GAMESCENES

EVENT: NATURE NUMÉRIQUE (MAY 21 - JUNE 5 2025, LA TOUR DE PEILZ, SWITZERLAND)

Pascal Greco

Nature Numérique: Photographier le jeu vidéo par Pascal Greco

May 21 - June 5 2025

Musée Suisse du Jeu
Rue du Château 11
1814 La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland

(English below)

Dans les années 1990, les mondes numériques ont souvent été pensés comme dissociés du réel : d’un côté, la réalité, le tangible. De l’autre, le virtuel, vu comme un simple divertissement, sans impact écologique ou politique. Face à la prolifération d’images générées par intelligence artificielle, de la remise en question des valeurs partagées qui permettent de faire société, de l’exploitation de nos échanges par le capitalisme de plateforme, force est de constater que les images « virtuelles » sont devenues politiques. Confronté à une culture visuelle générique, il devient crucial de repenser notre rapport aux images. Le travail de Pascal Greco s’inscrit dans cette perspective, en déplaçant la question du réalisme vers celle du sensible. À travers la photographie in-game, il interroge la tension entre réel et virtuel, questionnant la culture visuelle contemporaine et notre capacité d’action. Envisageant l’humain comme interface sensible, son travail refuse une vision technologique des images et privilégie l’expérience subjective : en photographiant des paysages de jeux vidéo, il questionne la frontière entre le réel et le virtuel et propose de renouer avec une écologie de l’attention et du sensible, condition essentielle pour repenser notre rapport au monde.

---

In the 1990s, digital worlds were often conceived as separate from reality: on one side, the tangible world; on the other, the virtual, regarded as mere entertainment, devoid of ecological or political consequence. Today, confronted with the proliferation of AI-generated imagery, the erosion of shared social values, and the commodification of our interactions by platform capitalism, it is clear that so-called “virtual” images have become political. In the face of an increasingly generic visual culture, it is vital to reconsider our relationship to images. Pascal Greco’s work responds to this imperative by shifting the focus from realism to sensibility. Through in-game photography, he explores the tension between the real and the virtual, interrogating contemporary visual culture and our capacity for agency within it. Conceiving the human as a sensitive interface, his work rejects a purely technological understanding of images and instead foregrounds subjective experience. By photographing video game landscapes, Greco probes the boundary between reality and simulation, advocating for a renewed ecology of attention and sensibility—an essential condition for rethinking our relationship to the world.

Pascal Greco is a Swiss-Italian self-taught filmmaker and photographer whose work often explores the interplay between architecture and landscape. His projects have been exhibited internationally, reflecting a deep engagement with both urban environments and natural settings. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Greco innovatively turned to video games as a medium for artistic exploration. Unable to travel to Iceland for a photography project, he immersed himself in the virtual landscapes of Death Stranding, a game renowned for its expansive, Iceland-like terrains. Utilizing the game's photo mode, Greco captured images that emulate traditional photography, challenging the distinctions between virtual and real-world imagery. This endeavor culminated in his photobook Place(s), which presents these in-game photographs in a Polaroid format, prompting discussions about the evolving nature of photography in digital realms.

LINK: Nature Numérique

LINK: Pascal Greco

EVENT: TOTAL REFUSAL’S SONS AND TRUE SONS (MAY 17 2025, BERLIN)

Total Refusal
Sons and True Sons

Sat 17.5.2025, 19:00 / HAU2

Hallesches Ufer 34, 10963 Berlin, Germany

Part of “A MAZE. / Berlin 2025 – 14th International Games and Playful Media Festival”
Part of “IETM Berlin Plenary Meeting 2025”

press release

In Sons and True Sons, the Viennese media guerrilla group Total Refusal examines the links between toxic masculinity, gaming culture and the 2021 US Capitol storming. In a live gaming lecture, they scrutinise the parallels between the video game Tom Clancy's: The Division 2 (2016) and real-life extremist movements – and highlight the dangers of hyper-masculine self-empowerment. Drawing upon their research into the connection between the game world and the digital manosphere, media guerrilla Total Refusal explores the entanglements of toxic masculinity, meritocracy, and the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. Sons and True Sons illuminates how the narrative of the video game Tom Clancy’s: The Division 2 (2016) inadvertently anticipated the events on January 6, 2021, and the strategic engagement of Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon with cis male gamers. Briefly about the game: In 2010s Washington, D.C., shaken by a smallpox pandemic and chaos, players must free the city from rival groups and restore order. The parallels between the depiction of the civilian militia (True Sons) taking control over the digital seat of Congress in the game and the advent of paramilitary crypto fascist groups in 2021 are indeed remarkable. Inspired by these uncanny similarities, the live gaming lecture overwrites the game version of the Capitol storm, unmasking the narrative decay of liberal democracy and the hyper-masculinist self-empowerment inside and outside of gaming spaces. With the live gaming lecture Sons and True Sons, HAU is represented for the second time at A MAZE. / Berlin, the international festival and platform for independent and arthouse games.                           

