GAMESCENES

EVENT: OPENING OF THE REAL VIRTUAL DIGAREC IN-GAME PHOTO GALLERY (JULY 16 2020, ONLINE)

Press release:

Opening of the real virtual DIGAREC In-Game Photo Gallery (Online Event)

Photo: Sebastian Moring, 2016 (physical gallery, via Twitter)

July 16, 2020, 6 pm CET in Mozilla Hubs (best access via Firefox / Chrome, no login required) and on Twitch

We have the pleasure of inviting you to the opening of the real virtual DIGAREC In-Game Photo Gallery which shows a number of in-game photographical works which were produced by students of European Media Studies – a joint program of University of Potsdam and University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The exhibition presents the results of their practical explorations of the medium of in-game photography as participants of three university seminars on the subject focusing on different topics: “Medial Environments, Milieus and Landscapes” (class of 2016), “Machines_ _Ethics; _Poetry; _Politics; _Poetics” (class of 2018), “Media Reflexivity” (class of 2019/20). This exhibition exists only online and makes use of the virtual meeting tool Mozilla Hubs. It is designed by Lars Pinkwart and curated by Sebastian Möring.

The opening starts with a brief reception and an introduction after which there will be a guided tour through the gallery. If you join through Hubs you will then be able to explore the virtual gallery space on your own and even start a conversation with other exhibition visitors over microphone.

Artworks by:

Aaron Richmond, Alexandra Günther, Barış Aydınlı, Celine Pilch, Christine Laqua, Daniel Latzel, David Gatidis, Dulguun Shirchinbal, Elise Kunze, Emily Hadrich, Fabian Brandtner, Finn Wittforth, Friederike Sophie Schulz, Hendrik Fischer, Jasmin Lehmann, Karoline Mushak, Laura Willikonsky, Lennart Mackies, Lisa Hein, Luzie Müller, Marian Billing, Marie-Lena Höftmann, Maurice Matthieu, Nadja Scherfy, Oliver Thurau, Philipp Röbke, Pia Zdila, Sandra Buttress, Sarah Töteberg, Stefanie Löbel, Till Schöneich, Ugur Yildirim.

In-game photography has been a research focus of DIGAREC (Digital Games Research Center at the University of Potsdam) since 2016: We have been researching the subject in the context of international workshops and university seminars. In recent years the scholarly, artistic, as well the economic interest in in-game photography has been on a constant rise. More and more academic literature gets published, exhibitions are being held in prominent museums such as the Centre George Pompidou, and ever more games come equipped with a photo-mode by default. In-game photography“describes a multitude of practices and technologies in which photography and video games Interact“ and it contains diverse practices such as „placing a DSLR in front of the unfolding events on the screen, using a video game's photo mode to take a picture, or playing a game where the use of the camera is simulated“ (Möring & de Mutiis 2019:70).

How to participate?

Option a: Participate with your avatar which you can control on your own (limited to 30 places). For this please sign up here: https://forms.gle/EaxssgbHgAGiRwhz6. We will provide the link a couple of hours before the event.

Option b: Participate as a viewer of our live stream on https://twitch.tv/digarec.

GAME ART: KIM HEECHEON'S SLEIGH RIDE CHILL (2016)

Kim Heecheon, Sleigh Ride Chill, single channel video, 17' 27", 2016

In the 2016 single channel video Sleigh Ride Chill, Kim Heecheon combines three different aesthetics and themes a live-streaming session of a video game play, an online suicide club and a cautionary tale of a leaked sex tape, which come to represent the subject in a digital world in South Korea: decentered, disembodied, and disarticulated through video gaming, face swapping, virtual reality. Sleigh Ride Chill features both filmed and found footage with CGI to comment upon the soulless state of mankind in contemporary Seoul where losing a smartphone means losing everything. 

Born in 1989, Kim Heecheon is a Korean Asian Modern & Contemporary artist who studied architecture. His work was featured in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Serpentine Gallery and the Art Sonje Center. 

