GAMESCENES

GAME ART: BRENTON SMITH'S STOP FOR A MOMENT (MARCH 7 - 17 2019, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA)

Brenton Alexander Smith, Stop for a moment, machinima, 4' 42", color, sound, 2019

BRENTON ALEXANDER SMITH

STOP FOR A MOMENT

SCRATCH ARTSPACE

67 Sydenham Road Marrickville NSW 2204

Sydney, Australia

John Chamberlain meets the digital uncanny. In Brenton Smith's solo show at SCRATCH ARTSPACE in Sydney, Australia, stop for a moment, James Graham Ballard, video games, and automobiles collide and collude to create situations that appear both familiar and bizarre. Smith gives machinima a third dimension using crushed automobile parts welded together and electronic parts to bring them to simulated life. The automobiles' viscera are on display, both on the screen and in the gallery space. Both virtual and physical, these organic/mechanic/machinic creatures know and crashforms evoke Shinya Tsukamoto's cyborgian entities.

Stop for a Moment underpins an endeavour to explore the potential for nonhuman entities to elicit an affect in human viewers. The car accident is a central theme using the driving simulator video game BeamNg.drive, known for its ability to realistically simulate car crashes. By pushing the limits of what the game engine allows, Brenton Alexander Smith forces the game into a crash scenario that would be impossible in the real world producing organic-chaotic shapes in response to the extreme input, coupled with strange twitching movements that afford them a sense of nonhuman liveliness referred to as ‘crashforms’. The title of the show invites the viewer to not only take a moment to view the work but to take a break from the pressure to perform in today’s technologically driven society. Like the crashform, it invites the viewer to allow a certain vulnerability for just a little while.

Brenton Alexander Smith’s practice emerged from an interest in the relationship between humans and machines. His work explores the point of connection and disconnection between humans and the artificial in the cycle of technological renewal. He frequently draws from abandoned and damaged technical artifacts, such as crashed cars, to create works that seek to elicit an affective response in the viewer. Many of his works aim to arouse feelings of sympathy for broken or discarded machines. Smith’s practice takes form in a variety of media. In several works, the residue of car accidents acts as a sculptural material that echoes the organic through mechanical forms. These sculptures are part relic and part creature, inert yet imbued with a faint sense of liveliness. Smith graduated from the Sydney College of the Arts with honours in 2014. Since then, he completed an artist residency in Iceland, where he held his first solo exhibition at the Akureyri Art Museum. The same year Smith received the Freedman Foundation Travelling scholarship. He is currently working on an MFA at UNSW Art and Design in Sydney.

LINK: Brenton Alexander Smith (All images and videos (c) Brenton Alexander Smith)

EVENT: NAVIGATION BEYOND VISION (APRIL 5-6 2019, BERLIN, GERMANY)

Navigation Beyond Vision 
Art after Culture? A second decade of e-flux journal 
April 5–6, 2019 

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) 
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 
10557 Berlin
Germany 

Navigation begins where the map becomes indecipherable. Navigation operates on a plane of immanence in constant motion. Instead of framing or representing the world, the art of navigation continuously updates and adjusts multiple frames from viewpoints within and beyond the world. Navigation is thus an operational practice of synthesizing various orders of magnitude, each with its own horizon. Super-modernity’s expansive enclosures of global infrastructure, time zone logistics, and data-behaviorism become external abstractions as much as computational and territorial facts.

Only a few weeks prior to his untimely death in 2014, Harun Farocki briefly referred to navigation as a contemporary challenge to montage—editing distinct sections of film into a continuous sequence—as the dominant paradigm of techno-political visuality. For Farocki, the computer-animated, navigable images that constitute the twenty-first century’s “ruling class of images” call for new tools of analysis. Drawing on Alexander Galloway’s concept of “actionable objects” in gamespace, Farocki began to ask: How does the shift from montage to navigation alter the way images—and art—operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention?

Today, we “navigate” known and unknown, real and virtual, concrete and abstract space—cities, territories, lives, and narratives. As we attempt to map and record the terrain, we are ourselves being mapped and recorded. If Google Maps seeks to map space and global finance seeks to map affective responses to possible events, Farocki appears to have employed the question of navigation to ask: What are the interfaces of navigation that transcend the realm of the purely technical, even as a form of visualization that paradoxically supersedes the spatial and temporal constraints of images completely?