Production: Donaufestivals Krems 2024 in cooperation with STRP Festival Eindhoven 2024. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses. Supported by: A MAZE.          

LINK: Sons and True Sons

Read more

EVENT: FIRAS SHEHADEH (MAY 9—22 2025, ONLINE)

The Way of the Future

Single-channel UHD video (color), 2-channel sound, 8’ 02”, 2025, Palestine

created by Firas Shehadeh

May 9-22 2025

vral.org

 

Set against the hauntingly desolate backdrop of The Last of Us video game, The Way of the Future follows a lone figure traversing a decayed territory after a long war, where echoes of resistance and displacement reverberate through the hollow ruins. The sound design, deeply rooted in the auditory textures of the attacked country — prayers and drones — brings a dislocated yet familiar reality. As the protagonist moves through these fragmented spaces, their journey becomes an allegory for the ongoing struggle: a fight not only for physical territory but for the survival of identity, memory, and visibility. Blurring the lines between the physical and media landscapes, the film explores a future where the cause transcends borders and occupies the global consciousness, a spectral nation fighting to reclaim existence in a political world order that continuously erases them.

Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist and researcher exploring issues of identity, meaning, and aesthetics in the digital age. His interdisciplinary practice engages with post-colonial effects, technology, and history through the lens of worldbuilding and internet culture. Shehadeh holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His education also includes studies in conceptual art, video, and architecture in Vienna, Barcelona, and Amman. Investigating topics like colonial legacies, memory, and belonging, Shehadeh creates speculative narratives that reveal unseen structures and realities. His research-focused practice utilizes and subverts the visual languages of new media, examining how technology transforms society’s relationship with knowledge and power. His work, which has been exhibited internationally, offers a critical perspective on the role of the internet and digital imaging in shaping contemporary identities, histories, and ways of world-making.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: AGAINST THE WILL, AGAINST STAYING STILL (MAY 15-18 2025, ATHENS)

 

 

Against the Will, Against Staying Still

Esto Association

24 Zaimi str. 10683

Athens Greece

May 15 - 18 2025

curated by Babak Ahteshamipour 

featuring Erifili Doukeli, Matthew D. Gantt, Berenike Gregoor, Nichole Shinn, Captain Stavros, and Pauvre Terre 

 

Against the Will, Against Staying Still is a group exhibition curated by Babak Ahteshamipour that frames urgency as both a creative method and a survival tactic in response to a world dominated by crises, algorithmic optimisation, and accelerated media environments. The participating artists — Erifili Doukeli, Matthew D. Gantt, Berenike Gregoor, Nichole Shinn, Captain Stavros, and Pauvre Terre — treat artmaking as a form of rapid response, deploying improvisation, upcycling, and fictional tools to navigate systems of control, including the figure of the curator cast here as a kind of authoritarian game master.

Set within the deliberately austere space of Esto Association — reminiscent of Foucault’s disciplinary institutions — the exhibition interrogates how aesthetic and procedural constraints mimic broader societal pressures: surveillance, self-optimisation, and commodified identity shifts. Drawing on thinkers such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Geert Lovink, Byung-Chul Han, and Nick Dyer-Witheford, the show critiques the burnout-inducing imperatives of late capitalism, while also exploring how immediacy, play, and glitch can serve as tactics for resistance.

Rather than reject urgency as debilitating, the exhibition proposes it as a weapon, capable of destabilising hyper-curated, algorithmic regimes of truth and meaning. It poses a central question: how might artists turn the logic of the system against itself, transforming gameplay into a form of subversive agency?

As Babak write, "the process of the show has been entirely gamified".

There'll be a game by Matthew D. Gantt as well.

