When it comes to bold, daring, unique, and unclassifiable game-based experiences, there's simply nothing comparable to the visionary, WTF stuff that the students of Eddo Stern's UCLA GameLab create. Point in case: check out the trailer for Elsie Wang's Game Lab Fellow Intimacy.
LINK: Elsie Wang
A collaborative project between artists Carson Lynn and Grace Grothau, Parched Earth examines the ecological tensions embedded in contemporary video games. As Carson writes:
Both artists have dealt with global warming in their respective practices, so they sought out to create a speculative fiction film depicting a dystopian future where scavengers are rewarded for finding remnants of flora in a ruined landscape. The film combines Lynn's machinima practice and Grothaus' digital seed archive. Lynn utilizes No Man's Sky and a VR headset to create a found-footage-like setting, with Grothaus' documented flora and text serving as a connection to the past (our present).
Carson Lynn is an artist based out of Southern California who through the usage of digital materials, sublime landscapes, and exploration within gamespaces, creates artworks as a queering of heterocentric photographic conventions and game systems. He is working towards receiving his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design with a projected graduation in April, 2020. He received his BFA in Photography and Imaging, also from ArtCenter, in 2015.
Grace Grothaus is a transdisciplinary artist focused on creating moments of reflection about human agency and balance with the built and natural environment. Through physical computing she creates immersive indoor and outdoor installations and performances, as well as interactive paintings and sculptures. Notable exhibitions & projects include the International Symposium of Electronic Art 2018, Trace, a large-scale public artwork for the city of Tulsa, and the 2012 World Creativity Biennale. Her work has been exhibited and/or collected nationwide and abroad on five continents. She was a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Merit Award winner and has received an Art365 Fellowship. Her art has been featured on the cover of Art Focus magazine and This Land Press. Grothaus earned a BFA as a double major in Interdisciplinary Arts and Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute and is currently pursuing an MFA from the University of California, San Diego where she resides with her dog and many plants.
LINK: Carson Lynn and Grace Grothau
Jenny Jiao Hsia, Consume Me, 2018
System Link: Video Game as Memoir
Curated by Brice Puls
January 24 - April 25, 2020
Opening Reception Friday, January 24 2020, 6-9pmVGA Gallery
2418 W Bloomingdale #101
Chicago, IL 60647
Video games have historically been a product catered to the player. A focus on engagement, replayability, and general entertainment value has guided design strategies that create impersonal pieces, appealing to the widest range of players possible. While film, music, writing, and other media have historically been vehicles of memoir and personal storytelling, games often maintain a trajectory as products of their audience and not their creator. The voices of the individual artists have recently begun to break through the standards of generalization in the medium, creating stories where players are able to experience the emotional perspectives of the creator. In doing so memoir games reveal that assumptions about the general audience skew toward specific perspectives, and exclude others. This exhibition seeks to highlight those works, exploring how a range of game makers and artists have translated their personal experiences into the interactive context. Each work is designed to allow the player to understand, empathize with, and connect to other lived realities, using the participatory advantages of video games to express a story as no other medium can. The different projects showcased in this exhibition offer different answers to the question “What happens when you let the player of games into your story?”
Now Play This 2020 – Open Call
Now Play This is returning to Somerset House in London from April 3rd – 5th as part of London Games Festival. Ahead of this year’s festival we’re once again opening up a call for playful makers and creators to tell us about their work.
The submission deadline for the open call will be midnight, 3rd February.
As a festival of experimental games and playful media we welcome the submission of games, installations, workshops, photography, films, performances or works in other mediums that directly connect to the subject of play. You can view festival line-ups from previous years here which will help provide an insight into the range of works we have showcased previously.
The theme for the festival this year is ‘breaking point’. We are looking for works which break or subvert rules or systems.
This might include games or works which…
– subvert, disassemble or break real world systems
– hack, remake, remix, modify existing games or works
– that foster creation through destruction or subversionWe are open to other interpretations of the theme, but do ask that you demonstrate clearly how work submitted connects to it.
To submit works please complete the open call form here.
If you have accessibility concerns regarding the form or the deadline please email [email protected]
Additional information:
- We strongly welcome submissions from marginalised and underrepresented creatives within games and playful media.
