GAMESCENES

CALL FOR ENTRIES: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2020 (DEADLINE: DECEMBER 1 2019)

MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2020

March 2020

IULM University

Via Carlo Bo 2,

20143 Milano, Italia

WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE OUR OFFICIAL CALL FOR ENTRIES FOR THE THIRD EDITION OF THE MACHINIMA FILM FESTIVAL, SLATED FOR MARCH 2020.

The third edition of the MACHINIMA FILM FESTIVAL will take place at IULM University (Milan, Italy) in March 2020 during the Milano Digital Week. Sponsored by the City of Milan, Department of Digital Transformation and Public Services, the Milano Digital Week celebrates the driving forces that are reshaping work, leisure, and learning.

Filmmakers and video artists engaged in the practice of appropriation, repurposing, and creative remix of video games are encouraged to send us their work for consideration. Submissions will be judged by an international panel of jurors and a selected number will be featured in the main program. A Critics' Award will be awarded during the ceremony. 

Screenings of selected works will be curated around different themes, to be announced. The most interesting submissions are those which seek to capture or highlight a specific facet of contemporary life - from politics to art, from violence to creativity, from technology to ideology - through the aesthetic lenses of digital gaming. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2019.

The full program will be announced in February 2020.

Please carefully read our simple submission guidelines and requirements below before sending your work.

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INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL FOR NEW MEDIA ARTWORKS

GUIDELINES:

The Milan Machinima Festival defines machinima as any digital video made using video games technology (game engines, game tools, assets such as characters, items, environments etc.).

Submissions must feature machinima made with specifically with video games (not virtual worlds, e.g. Second Life).

Submissions must be 10 minutes or less in length. The minimum duration is 1 minute.

Submissions must have been produced between January 1, 2019 and December 1, 2019.

Multiple versions of the same machinima will not be considered.

Acceptable submission formats: Digital video files only.

Acceptable exhibition formats: mp4, avi, mpg, Quicktime file (ProRes 422).

All applicants must complete the official festival submission form located on filmfreeway.com.

One-time, nominal submission fee: $15 or 15 euros payable via PayPal to the festival organizers.

The applicant holds the sole responsibility of copyright clearance of any copyrighted material in the machinima.

The submission must include an accompanying artist statement/description no longer than 500 words.

The MMF is under no obligation to provide comments regarding submitted machinima to any applicant.

Submission deadline: December 1, 2019.

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LINK: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL

LINK: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2019

LINK: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2018

GAME ART: HUGO MONTEMBEAULT'S VERTIGE (2019)

Vertige is a relatively rare example of a machinima created by combining gameplay footage from different games - Downward (Caracal Games, 2017), No70: Eye of Basir (Oldmoustache Gameworks, 2017), Rememoried (Vladimir Kudelka, 2015), Stairs (GreyLight Entertainment, 2015), Superhot (SUPERHOT Team, 2016), The Beginner's Guide (Davey Wreden, 2015), The Tape (Kazakov Oleg, 2015), The Town of Light (LKA, 2016) - captured by the Author. All glitches seen in the machinima were generated through databending and misalignment techniques using Audacity.

Hugo Montembeault is a lecturer in video game studies at the University of Montreal and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Film Studies of the same institution. He works as a research assistant for the “Video games Observation and Documentation University Lab” (ludov.ca). His main research studies the expressive, critical, and political potential of glitches to determine how their subversive nature shapes game design, gameplay, and gaming culture. His second area of interest examines how videoludic self-reflexivity and meta-referentiality impact the player experience. Others of his contributions focus especially on the subject of gameplay archives and the discourse analysis of the video game specialized press. In collaboration with Maxime Deslongchamps-Gagnon, he cohosts a French academic podcast called Profil Ludique dedicated to the in-depth analysis of the walking simulator through the lens of genre theory.