LINK:  Against the Will, Against Staying Still 

LINK: Babak Ahteshamipour

OPEN CALL FOR DIGITAL ART COMMISSIONS: PEREZ ART MUSEUM, FLORIDA (DEADLINE: JUNE 30 2025)

press release

(MIAMI, FL — April 30, 2025) — Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is thrilled to announce its inaugural open call for digital art commissions from the crossroads of the Americas. The museum’s first-of-its-kind program offers financial support to produce experimental digital artwork across South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora. Selected artists may be awarded between $1,000–$15,000 during an estimated 12-month period, expanding and advancing the museum’s presentation, study, and interpretation of international contemporary digital art.

The open call for digital art commissions launches on April 30, 2025. The application deadline is June 30, 2025, at 11:59pm PST.

The open call fosters the creation of innovative digital artworks that reflect PAMM's unique position at the crossroads of the Americas, bolstering artistic representation and reproduction within these regions. The open call aims to expand scholarship and engagement with digital art, advancing the museum’s mission to lead in the presentation, study, and interpretation of international contemporary digital art.

“This open call seeks to bolster new media practices across PAMM’s purview and reroute the history of digital art beyond what is typically shown in museums and galleries,” said Jay Mollica, PAMM senior director of digital engagement. "The economic, artistic, and scholarship opportunities built into the open call are vital for our digital arts ecosystem to thrive across South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora,” said Lauren Monzón, program manager of digital engagement.

Applicants can submit proposals for original projects in any production phase, including pre- to post-production. Successful digital art proposals will use the internet and digital processes to conceptually and practically shape their projects, including many disciplines spanning video art, film, augmented reality, net art, 3-D sculpture, video games, virtual reality, generative art, as well as forms yet to be discovered.

There is no fee for the museum’s open call for digital art commissions. Proposals must be submitted electronically through PAMM’s application portal here.

Learn more about the open call, applicant eligibility, evaluation criteria, and how to apply by clicking here.

EVENT: SEQUENCEBREAK// (MARCH 20 - JUNE 28 2025, ROCHESTER)

Screenshot from Anthology of the Killer (2024) by Stephen Gillmurphy

 

SEQUENCEBREAK//

March 20 - June 28 2025

Curated by Nilson Carroll

Visual Studies Workshop

36 King Street

Rochester, New York 14608

 

From March 20 to June 28, 2025, the Visual Studies Workshop presents SEQUENCEBREAK//, a wide-ranging, genre-subverting arcade of experimental games and digital artworks. This exhibition challenges commercial video game aesthetics and logic, offering a critical lens on the culture of play through works that collapse boundaries between software and art, interaction and observation, story and glitch.

Curated by VSW Assistant Curator Nilson Carroll, SEQUENCEBREAK// is not a nostalgic throwback to coin-op cabinets, but a radical reconfiguration of what an arcade, and a game, can be. It includes work by Stephen Gillmurphy (known online as thecatamites), Nathalie Lawhead, Philip Mallory Jones, Cassie McQuater, and the artist collective Heart Street (Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, and John Bruneau).

The exhibition title refers to the act of “sequence breaking”, a gaming term for disrupting a game's intended narrative or progression. Here, it becomes metaphor: each artist breaks the expected sequences of design, distribution, and interaction, revealing overlooked dynamics within digital culture.

Among the highlights is Out for Delivery, a first-person “playable documentary” by Heart Street. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work follows a Chinese food delivery worker navigating the surreal, sometimes threatening environments of lockdown-era Beijing. Combining live-action 3D footage and game mechanics, the piece probes global labour politics and surveillance culture. It has already earned critical acclaim, including Indiecade’s Impact Award and a BAFTA for Immersive Art.

Irish game maker Stephen Gillmurphy’s Anthology of the Killer twists the murder mystery genre into something alien and cartoonishly grotesque, using surreal humour and pixelated dream logic to disrupt narrative cohesion. Known for creating dozens of freeware games over the past two decades, Gillmurphy remains a central figure in the DIY games scene.

Nathalie Lawhead, a longtime advocate for open-source tools and experimental storytelling, presents BlueSuburbia, a hallucinatory interactive world that expands upon their legacy of net art and zine-making. Their work is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s game collection and Rhizome’s ArtBase, and often critiques systems of control through absurdity and digital bricolage.

Philip Mallory Jones’ Time Machine: Bronzeville projects a speculative 3D reanimation of 1940s Chicago, chronicling Black life through immersive archives. With a career spanning over 50 years in media arts, Jones blends scholarship, historical preservation, and digital art in ways that make history tactile and haunting.

