contemporaries, and this odd train of thought here leads me to my point, if a point it be... That the connection between speculative fiction and avant garde art seems to me to have been weak - to the point that each cultural sphere might be ignorant of the other and possibly even hostile.
Finally, I would like to mention how it seems that the art world has ignored the culture of gaming to a large extent. An exception I have come across is Nordic art LARP which seems to me to be a very interesting phenomenon that I will be exploring further in the future.... a nice presentation of this is to be found in Johanna MacDonald's interesting talk....