LINK: Hugo Montembeault

VIDEO: KRISTOFFER ZETTERSTRAND: A VIDEO ESSAY

An in-depth look at Kristoffer Zetterstrand's practice. The Swedish painter has been exploring the boundaries between art and paintings for more than a decade. As he explains on his website,

For some years I have experimented with virtual still lifes, often in the form of stage design in which I explore how two-dimensionality (and painting) relates to computer-generated 3D worlds. I am interested in visual spaces created online, in computer games and 3D programmes, and especially in what happens when the illusion is shattered and the underlying construction emerges - like when there is a bug in a computer game. I am interested in visual failures, which I try to use in my painting. Among other things, I have produced paintings based on the landscapes that you can see only if you are “dead” in the online game Counter-Strike, and paintings with motifs created by crashed landscape generators used in film and computer game production.

This long video essay by Solar Sands provides illuminating insights into his craft.

LINK: Kristoffer Zetterstrand

GAME ART: KARL MUNSTEDT'S GRAND THEFT HOMO (2019)

Karl Munstedt's Grand Theft Homo is an ongoing project comprising mods, hacks, and queer-ings of Grand Theft Auto V intended to subvert and obscure the hetero-masculine tropes embedded within the algorithms of the game. New mods are added to an online repository, which will augment the GTA world over time piece by piece. All mods are published as open-source files and include instructions for their implementation. Aspart of his Queertopia initiative, Munstedt has created the Fagbus, Billboards and Atrazine Store (related to his previous project Something in the Water).

Karl Munstedt is an artist and technologist living and working in Brooklyn NY. In his practice, he employs technologies like gaming, augmented reality, and the web to explore future, destruction, and fantasy. He graduated with a BFA in digital art from Pratt in 2018.

 

LINK: Karl Munstedt

GAME ART: DUNCAN ROBSON'S HOURS PLAYED (ONGOING)

A few months ago, Duncan Robson released a two hour cut of his monumental project Hours Played, a video game... remake... homage... remediation... (?) of Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010). Robson's project qualifies as truly maddening and insane, thus genius. It's the mother of all videogame supercuts. This segment posted on YouTube starts at 12:56 PM and ends at 3:10 PM. It also features an intermission (2:04 PM - 2:13:35 PM). Each game featured in this montage includes a clock or a watch. Alternatively, a character mentions the time of the day. In a couple of beat'em ups selected by Robinson, a grandfather's clock is visible in the background, while games like Animal Crossing the time is mentioned in a on-screen chat. The most remarkable difference between Marclay and Robson's projects has to do with medium specificity. Films are basically archives of images displayed in (mostly) linear way, while digital games - cutscenes aside - are not sequential at all. In other words, there's only one Vertigo. There are (almost) infinite plays of Animal Crossing. Each gameplay experience is unique - there's no urtext. What we call game is really a matrix of possibilities, some of which are enacted. This makes the viewing experience of Hours Played feel like a schizophrenic let's play - which is not a criticism at all: if anything this utterly bizarre viewing experience - akin to a collection of home videos than a montage of movies - reminds us of the idiosyncratic nature of a medium in which the acts of performing and observing the (or, rather, a) performance are deeply intertwined. 

You can fund this insane work by donating via Kickstarter. It's now or never. 

 

LINK: Duncan Robson

 

EVENT: INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS: EXPLORATIONS IN ART AND PLAY (OCTOBER 2 2019 - JANUARY 31, 2020, DAVIS, CALIFORNIA)

Steven Paul Judd, Invaders, 2018

Indigenous Futurisms: Explorations in Art and Play

Gorman Museum at University of California, Davis

Oct 2, 2019 - Jan 31, 2020

One Shields Ave., Davis, California

Open Mon-Fri, noon-5 p.m., and Sun 2-5 p.m.

Admission is free.

Website: gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu.

Indigenous Futurisms brings together graphics, comics, SF, and video games  to create a provocative space of engagement and thought about Indigenous futures and possibilities. The gaming section was curated by Ashlee Bird, a graduate student of Native American Studies at UC Davis, who writes:

The content and graphics involved with Native American and Indigenous representation in these genres are fraught with embedded stereotypes and in some cases, these depictions are viewed as deeply offensive and racist. Native American artists and game designers actively engage with these concerns by creating new spaces, environments and platforms for the expression of visual sovereignty. Games and artwork are created, mediated and informed from rich cultural foundations alongside technical media expertise.