Cassie McQuater’s Black Room reclaims feminine iconography and retro aesthetics to craft a fragmented, contemplative space. McQuater’s cyberfeminist practice mines internet ephemera, turning visual debris into critique. Her past work has appeared at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Rhizome, and indie gaming festivals globally.

In addition to the exhibition, SEQUENCEBREAK// features an active public programme that includes artist talks, walkthroughs, and outdoor workshops, all of which extend the ethos of collective experimentation. Events include an opening party (March 20), a conversation with Philip Mallory Jones (March 27), a live stream with Nathalie Lawhead (May 8), and a final celebratory gathering (June 26). Workshops like “Coding in the Park” on June 14 invite participants to break and remake code as a shared creative act.

Backed by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the William & Sheila Konar Foundation, SEQUENCEBREAK// asserts itself not only as an exhibition but as a platform, a call to rethink the conditions under which games are made, played, and valued.

In a moment when game culture feels increasingly corporatised and censored, SEQUENCEBREAK// reminds us that play remains political, porous, and profoundly strange.

LINK: SEQUENCEBREAK// (thank you, Nilson!)

EVENT: STAIRWAY TO MELON: VIDEO WORKS BY VIKTOR TIMOFEEV (MAY 27 2025, NEW YORK)

Stairway To Melon: Video Works by Viktor Timofeev

May 27, 2025, 7pm

e-flux Screening Room

172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

press release

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, May 27 at 7pm for Stairway To Melon, a screening of works by Viktor Timofeev, followed by a conversation with artist and filmmaker Ericka Beckman.

“Stairway To Melon” presents six works by Viktor Timofeev created between 2015 and 2024, each exploring the poetics and structures of rule-based systems. Spanning cinematic works made in game engines, experimental alphabets, performative simulations, and collaborative drawing sessions, the program traces a throughline in Timofeev’s practice: a sustained interest in how does functioning of systems—linguistic, algorithmic, or behavioral—impacts one’s agency and govern expression.

Rather than reinforcing order or imposing clarity, systems in Timofeev’s work are open to uncertainty, generating drift and variation. Game environments become sites of misdirection or ritual repetition: alphabets reconfigure into abstract languages, artificial agents follow logics based on improvisation. Across Timofeev’s films and videos, meaning does not arrive fully formed—it flickers, stutters, and reorganizes itself in real time. Through this approach, Timofeev invites viewers into speculative worlds where structure and chance remain in constant tension offering a view not of resolved narratives, but of dynamic, generative conditions for thought and perception.

Following the screening, Timofeev will be joined by Ericka Beckman to discuss cinematic worldmaking, generative aesthetics, and abstraction as a method of reconfiguring systems of meaning.

Films

Alice, Bob, Carol and David (2024, 22 minutes)
A short film created in a game engine blending game mechanics, chance operations, and choreographic loops to explore interdependent character dynamics. Alice, Bob, Carol and David by Viktor Timofeev is an interdisciplinary work combining film, gaming, and performance into a unique choreographic system. Using the Unity game engine, the installation presents four characters—named after cryptographic placeholders—engaged in a loop of improvised, interdependent movements. Inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s generative scores from the 1960s, their repetitive, everyday actions synthesise chance and structure, reflecting control, autonomy, and emotional resonance.

Continuum (2017, 8 minutes, black and white, sound)
Continuum was shot within a digital environment made with the Unity game engine. This was Timofeev’s first attempt at making a cinematic work using this process. The video cuts between first-person perspectives of two groups of entities that occupy a desert-like landscape—a group of bugs that live on the ground and a swarm of drones that fly around them. The entities act out their interdependent relationship as they observe, pursue, and escape each other in what is meant to feel like a tense and ritualistic, endless loop, all without coming into proximity or contact. The first-person view serves as the common, overlapping shot between both sets of characters in the video to emphasize its basic empathic potential, allowing viewers to “occupy” both entities’ positions.

Proxyah (2015, 8 minutes, color, sound)
Proxyah is a collage-based game originally made for a site-specific installation at kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga in 2015, where it was played by touching an egg-shaped joystick. The basic premise of the game is a struggle to simply exit a room, made difficult by various obstacles that interfere with the player’s agency: a two-dimensional snake game in the main field of view, random collage-based cuts to another world, reconfiguration of assigned controls, and more. The game was developed during a period of chronic physical pain. Game engines became a means of engaging rule-making as an artistic strategy, and games, as understood here, served as a medium for working with agency itself.