Rather than finding orientation by way of images in the real world, real world experiences may be increasingly used to find orientation within images. An image may mutate into a sort of interface—an operational tool reaching beyond visual-cognitive persuasions, beyond the documentary, beyond “the image” itself, enabling seemingly boundless and borderless mobility between spaces, scales, temporalities. The navigational also redraws as well as challenges power relations inherent to orientation and movement, when, for example, groups begin visiting distant “home countries” based on DNA test results, just as many from those countries flee to foreign countries moved by promise.

Against the backdrop of platforms that swell into worlds, disorientation may have become an ethical resource.

Co-organized by the Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) and e-flux journal in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), “Navigation Beyond Vision” asks: How do navigational paradigms in virtual and offline environments increasingly inform the politics of the image? If navigation puts ontological pressure on the static frame of a photographic or cinematic image, then how are our concepts of political action, visual literacy and collective intervention also pressured to surpass or perform model worlds? How does the operative and performative character of immersion in computational environments—navigating with and within images—impact the function and the status of the visual as such? Has navigation ever been a visual technology at all, or has it always compounded cosmological, mathematical, and sensorial orders of magnitude into aggregate spatial orders that surpass the visual entirely?

Join us at HKW on Friday, April 5 from 7–9pm and on Saturday, April 6 from 11am–8pm for “Navigation Beyond Vision,” the third in the conference series Art After Culture? organized in Rotterdam, Paris, Berlin, and New York launching off the next ten years of e-flux journal.

With Ramon Amaro, Julieta Aranda, James Bridle, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Maïté Chénière, Kodwo Eshun, Anselm Franke, Jennifer Gabrys, Charles Heller, Tom Holert, Inhabitants, Doreen Mende, Gloria Meynen, Matteo Pasquinelli, Laura Lo Presti, Patricia Reed, Nikolay Smirnov, Hito Steyerl, Oraib Toukan, Vassilis Tsianos, Ben Vickers, and Brian Kuan Wood.

Co-organized by the Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) and e-flux journal in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). With additional support from the CCC Research-Based Master of Visual Arts at HEAD – Genève.

LINK: NAVIGATION BEYOND VISION

GAME ART: JONAS ODELL'S I WAS A WINNER (2019)

In his latest film, Jonas Odell examines the topic of computer game addition is the through a mix of documentary interviews and animation. In the guise of their game avatars three people tell us about their experience of gaming addiction.

Jonas Odell (b. 1962) is a Swedish music video and film director and founder of FilmTecknarna. Odell, who specializes in a mix of animation and live action, has directed a number of short films, music videos and commercials. His short film Never Like the First Time! (Aldrig som första gången!) was awarded the Golden Bear for best short film in the Berlin International Film Festival 2006. He has won two Swedish Guldbagge Awards for Best Short Film, for Never Like the First Time! (2006) and Lies (Lögner) (2008). Lies also received the Jury Prize for International Short Filmmaking at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

LINK: Jonas Odell

DOC: PAOLO SANTAGOSTINO'S WILLY, 48K ABOUT A LEGEND (2019)

Paolo Santagostino's latest film - a documentary about legendary platform games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, starring the audacious Willy -  will make its UK Premiere at Play Expo Manchester with Matthew Smith on May 4 2019. You can read an interview with Paolo here.

Paolo Santagostino is a filmmaker and Film Editor Instructor at the Civic School of Cinema in Milan, Italy. As a Teacher is working also at the cfp Bauer institute of Milan. As a Director, Film editor and D.o.P he has worked in shorts, music videos, documentaries, with various directors and producers (Universal, EMI, Warner, Ricordi, Irma, Edel). As a Filmmaker has directed and produced two short documentary films, selected and awarded in many international festivals.

LINK: Paolo Santagostino

EVENT: VIDEO GAMES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN QUEER (MARCH 18 2019, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA)

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

Bonnie Ruberg, University of California Irvine

March 18 | 12:30 PM — 2:00 PM | BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley, California, United States of America

While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly.

In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to ‘pass’ in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

Bonnie Ruberg, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of digital games and interactive media in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Their research explores gender and sexuality in digital media and digital cultures. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019) and the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), as well as the co-lead organizer and co-founder of the annual Queerness and Games Conference. They received their Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in conjunction with the Berkeley Center for New Media and served as a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Interactive Media and Games Division at the University of Southern California.