Video game inspired art on display includes an enormous vinyl inkjet print created by interdisciplinary artist Sonny Assu which reimagines the original Nintendo Entertainment System controller and replaces the original directional pad with a copper, an indigenous shield shape that for Northwest coast tribes indicates status and wealth. The piece is exhibited as large inkjet on paper. 

Sonny Assu, Nuła̱mał Entertainment System, 2017, exhibition Copy: Inkjet on paper, 36 x 26 inches

Assu has previously made modified cabinet arcades such as Wreck-Consiliation! (2017) and Broken Treaties (2017) which both display a video of  Clayfighter (made by Brendan Tang) as a 81 second loop. The coin-op machines were exhibited in the context of the Ready Player Two exhibition at the Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, British Columbia between 25.05.17 - 03.09.17.

Sonny Assu, Wreck-Consiliation!, 2017 a, Maple, copper leaf, paint and video, 24w x 33.5d x 66.25 inches

Sonny Assu, Broken Treaties, 2017, Maple, copper leaf, paint, 73.75x25x28.25 inches

Nathan Powless-Lynes, Hold My Mand!, interactive game, 2019

Indigenous Futurisms also features interactive games playable with Xbox One controllers within the gallery space, including Nathan Powless Lynes's Hold My Hand!, a dual character puzzle platformer where the characters hold hands to help each other overcome obstacles.

Maize Longboat, Ray Caplin, Mehrdad Dehdashti, Beatrix Moersch, Terra Nova, interactive game, 2019

Created by Maize Longboat, Ray Caplin, Mehrdad Dehdashti, Beatrix Moersch, Terra/Nova is a split-screen side-scroller starring an elder land-keep and a youthful inventor. The characters must perform actions in their respective worlds in order to accomplish the game's ultimate goal. Lastly, visitors can experience Full of Birds, an interactive art gallery which immerses the viewer in a colorful, vibrant "natural" world.

LINK: Indigenous Futurism (All images and videos courtesy of the Artists)

GAME ART: JACKY CONNOLLY'S ARIADNE (2019)

Jacky Connolly, Ariadne, 2019, HD video, color, sound, 50m13s.

Last Summer, one of the most prominent video artists working with the video game aesthetics, Jacky Connolly, released her new monumental work, Ariadne. Like her previous projects, Ariadne was shot with/in The Sims. It was exhibited at Down and Ross Gallery in New York. However, this time around Connolly emphasizes the porous boundaries between the tangible and the virtual by mixing video game footage with live footage. As curator Emily Watlington writes:

The fifty-minute piece is set amidst a lightning storm that splices together two realities: a virtual, seaside Italian villa created in Sims, and New York City, shot with a camera. The rupture forms a third suburban, autumnal realm. Ariadne1, of New York and played by the artist, decides she wants to disappear, allowing lightning to transport her into a virtual realm. The simulated Ariadne2 is seen with a red lightning scar upon her chest—a trace of the act, which she carries with her back into the live-action scene that concludes the film. [...] There’s a haunting soundtrack, scored by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix; a Lynchian, empty, eerily-lit diner among other suburban interiors; the ‘camera’s’ fascination with solo, silent women à la Todd Haynes’ Safe; and implied family disfunction frequently found in melodrama (weepies, ‘women’s pictures). Connolly leaves clues toward her referents: Doug Richmond’s 1985 book How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, for instance, is stationed throughout. Due largely to the nature of the game, there are no close-ups, their absence serving to emphasize the characters’ solitude, their displacement in empty sets.

Jacky Connolly was born in 1990 in Lower Hudson Valley, New York. She gained her BFA in Photography, Art History, and Critical Studies from Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2011; she gained an MFA in Digital Arts and MSc in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute in 2016. Selected solo & two-person exhibitions and screenings: Downs & Ross, New York; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn; Peach, Rotterdam; Daata Editions at NADA New York; Kimberly-Klark, Queens; Bus Projects, Melbourne; and Et al., San Francisco. Selected group exhibitions and screening programs: Museum Brandhorst, Munich; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; D21, Leipzig; IULM, Milan; PAF Animation Festival, Olomouc, CZ; Ellis King, Dublin; Kimberly-Klark at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Et al., San Francisco; and Hester, New York. She lives and works in Bearsville, NY.