Artificial Life and Death (2020, 3 minutes, black and white, sound)
Video collaboration with Jaakko Pallasvuo, music by Viktor Timofeev.
The video is a timelapse of a collaborative online drawing made with Jaakko Pallasvuo. During the COVID pandemic, while based in New York and Helsinki respectively, the two artists began exploring how to continue collaborating across distance. Using newly emerging remote-work brainstorming platforms, they would speak and draw together, likening the process to doodling during telephone conversations. Timofeev began recording these sessions, eventually editing a few of them to a track from his 2020 EP Exocursion, released by Futura Resistenza in Brussels. The result became the music video for the track.

Hexbugs (2016, 4 minutes, color, sound)
A studio documentation of Timofeev’s experiments with making soft boundaries for electronic toy bugs that were featured in an exhibition at Cordova project space in Vienna. The bugs follow a simple rule: they move forward until they hit a wall, at which point they turn left or right. The artist played with making “soft” walls that would confuse this rule set, then placed multiple bugs into an enclosed system and recorded the results. The process led to a projection of personality and narrative onto the bugs’ interactions.

Chat (2021, 4 minutes, color, sound)
Chat was part of an exhibition at Interstate Projects, NY (2021). Originally part of a three-channel installation that included an invented writing system—an alphabet based in time—this version is a single-channel edit. The alphabet is generative: it takes the standard pool of English letters and systematically abstracts them by cutting and rearranging their parts. The resulting twenty-six abstracted letters form an animated key. A corresponding text is continuously updated to reflect these permutations. The process reorients familiar components and mutates them to appear foreign, recalling fictional languages and asemic writing systems. The result is a continuous defamiliarization of the alphabet from itself—an algorithmic language without a national identity.

LINK: Stairway To Melon

LINK: Viktor Timofeev

EVENT: DOUGLAS DIXON-BARKER (APRIL 25—MAY 8 2025, ONLINE)

untitled (archive)

16mm, color, 3’, 2024, United Kingdom

created by Douglas Dixon-Barker

vral.org

 

untitled (archive) is a machinima sui generis that transposes the residual memory of a videogame into the granular materiality of 16mm film. Framed as “an imperfect archive”, the work embraces degradation not as failure but as structure, treating loss as a generative condition. In collapsing the multitelic potential of the digital into the fixed duration of celluloid, Douglas Dixon-Barker offers a quietly radical proposition: that the act of translation itself might constitute a viable archival gesture, even — especially? — when it fails to preserve the full breadth of experience.

Douglas Dixon-Barker is an artist and filmmaker currently living between Leeds and Barcelona. Drawing on the history of avant-garde and structuralist filmmaking, their work reframes genre and digital environments through unstable formats, hybrid temporalities, and the material conditions of visual systems. Their filmography includes In Your Arms (2020), Ultimate Crush (2019), untitled (camera roll) (2017), Summer (2014) (2016), For Life (2015), and 「 A M V 」 (2014–2015). They also directed In a Hopeless Place (2013) and contributed to s01e03 (2020). Dixon-Barker is affiliated with Kinet, a virtual studio dedicated to avant-garde cinema.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: MANY GHOSTS, MANY SHELLS (MAY 1 - 31 2025, LONDON)

Many Ghosts, Many Shells

David Blandy and Petra Szemán; John Powell-Jones; Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

 

Curated by Rebecca Edwards

Seventeen

1st – 31st May 2025
PV 1st May 6pm

270-276 Kingsland RoadLondonE8 4DG

t. +44(0) 207 249 7789

press release

Many Ghosts, Many Shells debuts new collaborative work by Petra Szemán and David Blandy, in parallel with other artists working in the realms of identity and selfhood, reality and simulation. Each artist uses radical gameplay practices to ask where the self ends and the character begins, and what gets left behind. Also featuring works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and John Powell-Jones, Many Ghosts, Many Shells presents gaming experiences as devices for establishing surrogate modes of existence, a new world through new selves.