LINK: Kim Heecheon

GAME ART: TOM DAVIES VALLS' VIN DIESEL’S ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO BARCELONA (2020)

Inspired by Operation JaneWalk by Leonhard Müllner and Robin Klengel (a tour of New York through its representation in the videogame The Division 2), Vin Diesel’s Alternative Guide To Barcelona is a video essay providing an accurate account of the history and culture of the Spanish city through the eyes of a virtual Vin Diesel. His avatar from the 2009 video game Wheelman (Vin Diesel) frames the entire movie, which culminates with a powerful meditation on the City's inexorable gentrification process. Clocking at around 30 minutes, Vin Diesel’s Alternative Guide To Barcelona comprises video game footage, archive footage from a variety of sources, and video shot by the artist. The time-lapse showing the rise and rise of Barcelona is truly breathtaking: it looks like something out of SimCity or Cities: Skylines. As Tom Davies writes,

Vin Diesel is re-imagined as a knowledgeable local guide, his soft gravely voice leading us through turbulences past and present. The narration, just like the video, is a composite of both literary and historical accounts documenting the huge transformations that have grown to characterize the city, as well as incorporating my perspective as someone who was born here and has experienced it’s most recent history myself. 

Tom Davies is a media-tinkerer from Barcelona, Spain. He studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at University of Barcelona. He’s interested in images as vessels of information and mystery. Today, he thinks the purpose of art, perhaps, is to trick people into listening to each other.

LINK: Tom Davies Valls

EVENT: GAMEPLAY. VIDEO GAME CULTURE (DECEMBER 19 2019 - AUGUST 30 2020, BARCELONA, SPAIN)

If you have not had the chance to check out GAME PLAY VIDEO GAME CULTURE, you have until August 30. This excellent exhibition organized by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain (an extended adaptation of Gameplay. The Next Level, designed by and first presented at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe) and curated by Jérôme Nguyen and Óliver Pérez Latorre is accompanied by an array of events, workshops, videos, and conversations round the notion of games, art, politics, and identity. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the new version of the exhibition GAMEPLAY replaced the in situ interactives with original audiovisual contents which can be accessed online. The interactive part of the project, the selection of games, new activities, debates and workshops can be found here.

The available online games include:

• Ambush. Developed by Tecfri | Published by Nippon Amuse |1983
• La pulga.Developed by Paco Suárez i Paco Portalo |Published by Indescomp / Investrónica | 1983
• September 12th. Developed by Gonzalo Frasca i Sof.a Battegazzore | Published by Powerful Robot Games| 2010
• Passage. Developed by Jason Rohrer | 2007
• Sísif (Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment). Developed by Pippin Barr | 2011
• Limbo. Developed by Playdead | Publicació: Playdead | 2010 (demostración gratuíta)
• Crayon Physics Deluxe.Developed by Petri Purho | 2009
• Phone Story Developed by Paolo Pedercini |Published by Molleindustria | 2011
• DYS4IA. Developed by Anna Anthropy | 2012
• Unmanned. Developed by Molleindustria (Jim Munroe) | Published by Molleindustria | 2012

Photo by Marti Berenguer, (c) CCCB, 2019

Although some events did raise some eyebrows - like the involvement of the Emperor of Midcult himself, Alessandro Baricco - most are terrific, like this conversation between Mary Flanagan and José Louis de Vicente, titled "New Perspectives on Digital Leisure"

 

Also check out the inevitable film/game connection here.

LINK: GAMEPLAY

GAME ART: BARDUU'S PHOTO TUTORIALS FOR THE LAST OF US PART II (2020)

Petri Levälahti aka @Berduu is making super short photo mode tutorials for The Last of Us Part II on Twitter. Check'em out!

 

 

Petri Levalhati currently works at EA DICE as a Screenshot Capture Artist.

 

You may remember his brilliant machinima that we covered a few years ago. 

 

LINK: Petri Levälahti aka @Berduu (Thanks to Pietro Righi Riva for the heads up)

 

GAME ART: ROBERT ROBINSON'S SEATTLE (2020)

The compare-and-contrast reality vs simulacra trope is one of the most popular in game photography and The Last of Us Part II does not disappoint. Robert Robinson is remapping Seattle by juxtaposing photographs from the real thing and the game. The result looks, oddly, like an episode of Dark.

Check out the full album here.

RESOURCE: FRIEZE JULY/AUGUST 2020

The July/August 2020 issue of Frieze features a series on articles on play and games, including but not limited to: Darran Anderson's reverie about escaping into the classic arcade game Street Fighter II (1991) during the Troubles in Northern Ireland; Orit Gat on sports writing as a visual experience not dissimilar to writing about art (click here to read the full article); Simon Denny and Joanna Pope update the world’s first socialist board game Class Struggle (1978); Jennifer Kabat takes a close look at Lynn Hershman Leeson’s use of avatars and antibodies; and Azby Brown asks: what went wrong for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Stadium?