LINK: Jacky Connolly (All images and videos courtesy of the Artist)

GAME ART: TOTAL REFUSAL'S HOW TO DISAPPEAR. DESERTING BATTLEFIELD (2019)

Total Refusal, How to Disappear, machinima, 2019, 20:06

A game video essay on the nature of war - both "real", that is, unmediated, and its remediation through ludic means - How to Disappear. Deserting Battlefield is a profound, moving, and enlightening meditation on topics ranging from the weaponization of nationalism to the ideology of physical exercising in military contexts.

The artists, who previously visited a virtual New York to illustrate the neoliberal principles informing the logic of urban spaces in digital games (see Operation Jane Walk), appropriated Battlefield V to highlight the contradictions of "playing war". Embracing the role of the spoilsport, the collective Total Refusal - Digital Disarmament Movement examines the practice of deserting in online gaming situations. The approach is not necessarily new - consider Joseph DeLappe's dead-in-iraq (2006-2011) project which turned American's Army on its head and elevated the artist to the role of the activist, or the creative deserter (something that was subsequently parodied by Eva and Franco Mattes with Freedom, 2010). However, in How to Disappear, the anti-war message is simultaneously more explicit and more subdued. Total Refusal's machinima is a collection of in-game performances in which several characters refuse to play. Instead, the kill themselves by jumping off cliffs (an homage to Brody Condon's seminal Suicide Solution, perhaps) or targeting a standing pole with their machine guns, surprised by the resilience of the pennant. 

In DeLappe's performance, the artist/player refused to play according to the rules. Instead, he entered the online US Army recruiting game in order to manually type the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person who perished in the Iraq war. As Delappe wrote, dead-in-iraq "is essentially a fleeting, online memorial to those military personnel who have been killed in this ongoing conflict. My actions are also intended as a cautionary gesture." How to Disappear, on the other hand, is more open to interpretation: the narrator provides contextual information, but no definite didactic takeaways or explicit warnings about the implications of militarization. What it does, unequivocally and convincingly, is demonstrating that the bridge separating "real life" and the simulation is much shorter than one may think. 

The artists provide remarkable commentary upon the most puzzling aspects of the game, e.g. the aforementioned, inexplicable indestructibility of flags - which are imbued of that sacred aura that often justifies the most vile acts of "patriotism". In other words, these are not bugs but features: ideology mostly is hegemonic. Implicit, not explicit. How to Disappear is metagame walkthrough, a Let's play sui generis that focuses on the game mechanics to bring to surface the embedded ideologies, thus completely disrupting the banal excuse that close textual analysis of games is unwarranted and unnecessary because, well, "it's just a game", the abused "common sense" approach to gaming that validates its values and messages a priori while simultaneously dismissing them as harmless. In all cases the uncanny nature of the game is highlighted not with incredible stunts or masterful maneuvers ("high performance play", as Henry Lowood put it), but by simply showing the characters' aspect and basic moves, like pointing a gun or crawling on the ground. The banality of such actions, emphasized by a fixed, lingering camera, is deeply unnerving. 

Total Refusal is Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, and Michael Stumpf.  In their practice, they critically analyze and appropriate digital game spaces and put them to new use. Moving within games but ignoring the intended gameplay, Total Refusal allocates these resources to new activities and narratives, in order to create “public” spaces imbued with critical, even subversive potential.

Leonhard Müllner works as an artist in the public and digital space and is currently writing his doctoral thesis at the Linz Art University at the Institute for Art and Cultural Studies.

Robin Klengel works in Graz and Vienna as an interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, cultural anthropologist and vice president of the Forum Stadtpark.

Michael Stumpf studied philosophy at the University of Vienna. He works as an artist, designer and cultural theorist.

LINK: Total Refusal

Related: Swings Don't Swing and Friendly Fire

GAME ART: SÉAMUS GALLAGHER'S A SPACE AND PLACE FOR US ALL (2017)

Seamus Gallagher, falling in love with whatever loves me first, pigment print, 44” x 66”, 2017

I'm in love with Séamus Gallagher's a space and place all for us, a triptych featuring images created digitally using 3D modeling programs like Blender, as well as Unity, a computer game engine. As Gallagher explains,

images of these video game environments are then extracted into print form, which i use to construct complex, large-scale installations for me to photograph, encompassing the camera’s frame. in bringing these digital aesthetics into a physical space, these photographs exist as dense visual environments that blur the line between the digital and the physical, the real and the fake. by photographing myself inside these constructed spaces, i want to explore what it means for the body to interact within virtual, otherworldly spaces.