When identities are increasingly fragmented across digital landscapes, these artists question how we reconcile our dispersed selves within today’s  techno-political milieu. By bridging gaps between player and world, character and creator, the works in the exhibition challenge the very nature of agency and identity in a hyper-connected age where Away From Keyboard is never quite separate from Meatspace. Alter egos are often used to describe a concealed or contrasting side of a person’s personality, but in the case of playable characters or in the case of this exhibition, these alter egos become imbued with a sense of possibility – figures existing in a state of perpetual becoming, never fully whole but never entirely detached. Breaching a biographical narrative, the works in the exhibition question nostalgia, self-construction, and the processes of negotiating trauma and lived experiences that often percolate unsaid.

Sharing imaginaries across different practices, cultures and generations allows for a co-creation of richer, more inclusive visions, grounded in diverse experiences, knowledge systems, and values. In their game Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1 Blandy and Szeman share layered references to games of their youth, nostalgic artefacts and anime inspirations in a pixelated landscape of memory. Lucid game structures, immersive storytelling, and nonlinear narratives allow the works to invite a navigation into speculative futures and alternate pathways of existence. For Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley this means confronting histories of violence and mutilation through the uncovering of familial ties and oral testimony, asking questions of accountability and acceptance; while John Powell-Jones’ Web Wide World animated choose-your-own-adventure game and related ephemera encourages encounters with strange beings as we seek to understand the new universe of Durt where the protagonist Atamur has awoken void of a protective skin layer. From interrogating power and erasure in digital archives, to uncovering shared imaginaries that transcend cultures and generations, the exhibition positions gameplay as a radical tool for rethinking action in embodied engagement.

Featured works:

Petra Szemán and David Blandy, Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1, 2025
John Powell-Jones, Web Wide World, 2021
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, I’m Not Doing This For The Likes, 2022

David Blandy is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives; Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence,  through visual poetry and immersive play.  https://davidblandy.co.uk/

Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, new forms of cultural production and artistic development, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. https://rebeccaedwards.xyz/

John Powell Jones is an artist whose work includes 3D and 2D animations, life-size characters. comic books, ceramics and wall hangings. He takes inspiration from European folklore, horror and science fiction. https://www.johnpowell-jones.co.uk/

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin and London-based artist. They received an BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works in animation, sound, performance and video game development. Their practice focuses on combining lived experience with fiction to archive Black Trans existence and challenge the audience’s moral standing. https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/

Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Their practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line separating real and fictional, and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from thinking of the cyberspace as a radically ’other’ realm, Petra hopes to walk the line situated between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons.  https://www.petraszeman.com/

LINK: Many Ghosts, Many Shells

EVENT: GAMEPLAY. PLAYING FOR IMPACT (APRIL 17 - NOVEMBER 16 2025, VILNIUS, LITHUANIA)

Gameplay. Playing for Impact

curated by Agnė Kuprytė, Laura Schmidtù

MO Museum

Pylimo str. 17, Vilnius, LT-01141

press release

The fact that digital games have developed into a leading medium is nothing new. The social and aesthetic significance of this interactive and multimedia form can no longer be overlooked. 

Over 60 years have passed since the emergence of digital games and much has changed. Digital games have freed themselves from their origins as laboratory experiments and toys, becoming the defining medium of digital society. Positioned between pop culture, entertainment, and art, games now permeate every aspect of modern life. They shape how we learn, socialize, and perceive reality. Video games have increasingly attracted talented artists and independent developers who push boundaries and question established conventions in digital games and design, exploring unconventional subjects, aesthetics, and game mechanics.

By combining traditional art forms – graphics, film, animation, music, sculpture, and literature – digital games offer artists an unprecedented opportunity to communicate with audiences and have become a medium of artistic expression. “GamePlay – Playing for Impact” invites you to play, reflect, and learn more about the multifaceted forms that video games can take. 

This exhibition is a product of a collaboration with the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany and is an adaptation of their acclaimed gaming exhibition “zkm_gameplay. the next level”. This exhibition at MO Museum focuses on three key areas: games that push creative and aesthetic boundaries, games that address current social and political issues, and games that foster empathy through personal narratives.

MO Museum, a personal initiative of Lithuanian scientists and philanthropists Danguolė and Viktoras Butkus, functioned as an art museum without walls for close to ten years. The collection of around 6 000 modern and contemporary pieces contains major Lithuanian artworks from the 1960s to this day.

From October 18th, 2018 MO has become an excellent place to spend free time. MO invites visitors to attend exhibitions, film screenings, educational activities, concerts and events geared to all age groups. One of MO’s goals is to create an active community of MOdernists who support the idea of MO and want to help us create a new kind of museum – together!

LINK: Gameplay. Playing for Impact