LINK: VIDEO GAMES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN QUEER

OPEN CALL: GAME ON ON! EL ARTE EN JUEGO (DEADLINE: APRIL 30 2019, ARGENTINA)

Game on! El arte en juego is an art games exhibition founded in 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Game on! Exhibits artgames, experimental games, non-games, alternative controllers, playable media and a wide range of independent video games that explores the inner logic of video games, that deconstruct, re-shape and reformulate the very same notion of video games. Game On! explores the possibilities of interaction, cyber narrative and playability. The exhibition is always accompanied by a series of activities that include performances, workshops and round-tables. This year and as a celebration for its 10th anniversary Game On! will be presenting the first edition of GAIA in co-productio with GAIN. GAIA is the first think tank for the international game arts ecosystem.

From November 22 to November 30th 2019 Game On! El arte en juego, the 6th international art games and playful media exhibition, invites general public and professionals from the fields of new media art and video games to explore the state of the art of independent, artistic and experimental video games. This year the exhibit will be held in San Martin Cultural Center, during #NoviembreElectrónico, Buenos Aires main cultural and technological festival

LINK: Game on! El arte en juego

Game On! El arte en juego es la primera exhibición en Argentina en explorar las relaciones entre arte, videojuegos y sociedad.

Es una exhibición de videojuegos independientes que exploran las lógicas del dispositivo mismo, lo deconstruyen, cuestionan y reformulan. Cada edición está integrada por una selección de piezas que oscilan entre las categorías de non-games, juegos experimentales, serious games y artgames. Se presentan también instalaciones lúdicas interactivas que indagan en los cruces de interactividad y juego. Y por supuesto controles alternativos que proponen nuevos modos de juego. No puede faltar el ámbito de las experiencias en realidad virtual que exploran los límites de la narratividad e interactividad. El objetivo es navegar por los distintos formatos que el videojuego puede adoptar hoy cuando decide adoptar un tono experimental y artístico.

La exhibición es siempre acompañada por un programa de extensión que se ocupa de el aspecto académico: ensayos, tesis, investigaciones y discusiones sobre game studies. En esta ocasión y como parte de la celebración de su décimo aniversario Game On! presenta la primera edición de GAIA, un think tank dedicado a la comunidad internacional de game art (curadores, productores y gestores de comunidad especializados en videojuegos y cultura) GAIA es una co-producción de Game On! y GAIN.

Esta nueva edición de Game On! El arte en juego tendrá lugar entre el 22 y 30 de noviembre 2019, en el Centro Cultural San Martín dentro de #NoviembreElectrónico, el evento insigne de Buenos Aires que invita al diálogo entre artes electrónicas y cultura digital, que ha reunido a más de 110.000 participantes en sus ediciones anteriores.

LINK: Game on! El arte en juego

GAME ART: CORY ARCANGEL'S DUNK (2017)

Cory Arcangel “Verticals” installation view at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg, 2019.  Courtesy: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi. © Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel's DUNK (2017) is a laser animation that depicts the motions of a stylised basketball player from an NBA video game throwing a ball into the basket. The artist drew the animation by hand into a computer using a Wacom tablet. It is projected onto the wall using a Kvant Laser projector Clubmax 800. The slam dunk represents both an aesthetic and performative gesture and an ideological motif of America's neo imperialism.

LINK: Cory Arcangel

GAME ART: PEDRO MOREIRA'S THE TRIPPLESAPIENS, PILOT (2018)

The first Tripplesapien, Tlön, is a projection of what the artist regards as the next evolutionary stage of humanity, a being that transcends gender, race, and nationality and exists solely in the the realm of an utopian virtual world. The Tripplesapiens: Pilot, 2018 is the first episode in the Tripplesapiens project, which originated from Moreira's A Level Playing Field (2017) residency. The 17 minute video features Tlön as a guide to the world of the Tripplesapiens, allowing the audience to act as a voyeur to Moreira’s fictional world. The work has been exhibited at MACAO (Milan), Killburn Arches (London), Wozen (Lisbon) and Aarhus Billedkunstcenter (Aarhus).

Pedro Moreira was born in Lisbon, Portugal in the year of 1989. Raised Mormon and constantly relocating with family, Moreira has led a sheltered and restricted existence. The gender-non-binary artists was raised in the United Kingdom from the age of 14, severing their ties to the Mormon church at the age of 18, with the move to London and enrolment in the UAL. It was here that Moreira gained an interest in identity theory, and honed their interest in art installation as a communicative medium with the piece Gender Mirror, 2012. It was also in UAL that Moreira gained an interest in morality and media, writing the dissertation With No Power Comes No Responsibility, 2012, in which they juxtaposed popular super hero narratives with The New Testament, arguing that theological texts are simply incarnations of ‘the basic hero’s journey’ a formula of moral story telling present since the Epic of Gilgamesh. An interview with Moreira is available here.

