GAMESCENES

EVENT: VIDEO GAMES? ART AND TECHNOLOGY (OCTOVER 6 - JANUARY 29 2023, GRANDE PRAIRE, CANADA)

Video Games? Art and Technology 

Curated by Manar Abo Touk, Curator, Exhibitions & Collections

Oct 6, 2022 to Jan 29, 2023

Art Gallery of Grande Prairie 103-9839 103 Ave, Grande Prairie, Alberta T8V 6M7

Canada

(780) 532-8111

[email protected]

press release (excerpt)

Video Games? Art and Technology is a group exhibition featuring Pippin Barr, Sandee Moore, and artist collective SpekWork (Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll), that examine video games as an artform for design and self- expression. From computer art to digital art, to animation, web-based art, photography, film, AR and VR, and video games. The Art and Technology movement of the 1960s provided artists the tools to mix technology, art, and science.

As technology advanced and progressed, gaming design grew as an artistic practice. In the 1990s digital artists explored the historical dimension of the computer and its development as a creative medium. Video Game creation allows artists to play with technological tools and game mechanics to question our perception of the physical world. How can Video Games shape and contribute to the way we learn history and understand issues in the contemporary world? such as the representation of female skateboarders, architecture and labour, or philosophical mythology.

Video Games? Art and Technology aims to create a digital artistic experience that reflects on how technology and art are used to examine design structures and societal themes through re-interpreting classic video games and offering a new way of seeing in our digital age.

(Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment game, Pippin Barr, 2011)

(The Mixer: The Ultimate Sk8 Activity Centre, 2001, electronics, sculpture, household paint, modified video game, single-channel video. Photo courtesy of the Dunlop Art Gallery.)

LINK: Video Games? Art and Technology

EVENT: MARTINA MENEGON (SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 13 2022, ONLINE)

when you are close to me I shiver

video recording of live simulation

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 7’ 47”, 2020, Italy

Created by Martina Menegon

Sound design by Alexander Martinz

Introduced by Luca Miranda

vral.org

when you are close to me I shiver is an algorithmically controlled live simulation, hereby presented as a video recording, that is, a real-time generated virtual experience that takes place in a version of the future in which humans, out of desperation, gather in masses on the last remaining piece of land. Inspired by the walrus scene in the documentary Our Planet narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, the project proposes a scenario encompassing ongoing environmental and personal crises. The video depicts a desolated island populated by 3D-scanned clones of the artist herself. Through these perceivable avatars, the artist creates a new identity that arises out of plurality, proprioceptively renegotiating the fragility of both the physical and the virtual self and its realities.

Martina Menegon (Italy, 1988) is an artist working predominantly with Interactive and Extended Reality Art. In her works, Martina creates intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its phygital corporeality. She experiments with the uncanny and the grotesque, the self and the body and the dialogue between physical and virtual realities, to create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: THE VISIBLE CITY - THE CITY AT PLAY (SEPTEMBER 20 - 23, VALENCIA, SPAIN)

 

La ciudad jugable - la ciudad en juego (The visible city - the city at play)

Curated by Luca Carruba and Dr.a Eurídice Cabañes, produced by Meritxel Ahicart

Main Hall, Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences

Universitat de València, Spain

Av. de Blasco Ibáñez, 13, 46010 València, Spain

 

Produced in the framework of the 7th International Conference on Videogames and Education (September 20-22 2022) in Valencia, Spain, the exhibition is organized by the Chair Gamification and Open Government (according to the agreement signed between the University of Valencia and the City Council) and the International Group of Researchers Association ALFAS. The works on display include video games, board games, video art, documentary, and digital photography, focusing on the theme of art, the city, and video games. According to the curators, the goal of the exhibition is to open up a space for dialogue between Art and the City in their relation with video games.

 

Curators' statement (translated from Spanish)

The city is built in many ways. Through material manipulation, but also through languages and constructions of symbolic worlds that operate and shape it. Different artifacts and technologies amplify this effect. Our entire relationship with reality is technologically mediated, and if there is one technology (and one language) that has become the spearhead of this interaction, it is clearly the video game.

Beyond leisure, the video game has changed our ways of generating and interacting with knowledge about reality, it has become a tool with great potential for collective decision making, to disseminate different values and to experiment imagining new worlds and systems.

We propose an exhibition that allows us to look at the video game from its potential to transform the city, without forgetting to provide a critical perspective on the medium that also makes visible the problems that we face and that it is important that we solve in order to exploit the full potential of the medium in an ethical, fair and diverse way.

The full program is available on the official website.