Seamus Gallagher's is a an interdisciplinary artist originally from Moncton, New Brunswick, and currently finishing his undergraduate with a double major in Photography and Expanded Media at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. His practice centres around constructing complex, colourful spaces for myself to interact within, blending photography with installation and performance.

LINK: Seamus Gallagher

GAME ART: JONA KLEINLEIN'S HIDDEN CONFLICTS (2019)

Jona Kleinlein, Hidden Conflicts, machinima, 23' 05", 2019

Jona Kleinlein is a multi-media artist working with film, video and installation living and working in Norway. He is interested in exploring the increasingly porous boundaries between filmmaking, video games, and simulation. Hidden Conflicts is Jona's new short, created as a final project for his B.A. in Moving Images at Nordland College of Art and Film in Norway. Jona calls it a hybrid documentary, a game video essay that uses Arma 3 to document the MilSim scene (i.e., an activity that strives to realistically simulate the experience of armed conflict, often taking place in video games, and enacted by civilians). In a private email, Jona explains that he selected Arma 3 to shoot his documentary because of its incredible modding community, which makes filming extremely flexible. "It was important to me that my in-game character would be a real cameraman using a 'real' camera - says Jona - so if I would film somebody within the game environment, they would know. That worked like magic. There were several awesome mod creators that have created incredibly sophisticated camera models." Jona was invited to discuss his project to a roleplaying group via discord : "I pitched my idea to the whole group and they were as excited as I was, given the roleplay potential having a press officer onboard. I personally tried to roleplay some sort of cameraman character as well." The entire process - from shooting to post-production - took approximately six months. "All the interviews are made ingame, recorded with screen capture software and Discord. The conversations of the other players are mostly in-game and in so called 'debriefs' of the players." Jona says that the conflation of reality and simulation was a truly powerful experience. Before creating Hidden Conflicts, Jona spent several months inside The Witcher 3 to learn about filming in three dimensional worlds. "Machinima has really opened my eyes and now I see video games in a completely different light. There is so much untapped potential, loopholes, and stories to be found that the creators of the videogame never intended. Video games perfectly captured the zeitgeist" Jona adds. "Filming inside a video game can quickly become a political matter and I like that. I find hard to communicate that aspect to people that are unfamiliar with video games: their understanding of the medium is really basic, and thus they won't understand what I tried to achieve with Hidden Conflicts." The film has not been released yet, but Jona is submitting it to various festivals around the world and it truly deserves to be seen.

 

LINK: Jona Kleinlein 

GAME ART: ANDY HUGHES' PLASTIC SCOOP (2019)

Andy Hughes' monumental Plastic Scoop examines the relationship between virtual environments and ecological issues though the filter of GTA V. Created using the Rockstar Editor, Plastic Coop mixes images from the videogame with found footage and archival moving image. The video opens with the soothing atmospheres of an ocean at sunset, but the voiceover - extolling the merits of nuclear weapons and plastic ("plastic... plastic... plastic...") - and rockets penetrating the surface soon disrupt the tranquility. Suddenly, an astronaut emerges from the water...

Plastic Scoop draws on contemporary narratives to express the ways in which our anxiety and fears about ocean pollution, plastic waste and global heating are presented. The film features gleaned archival moving image material and cinema footage from early ocean exploration, including nasa sound recordings with his own created and directed in-game Grand Theft Auto machinima. Working in cooperation with Dr Mandy Bloomfield and the English faculty students at the University of Plymouth through discussion and workshops the film was co-developed through the exchange of ideas and concepts.

Hughes’ photographic work explores the littoral zone and the politics of waste. In 2013 he traveled to Alaska, invited as part of an international team of artists and scientists to work on the project Gyre: The Plastic Ocean. This project was a world first and unique project that explored the integration of science and art to document and interpret the issue of plastic and human waste in the marine and coastal environment. 

LINK: Andy Hughes (All images and video courtesy of the Artist)