LINK: Pedro Moreira

EVENT: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL (MARCH 15 2019, MILAN, ITALY)

THE SECOND EDITION OF THE MILAN MACHINIMA FILM FESTIVAL PROMISES UNCANNY VISIONS.

The MACHINIMA FILM FESTIVAL returns to Milan on March 15 2019 during the Milano Digital Week. 

Featuring a selection of artworks created by artists appropriating, repurposing, and remixing commercial video games, the MMF includes short films and experimental works created by Lisa Carletta, COLL.EO, Joseph DeLappe, Kara Gut, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Chris Keric, Luigi Marrone, Luca Miranda, Leonhard Müellner, Bram Ruiter, Brenton Smith, Petra Szeman, Twee Whistler and Brent Watanabe.

An international panel of critics, curators, and academics contributed to the selection and evaluation process: : Valentino Catricalà (Artistic Director of the Media Art Festival in Rome), Marco De Mutiis (Digital curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur), Stefano Locati (member of the Scientific Committee of the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival in Venice and Director of the Asian Film Festival in Bologna), Henry Lowood (Curator for the Germanic Collections and the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University), and Jenna NG (Professor of Cinema and Interactive Media at the University of York).

This year’s theme is the UNCANNY, the perceptual phenomenon caused by experiences that are at once familiar and alien. Disquieting visions pervade an eclectic program in which glitches, shocks, and disturbing repetitions become a metaphor for societal chaos in the age of algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence. These alternative narratives question the relationship between authenticity and performance, identity and self preservation in everyday (digital) life. Two longer documentary works examine the unexpected side (effects) of virtual gaming.

Curated by Matteo Bittanti and presented by Gemma Fantacci, the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2019 is organized by the Master of Arts in Game Design at IULM University. Admission is free upon registration. The screenings take place in Sala dei 146 located in the IULM Open Space.

Two days before the Festival, on March 13, 2019, Jenna NG will deliver a keynote as part of the ongoing GAME TALKS series at IULM. Titled MACHINIMA AND THE ALLURE OF EPHEMERALITY: GAMEPLAY, LIVE STREAMS & DIGITAL CULTURE, the talk will address the explosion of interest in the live streaming of gameplay as witnessed in the popularity of Twitch, whose latest number of daily active users has reached 15 million, as well as other major platforms such as YouTube Gaming, Mixer, and Facebook Live. Specifically, the talk will link the current phenomenon of video game live streams with machinima and its origins in game demos and captured video game play, arguing not only for live streams to be the next logical evolution for machinima, but also for a critical theorisation of screen media that pursues a realist trajectory, one which potentially works its way from neorealist cinema to drone culture.

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. By highlighting the interplay behind production and consumption made possible by digital technology, MDW connects citizens, companies, institutions, universities, and research centers.

LINK: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL

EVENT: JENNA NG, MACHINIMA AND THE ALLURE OF EPHEMERALITY (MARCH 13 2019, MILAN, ITALY)

JENNA NG

MACHINIMA AND THE ALLURE OF EPHEMERALITY: GAMEPLAY, LIVE STREAMS & DIGITAL CULTURE

GAME TALK #2

March 13, 2019

Aula 135, IULM 1

Università IULM

Via Carlo Bo, 1

20143 Milan Italy

In this talk, Jenna Ng will address the explosion of interest in the live streaming of gameplay as witnessed in the popularity of Twitch, whose latest number of daily active users has reached 15 million, as well as other major platforms such as YouTube Gaming, Mixer, and Facebook Live. Specifically, the talk will link the current phenomenon of video game live streams with machinima and its origins in game demos and captured videogame play, arguing not only for live streams to be the next logical evolution for machinima, but also for a critical theorisation of screen media that pursues a realist trajectory, one which potentially works its way from neorealist cinema to drone culture.

Jenna Ng first trained as a finance lawyer in Singapore and London before switching to film studies, in which she obtained a PhD from University College London (UCL), and currently teaches film and interactive media at the University of York, UK. She is the editor of Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2013) and her current book project, Undoing the Screen: Space, Spectacle, Surface (Palgrave), explores the effacing of screen boundaries in relation to contemporary display technologies and the resulting erasure between images, objects, surfaces and spaces.

Click here to register