Trigger Happy
structures of logical thought incarnated in a beautiful dance of electrons.
Martin Amis wrote that Battlezone has “the look of op or pop art and the feel of a genuine battlezone.” This intriguing comparison is instructive in its shortcomings. For unlike op art, which produces an illusion of movement in the abstract, static image, Battlezone has partly representational ambitions (that is a tank, that is a flying saucer), and produces an illusion of movement by stringing together simple static images at high speed. Battlezone’s defining aesthetic (owing in part to technical limitations at the time), on the other hand, and in contrast to pop art, is one of purely imaginary surfaces. Where pop art glories in colorful flat shading and razored curves, Battlezone evinces contempt for color, for material, for substance itself. Such qualities, it murmurs seductively, are illusory anyway. The edge is everything: the frontier where one plane meets another, where turret joins body, where missile meets flank.
The look of Battlezone or Tempest was at the same time shockingly weird and comfortingly familiar, not from Warhol or Riley but from a much nearer and more disturbing medium. It was as if high school mathematics lessons had come to life, benignly. No
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