Unmissable. 

LINK: Frieze

RESOURCE: ART JOURNAL, SUMMER 2020

The Summer 2020 issue of Art Journal is now available in print and online and it features an outstanding selection of essays and articles on the relationship between art and video games, including contributions from guest editor Soraya Murray, Tracy Fullerton, Dorothy R. Santos, Eugénie Shinkle, Alenda Y. Chang, Hava Aldouby, and COLL.EO, i.e. Colleen Flaherty and Matteo Bittanti, with a project titled The Long Road of Silicon.

The cover cover features Walden Pond, from Walden, a game (USC Game Innovation Lab, 2017), video game, designed by Tracy Fullerton (screenshot by Tracy Fullerton).

The digital version is free to explore through September 30th.

EVENT: VRAL #5_THOMAS HAWRANKE (JULY 3 - JULY 16 2020, ONLINE)

SHADOWS:ULTRA

Digital video, color, sound, 9’ 30”, 2019

July 3 - July 16 2020

Introduced by Luca Miranda

Shadows:ULTRA shows overlapping animal shadows within the Dunia game engine, a software fork of CryEngine designed by Kirmaan Aboobaker while working at Crytek. Thomas Hawranke filmed the individual images from the monitor with a Kodak Tri-X 7266 eight millimeter camera, and subsequently exposed, cut, and again digitized the film material. The limited resolution of the shadow maps within the game engine is negated by the grain of the film material. The soundtrack was created by assembling various field recordings created in the 1930s by Ludwig Koch, a musician and animal voice collector.

Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern in his practice is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and is currently finishing his practice-based PhD at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of Susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the Next Level Festival in Essen and the Weltkunstzimmer in Düsseldorf. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: THE ENDLESS FOREST, AURIEA HARVEY & MICHAËL SAMYN (JUNE 23 – JULY 7, 2020)

Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, still from The Endless Forest, online multiplayer game, 2005/2020-ongoing.

bitforms gallery x Small Data Industries presents:
The Endless Forest, Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn
Streaming online June 23–July 7, 2020
bitforms.art/stream
 
bitforms gallery is proud to present The Endless Forest by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn as the second work in a series of streaming generative artworks, presented in collaboration with Small Data Industries. The Endless Forest is an online multiplayer game where players interact as deer in a magical forest. There are no specific goals to achieve or rules to follow in the forest—players are encouraged to engage with other deer and explore and find magic in the wilderness. Access to this work has been offered online as a free download since 2005, given that users have a Windows machine and a fast 3D videocard. However, this unique collaboration with Small Data Industries allows viewers to access The Endless Forest in a live format without a Windows machine or downloadable files. In this configuration, the artwork is self-playing—referenced as Deer Observation Mode by the artists—and oscillates between a peacefully sleeping deer to variable glimpses of the lush forest and social interactions with other players (deer). (BITFORMS)

Auriea Harvey is co-founder of Tale of Tales. Net art pioneers, she and Michael Samyn have been creating award winning independent games and digital artworks together for the past twenty years. From multiplayer deer screensaver The Endless Forest to IGF Nuovo prize winning sex game Luxuria Superbia to the extreme politics of Sunset to technicolor horror fairy tale The Path; Auriea has designed, modeled, and experimented with the medium of polygons inside game engines. Her philosophy is to do whatever it takes, whatever she can, to get across a concept. Using digital and analog techniques, drawing from diverse cultural references, she creates works of subtle (and not so subtle) expression. Her emphasis is always on what it means to be human with your finger on the button. She is currently creating paintings, sculptures, and experiments with VR. She teaches in Kassel, Germany, and Milan, Italy.

Michaël Samyn is half of Tale of Tales, an artist couple that has been masquerading as an independent game development studio for 12 years during which they published 8 games - The Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path, Fatale, Vanitas, Bientôt l'été, Luxuria Superbia and Sunset -, each of which was met with equal measures of applause and consternation. Michaël sort of hates games. But he loves the medium that videogames use because he sees in it the possibility to continue the great tradition of art and culture that was rudely interrupted by the modernism of the 20th century. With a background in graphic design, furniture design, music, web design, net.art and videogames, and a passion for Old Master art and Christian architecture, Michaël currently explores the amalgamation of the sacred and the digital in Tale-of-Tales' first post-games project, Cathedral-in-the-Clouds.

To view this work streaming generatively, click here.