GAMESCENES

CFP: MACHINIMA, THE STATE OF THE ART (DEADLINE: APRIL 15 2020)

The 2020 edition of the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL will be followed by the release of a printed bilingual (English and Italian) publication later this year featuring critical contributions on the state of machinima. The book/catalog will be edited by Matteo Bittanti and Gemma Fantacci. Contributors do not necessarily need to be addressing the machinima featured at the Festival. Scholars, critics, artists, and curators are invited to submit an extended abstract (between 500-1000 words excluding references) or full papers to [email protected] either in English or Italian.

Timeline:

April 15, 2020 Abstract submission deadline (full papers are also accepted);

May 15, 2020: Notification of acceptance/rejection sent to authors;

July 1, 2020: Full paper submission deadline;

Sept 1, 2020: Review deadline;

Oct 1, 2020: Deadline for edited papers.

Possible topics include:

• Vernacular machinima vs. avantgarde machinima
• Exhibition & screening of machinima
• Art historical perspectives on machinima
• Machinima and remix/mash up culture
• Recording and sharing of in-game performances
• The evolution of in-game video editors
• Critical analysis of an artist's oeuvre/work
• Innovative online distribution platforms
• The changing audiences of machinima

Inquiries may be directed to [email protected]

 

LINK: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL

GAME ART: BRENTON ALEXANDER SMITH'S SOFTCRASH (ONGOING)

Softcrash is part of an ongoing series made using BeamNg.drive, a video game known for its ability to produce realistic car crashes. By pushing the limits of the engine, Smith forces the game to visualize situations that would be impossible in the real world. The software often produces wild, almost organically chaotic shapes, coupled with uncanny twitching movements that afford them a sense of liveliness. The artist calls these phenomena crashforms

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

ART GAME: MIKHAIL MAKSIMOV'S MOSCOW MODERN ART MASSACRE (2020)

Hail the new futurists! Hail Mikhail Maksimov, an artist, director, and designer creating games that operate like "a sanatorium for artists". In his latest work, Moscow Modern Art Massacre (MMAM), players can destroy art and burn down entire museums, like F.T. Marinetti recommended. You have sixty seconds to annihilate the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, obliterate the Garage Museum in Moscow, and vandalize the XL Galleries... You can also unlock new white walls - the mysterious 6th level gallery! - and inflict physical harm to conceptual art. MMAM actively encourages the player - an android-like type reminiscent of Bjork's "All is full of love" music video - to reject the dictates, rules, and conventions of modern art. Each gallery is full of destructible artworks - you must wreck havoc on a set number of masterpieces to progress to the next level. Even sculptures can be demolished. Photos can be burned. There's even an online leaderboard.

And don't get me started on the soundtrack.

Moscow Modern Art Massacre reminds me of such iconoclastic classics such as Hunter Jonakin's Jeff Koons Must Die (2011) and, obviously, Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson's Museum Meltdown (1996). But it is also the culmination of a series of projects critiquing the art system through game mechanics and ludic tropes, like The Pasture (2016) a "Russian Art System Simulation Game", an art gallery simulator and the precursor to MMAM, Rodchenko Rampage (2014). Technically speaking, Maksimov's games are the state of the art, no pun intended. 

Mikhail Maksimov, Rodchenko Rampage, 2014. Screenshots, Windows platforms. 

Mikhail Maksimov is a Russian artist and video director. He graduated at Moscow State Construction University and Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, and took part in several exhibitions and festivals including 3-th, 4-th, 5th Moscow Modern Art Biennale, New Horizons International Film Festival, Wroclaw, Poland, 34rd and 36th Moscow International Film Festival (2013, 2014), Manifesta 10 (2014), 12nd and 13th, 14th Kansk Video Festival (2013, 2014, 2015, when he won the Best Russian Short Prize), 2morrow Film Festival (2015).

LINK: Mikhail Maksimov

ART GAME: ALAN KWAN'S SCENT (ONGOING)

Eight years ago we shared on GameScenes Alan Kwan's groundbreaking project Bad Trip in which the artist connected a small camera to his glasses in order to develop a videogame about my virtual memories. It remains one of the most inventive project at the crossroads of technology, gaming, and digital art. At the time, Kwan was a student. Now he is a full time artist. For the past few years, Kwan has been making experimental games and VR games while researching at MIT, in Boston. His latest project, Scent, is a video game that takes place near the border of a city undergoing a massacre. A stray dog follows scent trails of human fear and carries out its job to help human souls reincarnate. The game uses stealth mechanics and a contemplative, meditative gameplay. 

This game focuses on delivering an interactive cinematic experience with simple control. While using the mouse to look around, players control the dog to walk/sprint/hide/stop and the steering is automated. A bit similar to the control of a 2D platform game like Mario but the players can also look around in a 3D environment. For most of the gameplay, players are walking, hiding, or witnessing.