- The festival pays a £75 honorarium for exhibited works and provides all hardware required for display (where applicable). We can also cover any additional expenses required to showcase work.
- Creators are not required to attend the festival for their work to be exhibited. If a work is dependent on your presence to be shown, e.g. a performance, then we will cover travel and accommodation expenses.
- We will respond to all submissions by late February. Due to the volume of submissions we receive we sadly cannot provide individual feedback.
If you have any other queries, comments or feedback then please email [email protected]
LINK: NOW PLAY THIS
Jon Rafman, Open Heart Warrior, Three-channel HD video, sculptural installation, 13:30, 2016
In Rafman's Open Heart Warrior, virtual landscapes evoking the iconography of fantasy play on three screens, while unsettling and disturbing images from violent computer games enter and exit the frame, often in the viewer’s peripheral vision. Images of secular trees, majestic mountains, and imperious skies are replaced by grotesque brutality. Rafman's universe is completely devoid of hope. Much like ours.
Installation view, Sprueth Magers, Berlin (Germany)
LINK: Jon Rafman
As if we needed proof further proof that Akihiko Taniguchi is a staggering genius... In his latest project, the ultra realistic racing game Art Speed, artworks on wheels - Gabriel Orozco's La DS (1993), Umberto Boccioni's Forme uniche nella continuità dello spazio (1913), and R.T. Mutt's Fountain (1917) among others - compete in the art circuit. F.T. Marinetti would be so proud. Art Speed. The Contemporary Art Racing Simulator is currently under development...
Akihiko Taniguchi is and artist and full-time lecturer of Tama Art University and part-time lecturer of Musashino Art University. His practice includes installations, performances and video works using self-built devices and software.
LINK: Akihiko Taniguchi
Somehow related: COLL.EO's CARJACKED
Juan Obando, Pro Revolution Soccer, 2019
Featured artists
Cao Fei, Paloma Dawkins, Tracy Fullerton, Dan Hernandez, Nyamakop, Juan Obando, Momo Pixel, Skawennati, Brent Watanabe
LINK: Game Changers
The theme of the 2020 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is The Weird, the Eerie, and the Unreal. Inspired by Mark Fisher’s last book, The Weird and the Eerie (2017), the theme tries to capture the essence of machinima, like the previous two, Aesthetics of game-based cinema (2018) and Uncanny (2019).
The poster and the full program will be revealed in the upcoming weeks.
Click here to read the full description.
The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is organized in collaboration with GAMESCENES. Art in the age of video games and the M.A. in Game Design at IULM University. An official event of the Milano Digital Week, the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL takes place between March 09 - 13 2020 at IULM University, in Milan.
Click the image below to read more:
Explorer Award"Go, where nobody has gone before! This is the award for all forms of experiences beyond the boundaries of contemporary ways to play or develop games. Here, we are exploring alternative controllers, interactive installations, creative coding experiments, robotics and tech performances, as well as interdisciplinary teams, collaborations with science, makers, engineers, researchers, theater and writers."The submission fee is 30€ and even if artists don't get nominated, they will receive a 25% discount on the festival ticket and will be asked first for spots in the Open Screens program of the exhibition, so that everyone has the chance to exhibit. Every entry will be visible on the website too. It is also possible to register as Selection Committee to review the submitted works - Here a 25% discount is given out as well, for everybody who reviews 5 or more entries.
Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf), Featherfall, 2019
4 channel video installation (loop) + audio, loudspeaker
Several scholars have compared the logic of video games to dreams (rather than movies or novels) to explain their peculiar nature: Alfie Bown comes to mind (see The PlayStation Dreamworld). Total Refusal explored this analogy by collecting experiences from gamers who share their oneiric visions with each other in online forums. A recurrent trope is the feeling of falling, which becomes the theme of Total Refusal's latest installation, Featherfall. As they write,
The video installation Featherfall is based on research in online forums in which video players * exchange their dream experiences. It becomes clear how close dream and game worlds can come to each other in the psyche of the users * and what feedback can develop between the two alternative realities. Featherfall ties in with the archetypal nightmare of "falling down", which often occurs during puberty. Falling without ever landing "exists in video games in the form of a recurring programming error - a glitch - through which the avatar falls beneath the surface into the empty, non-programmed space. The glitch as a digital nightmare.
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 (all images and video courtesy of Total Refusal)