GAMESCENES

GAME ART: CANYON CASTATOR'S BAD ACTORS, THE VIDEO GAME (2019)

Canyon Castator, Bad Actors, The Video Game, 2019, Oil, print, spray, 80 × 60 in, 203.2 × 152.4 cm

 

Born 1989 in Houston, TX, Canyon Castator lives and works in Los Angeles. He is represented by Postmasters Gallery.

 

LINK: Canyon Castator

GAME ART: DYLAN HAN'S 50 WAYS YO KILL YOUR SIMS (2019)

Dylan Han, 50 Ways to Kill Your Sims, oil on canvas, 2019

Dylan Han is a photographer, designer, painter, drawer and conceptual creator from San Francisco, California. He is currently a third year at UCLA Fine Arts with a minor in Asian American Studies.

LINK: Dylan Han 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2020 (DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 1 2020)

VECTOR FESTIVAL 2020: AFTER GAMIFICATION

TORONTO, ON | JULY 16-19, 2020

OPEN CALL FOR ARTWORKS AND CURATORIAL PROPOSALS 

Vector Festival is an annual media arts event dedicated to showcasing experimental art works that engage critically with digital technologies.
The festival is proudly participatory and community-oriented. Hosted by InterAccess and co-curated by Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger, Vector Festival takes place at arts venues and in public spaces across the City of Toronto.

Since its inception, Vector Festival has been innovative in its inclusion of game-based digital art alongside other new media disciplines. Continuing this focus for the 2020 edition, the festival’s curators pose a deceptively simple question: what comes after gamification?

Now that game culture and game technologies have become so pervasive in popular culture, how do experimental media artists respond critically to the rampant gamifying of everyday life? From online social interaction to digital finance, from education to military conflict, from politics and environmental issues to the ways in which humans (and machines) express themselves creatively, what comes after gamification?

The Festival will take place between July 16-19, 2020, with the flagship exhibition extended until August 22, 2020.

Please note that Vector Festival does not charge submission fees to artists applying to participate.

All artists and curators selected for participation will receive fees in accordance with the up-to-date CARFAC Fee schedule, as well as support to apply for external funding.

We invite art submissions of digital – and post-digital – works for the following festival categories:

Flagship Exhibition
Digital and post-digital art works including interactive installations, experimental game mods, sculptural work, screen-based work, sound art, etc.

Online Projects
Web-based projects and digital artworks that can be presented online, including experimental interactive and time-based digital projects.

Festival Screening
Experimental film/video/machinima works.

Performance
Performance-based proposals including chiptune, sound art, live coding, A/V performances, and telematic performances for virtual and public spaces.

Site-Specific Outdoor Screening
To be presented on two large-scale (4.88 x 8.64 m) outdoor LED screens for a public audience of all ages.

GIFs
Animated GIFs intended for presentation on public screens across Toronto.

Curatorial Submissions
This year, we also invite curators/curatorial collectives to submit proposals for machinima screenings (on a theme of your choosing). If you are considering a curatorial submission, we encourage you to contact the Vector Festival team for additional practical details.

Deadline: February 01, 2020

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Please submit the following details using our online application form:

• Project description (approximately 300 words)
• Documentation (maximum of five images, and/or link to audio/video documentation)
• Description of technical requirements (please outline materials provided by the artist and materials required from the exhibiting venue)
• Artist biography (approximately 100 words)
• Please indicate if your work has a thematic, conceptual, or historical connection to Toronto, or if you have a biographic connection to the Greater Toronto Area
• Current CV

If you have questions about submitting your application please contact [email protected].

About Vector Festival
Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing experimental media art practice. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector Festival acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice. Vector Festival was founded in 2013 as the “Vector Game Art & New Media Festival” by an independent group of artists and curators: Skot Deeming, Clint Enns, Christine Kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger. In 2015 Vector Festival announced that longtime presenting partner, InterAccess, would be taking over responsibility for the festival as part of its regular programming.

About InterAccess
Founded in 1983, InterAccess is a non-profit gallery, educational facility, production studio, and festival dedicated to emerging practices in art and technology. Our programs support art forms that integrate technology, fostering and supporting the full cycle of art and artistic practice through education, production, and exhibition. InterAccess is regarded as a preeminent Canadian arts and technology centre.

For more information contact:
Festival Curators, Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger
[email protected]

Follow us for updates!
facebook.com/VectorFestivalTO
twitter.com/VectorFestival
instagram.com/interaccessto

LINK: VECTOR FESTIVAL

GAME ART: GAMEGIRLPOWER'S MUSCLE GIRLS (2019-)

Phenomenal, uncanny stuff from GameGirl Power: muscle fetish, femdom fandom, and virtual steroids like it's raining. She has been making short films of female muscle and strength fantasies since 2013. As she writes: "What started with mods of Street Fighter and others games has since become a real filmmaking effort." She originally dedicated her YouTube channel "to strong women in video games and art, hoping to demonstrate that there is beauty in physical strength, and that there is an alternative to portraying female characters as skinny dolls." Eventually, she began producing at least four videos per month on Patreon, working with other artists and developers; each production is "scored, edited, choreographed and in beautiful 4K UHD definition." What's not to love?

LINK: GameGirlPower (all images and videos (c) GameGirlPower).