As Kwan wrote in an email, "In this chaotic world right now, I wanted to create this game to invite players to contemplate on fear, deaths, and the collapse of a city. " Indeed, Scent is a timely project. 

 

Kwan is developing Scent for Windows-based platforms. 

Alan Kwan is an artist, game designer, and technologist. After completing his master's degree at MIT, he has been developing video games and virtual reality environments to build worlds, stories, and immersive experiences that lie outside of the traditional gaming paradigm. He is also deeply interested in how 3D virtual world, as a spatial medium, can help people organize or learn complex information by leveraging their spatial cognition. He started experimenting with the idea of building virtual memory palace in 2011, and then in 2016 he collaborated with architect and designer Meng Sun to make an interactive 3D educational tool. These projects were presented at venues including Ars Electronica Center (Austria), International Bauhaus Colloquium (Germany), ZKM Centre for Art and Media (Germany), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Shanghai), and were featured in media including Discovery Channel, Popular Science, and The Boston Globe. Alan was awarded the first prize of the MIT Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Award for Young Artist (Media Art). Recently, Alan completed two permanent installations for the museum Historic New Orleans Collection and one permanent installation for Taylor Education Center in collaboration with interaction designer and artist Xiao Xiao.  

LINK: Alan Kwan 

GAME ART: SAVEME OH'S ISOLATION (2020)

Machinima in quarantined times.

SaveMe Oh is just one of the several virtual alter-egos created by Oscar Wagenmans, a Dutch theatre director and actor. An eclectic figure inside and outside the virtual space, Wagenmans began his career as an actor in 1983 performing with youth theatre groups, subsequently as a comedian in solo shows and finally as part of the collective De Pinokkio's and Wagenmans and Strikker. Since 1991, he has been the artistic director of the Kamak Theatre, a theatre group of actors with learning disabilities, in Hengelo, Holland. Besides the Kamak project, Wagenmans works with amateur companies and musicians. His alter-ego SaveMe Oh was created in Second Life in 2007, where he appears as an irreverent, sensual performer with Asian roots, whose practice consists in creating sardonic plays on a variety of themes, including the artworld and current events. Mixing a variety of aesthetics (machinima, digital images, video, 3D animation), Wagenmans uses the character of SaveMe Oh to explore the creative challenges and limitations offered by Second Life, trying to disrupt the rules and real-world etiquette that users project onto the lives of their digital personas. His subversive tactics aimed at deconstructing and exposing the nonsense of the mechanisms governing politics and contemporary society, along with its fears and fetishes, provides a remarkable depiction the absurdity and grotesquery of human life.

LINK: SaveMe Oh

GAME ART: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S SCROLLING LANDSCAPE IN 34 NES GAMES #2 (2020)

Eddie Lohmeyer, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #2, digital video/machinima, color, 8' 05", 2020

Eddie Lohmeyer's archeological approach to machinima is exemplified by his second installment on the congoing Scrolling Landscape series. 

A the artist writes: 

Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #2 (2020) is a work of experimental glitch video that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. It is a different version of Scrolling Landscapes #1 in which four seperate video channels have been arranged to create a psychedelic Rorschach pattern. The film was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into a continuously unfolding vista of gameworlds. This landscape has then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. Here, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games envisions childhood nostalgia for video gameplay as an imaginary environment separated from the mundane in which certain desires and sensory pleasures are taken up within spaces of play. Through the viewer’s interfacing with these sublime visions of technology, the film serves to challenge our embodied reception of the video game medium and the knowledge frameworks that underlie our perception of scrolling motion.

Eddie Lohmeyer is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to traditions of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, assemblage, etc., his installations, sculpture, and video stage bizarre encounters with media as a means to unveil our normal attitudes and perceptions toward technologies.

LINK: Eddie Lohmeyer

ART GAME: AKIHIKO TANIGUCHI'S ARTSPEED (IN DEVELOPMENT)

Here's an update on ARTSPEED, Akihiko Taniguchi's racing game featuring conceptual artworks competing on the art circuit (no, really). The game is looking increasingly polished and avantgarde. Alas, R.T: Mutt aka Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is not doing great and Umberto Boccioni's L'homme en mouvement is currently last, but I have so much faith in the Futurists, I mean, the whole spiel about speed etc. Where's F.T. Marinetti when you need him? Jeff Koons has invested lots of (his own) money to win the race and it shows but Orozco's Citroen still has a chance. I'm waiting for Maurizio Cattelan's Audi-cum-tree (Untitled, 2000).

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

GAME ART: FOCI+LOCI'S BOUNCING MOON (2017)

Another formidable work by foci+loci, Bouncing Moon is an algorithmic music device built in LittleBigPlanet 3. Truly avantgarde. 

As the Brooklyn-based duo explains:

The user trigger emission of a triangle in any of four rows- percussion, droplets, bass and piano- by pressing buttons on the controller. Each triangle has three possible notes and plays whichever one lands point-down in the slot it finds. The moving white light indicates what step the sequencer is on. As it passes each triangle, it triggers a note. The user can also, 'reset' any row by thrusting them back upwards to resettle as they fall. The tempo is also controllable.

Treating the map editors in video games as virtual sound stages, foci + loci create immersive electro-acoustic spaces with virtual instruments and timed audiovisual events. Saving and replaying digital game data, camera movement in space can be disassociated from time, changing traditional filmic relationships. foci + loci is Tamara Yadao and Chris Burke.

LINK: foci+loci

GAME ART: ANTONIO M. ABATE'S HOW DID I END UP HERE? (2017)

An ironic take at deep existential concerns. Forty seconds shot with GTA V's Rockstar Editor. Antonio M. Abate is filmmaker and film critic based in Milan, Italy.

LINK: Antonio M. Abate

CALL FOR ARTWORKS: DAVID BLANDY'S THE FIELDS OF ALGORITHMS (DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 1 2020)

Open Call: The Fields of Algorithms by David Blandy

For poetic machinima lasting exactly one minute.

Send in your One Minute video!
Deadline 1 September 2020
theoneminutes.org/participate

David Blandy is an artist working with pop-cultural spaces such as video games, tabletop RPGs and Twitch streams. He lives in these worlds to think about the stories that create our sense of self, and how these spaces can propose different models for collectivity, either in their narratives or in the cultures that surround them.

The One Minutes Foundation produces and distributes one-minute videos from an artistic point of view, offering an international stage for people to create, engage and connect. The One Minutes is active at the forefront of international contemporary art, as well as in education and welfare. And has exhibited amongst others at Power Station of Art (CN), National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavík (IS) and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (USA). Every two months, The One Minutes Foundation puts out a new series of 60-second films that investigate how we perceive and engage with moving image. Museums and cultural organisations around the world subscribe to the series.

LINK: The Fields of Algorithms 

CFP: WELL PLAYED JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE CFP: PLAYABLE THEATRE (MAY 31 2020)

Well Played Journal Special Issue Cfp: Playable Theatre 

Edited by Celia Pearce & Nick Fortugno

The rising popularity of immersive theatre works such as Third Rail’s Then She Fell and Punch Drunk’s Sleep No More, has given rise to new hybrid forms of live entertainment that combine aspects of games and theatre. These “playable theatre” works draw extensively from digital games, Big Games, tabletop and live action roleplaying (LARPs) combined with theatrical conventions and methods to create fully immersive, participatory live theatrical events in which the audience plays a substantive role in the experience. We use the term “playable theatre” to distinguish works that engage meaningful audience agency from more passive forms of “promenade” theatre where the audience’s role is strictly navigational. Works of this type include a wide range of genres, scales and contexts, from highly theatrical “Nordic larping” traditions, to theme park experiences, to “puzzle plays” that integrate aspects of escape rooms and performance, to site-specific and pervasive/progressive live events. They can also draw from a variety of theatrical methods such as improv, process drama, and devised theatre. The rise of these works has been accompanied by a rediscovery of Pine & Gilmour’s concept of the “Experience Economy,” spurred by scientific research that people who spend money on experiences are happier than those who spend it on goods. The aim of this special issue is to explore critical and practical aspects of this emerging form and develop a shared vocabulary across disciplines to advance both scholarship and innovation in this emerging art form. 

For this special issue we invite experiential play-throughs, theoretical papers, critical analyses, and post-mortems by practitioners, across domains from around the world, that explore the many facets of live, interactive experiences. As an interdisciplinary issue, we welcome researchers and creators from theatre, digital and analog game studies, performance studies and related disciplines.

ETC Press is accepting submissions for this special issue of the Well Played journal.

All submissions are 31 May 2020

All submissions and questions should be sent to:

well-played (at) lists (dot) andrew (dot) cmu (dot) edu

The Well Played Journal is a forum for in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. It is a reviewed journal open to submissions that will be released on a regular basis.

 

Contributors are encouraged to analyze sequences in a game in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the various components of a game can come together to create a fulfilling playing experience unique to this medium. Through contributors, the journal will provide a variety of perspectives on the value of games.

 

The goal of the journal is to continue developing and defining a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis. By inviting contributors to look closely at video games and the experience of playing them, we hope to expand the discussion, and show how games are well played in a variety of ways.

 

The ETC Press is an academic and open-source publishing imprint that distributes its work in print, electronic and digital form. Inviting readers to contribute to and create versions of each publication, ETC Press fosters a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue across media. ETC Press represents an experiment and an evolution in publishing, bridging virtual and physical media to redefine the future of publication.

 

LINK: Well Played Journal