GAME ART: JORDAN BARUCH'S MIDNIGHT RAINS (2019)

In Jordan Baruch's machinima, "a farmer, enticed by the appearance of a mysterious figure in his town, discovers his existence is arbitrarily criminalized by a militant policeman who chases him into poverty and isolation." Shot entirely with/in GTA V and edited with Premiere Pro, Midnight Rains was created by a New York-based screenwriter, filmmaker and video artist Jordan Baruch.

LINK: Jordan Baruch

GAME ART: HUGO ARCIER'S INLAND (2019)

Hugo Arcier, Inland, Audiovisual performance: live music, video in audio reactive 3D computer images, 2019 - Music: Annabelle Playe & Marc Siffert, music - video in 3D computer graphics with audio reactivity: Hugo Arcier

Passages, crossings and metamorphoses weave the odyssey of « inLAND | come back in broad day ».These universes are explored live as a 3D video game in which we wander. This exploration is carried out on site or remotely with Discord gamer tool. In these multiple spaces, perception is disturbed between reality, matter and appearance. Abstraction gives way to landscapes, echoes of the inner worlds that a narrator seems to unfold. The visions crumble, the image turns out to be an illusion. We then experience what can't be said or represented. (Hugo Arcier)

Hugo Arcier is a French digital artist - or, rather, “an artist in a digital world” - who uses 3D computer graphics in various ways: videos, prints and sculptures. Initially interested in producing special effects for feature films, he worked on several projects with such directors as Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. This practice has allowed him to gain a deep understanding of digital tools, in particular 3D graphic images. His artistic works have been exhibited at international festivals (Elektra, Videoformes, Némo), galleries (Magda Danysz, Plateforme Paris, etc.), art venues (New Museum, New Media Art Center of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Le Cube, Okayama Art Center, Palais de Tokyo, etc.), and contemporary art fairs (Slick, Variation)

LINK: Hugo Arcier

GAME ART: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S MAPS (2019)

A new machinima work by Eddie Lohmeyer:

Maps is an experimental machinima film that uses composited gamespaces to generate seductive forms of abstraction. Created through appropriated game footage of map walkthroughs, the film produces colorful swirling and gyrating game fragments by blending the dynamic motion of avatars as they traverse giant gameworlds. Here, color mixing each game overlaid upon the other creates vibrant rhythms of pixels that continuously explode and swallow themselves. These psychedelic sequences are accompanied by a warped recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4, F Minor, Op.36 resulting in a visual symphony; a synesthesia of fractured spaces with the changing pitches and echoes of orchestral movements. Following in the traditions of avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Tony Conrad, Maps explores the material contours of game engines and the 3D environments they render by transforming familiar gamespaces into a kaleidoscope of ever-changing polygons. (Eddie Lohmeyer)

Lohmeyer’s work explores the intersections among body and technology, particularly in how interactivity can open participants to novel sensory and perceptual experiences. Through installation, sculpture, and video these media interventions prompt a politics of the body that reconsider our habitual encounters with technologies through new avenues of play and engaging with unfamiliar and uncanny interfaces. These works upend and play with the media we have grown up around and have a nostalgic affinity for, often through intentionally deconstructive approaches: glitch, physical modifications to hardware, and assemblage. The bizarre and playful encounters with these strange media unveil the normal attitudes and perceptions of technologies that have become a mundane extension of our bodies, while also questioning the knowledge frameworks through which we perceive and sense the world via media artifacts. Lohmeyer is also an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Nicholson School of Communication and Media at the University of Central Florida. 

LINK: Eddie Lohmeyer

EVENT: GAMEPLAY. VIDEO GAME CULTURE (DECEMBER 19 2019 - MAY 3 2020, BARCELONA, SPAIN)

GAMEPLAY. Video Game Culture

19 December 2019 - 3 May 2020

Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona

Inauguration
18 December 2019 - 19.00

7.00 pm Audiovisual performance by Alba G. Corral & Tutu

 

Dates and hours
19 December 2019 - 3 May 2020
From Tuesday to Sunday, 11.00 - 20.00

Curated by Óliver Pérez Latorre, Jérôme Nguyen

Gameplay journeys to the origins of video games, analyses their language and highlights the impact they have had on popular digital culture and on art and society. The exhibition is designed as a space for recreation and reflection where visitors can play and (re)discover video game culture. Since their popularisation in the seventies and eighties, video games have developed as an expressive and entertainment medium and now occupy a central space in our imaginary to the point that, today, it is impossible to understand contemporary society and culture without relating them with video gaming.

Gameplay takes a look at the history of the medium, video game language, experimentation and artistic innovation, and critical and political video games.vThe exhibition also raises the issue of the increasing gamification of society: from mobile games to YouTubers and electronic sports (esports) to so-called serious games, educational video games with applications that go beyond entertainment. With 28 game points, from the first arcade and historic computer games to the new immersive options, Gameplay is devised as an exhibition where visitors can play and, at the same time, understand and enjoy video game culture from a critical viewpoint. The show pays particular attention to Catalan production, especially pioneering works, recent indie creations and local artists, and university projects.

Gameplay. Video Game Culture is an extended adaptation of Gameplay. The Next Level, designed by and first presented at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

LINK: GAMEPLAY

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