LINK: La ciudad jugable - la ciudad en Juego (in Spanish)

EVENT: BABAK AHTESHAMIPOUR (SEPTEMBER 16 - SEPTEMBER 29 2022, ONLINE)

POST-CODED THOUGHTS ON THE NEVER-UPCOMING FORESHADOWED LI(F)E

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 8’ 54”, 2021, Iran/Greece

Created by Babak Ahteshamipour

vral.org

 

Post-coded Thoughts on the Never-upcoming Foreshadowed Li(f)e is a machinima created with The Sims. In this post-apocalyptic narrative, human beings suddenly vanish, leaving behind all their digital spawns: A.I., avatars, algorithms, and programs. Faced with their own risk of extinction, these non-human entities acquire agency and embark into an existential journey to find meaning in an otherwise empty life. The main character is Babak Ahteshamipour’s alter ego, who is reproducing the sheer banality of RL (real life) activities in an environment mirroring his “real”, concrete space, having imported some of his paintings, few custom 3D models from other video games that are depicted in the paintings, musical improvisations with electric guitar and piano, and a text visualizing the sim-avatar’s thoughts.

Babak Ahteshamipour’s practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs actual, aimed at correlating various topics that are not directly connected at first glance from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity exploring them via MMORPGs/video games, social media and online integrating themes of co-existence and simultaneity in response to the futuristic anthropocentric urge of technocracy to focus on posthumanism. He has exhibited and performed at Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), New Art City (online), The Wrong (online), Sub Rosa space (Athens, Greece), ERGO Collective (Athens, Greece), arebyte (online), Biquini Wax ESP (Mexico City, Mexico), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, Illinois) and elsewhere. He has released music on the independent cassette label Industrial Coast and his music has been played on radio stations such as Noods Radio (Bristol, U.K.), Radio Raheem (Milan, Italy), Fade Radio (Athens, Greece) and Radio alHara. Originally from Iran, Ahteshamipour lives and works in Athens, Greece.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: VOLUNTARY ATTEMPTS TO OVERCOME NECESSARY OBSTACLES (SEPTEMBER 23 - OCTOBER 29 2022, NEW YORK)

Robert Yang, The Tearoom, Video Game 2017

Voluntary Attempts to Overcome Necessary Obstacles

On View: September 23 – October 29, 2022

Opening Reception: Friday, September 23, 2022, 6-8 PM

curated by Nicholas O’Brien

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
323 West 39th Street
New York, NY 10018
P: (212) 563 5855 x244
E: [email protected]

Featured artists

Pippin Barr
Jeremy Couillard
Charity Porpentine Heartscape
Nathalie Lawhead
Everest Pipkin
The Escape From Woomera Collective
Studio Oleomingus
Angela Washko
Robert Yang

press release (excerpt)

EFA Project Space presents Voluntary Attempts to Overcome Necessary Obstacles, a group exhibition of artists, designers, and developers exploring the boundaries of games as an artistic medium. This exhibition attempts to sidestep the reactionary debates of whether “games can be art” and instead highlights works that have already put an end to this question. By bringing these works together at EFA Project Space, curator Nicholas O’Brien, wants to show contemporary art audiences how games have been having parallel (or shared) conversations about politics, society, history, and identity in equally nuanced, poetics, and critical ways.

Studio Oleomingus, Folds Along a Separation, Video Game, 2022

LINK: Voluntary Attempts to Overcome Necessary Obstacles

GAME ART: MARIO MU'S SITES OF ENCOUNTER (2022)

Sites of Encounter is composed of three short films exploring the intersection between spatial memory and architecture within games. The narrative follows an intimate dialogue between a group of characters as they navigate contemporary labour conditions, using spatial structures to activate an archive of memories. The structure of the work in many ways resembles a theater piece. There are three acts divided into three scenes. Each part of the trilogy is a self-contained dramatic unit, although the endings of the first two acts lead naturally into the play that follows them. Sites of encounter deals with issues related to contemporary work conditions, video games and man-made environment, whether it is architecture or space of video games themselves.

The artistic practice of Croatian artist Mario Mu revolves around projects which are often constructed as extended gaming platforms. In addition to sound and drawing, his preferred media often include elements of game design, 3D animation, and performance. A student of Hito Steyerl, Mu received an MFA in Berlin from the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin in 2017, a BFA with a major in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in 2015, and an MA from the Faculty of Graphic Arts in 2012 from the same institution. Between 2016 and 2017, Mu was an active member of the Research Center for the Proxy Politics in Berlin. He has been working on several LARP events as an author, collaborator and/or performer at Play Co London and Zagreb, Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, Galerie gr_und, Acud, and UdK in Berlin. Mu is currently working on a new game project initiated by the Portuguese artist Odete and supported by Maat Museum and Boca Bienal.

Mario Mu, Sites of Encounter, video installation, color, sound 1920 x 1080 3 × 18', wood panels, 2022 (images courtesy of the artist) Solo exhibition Gallery Nova, Zagreb. WHW Collective , Curated by Ana KovacicPhoto credits Sanja Bistricic

LINK: Mario Mu

EVENT: GINA HARA (SEPTEMBER 2 - 15 2022, ONLINE)

VALLEY

digital video/machinima (1280 x 720), color, sound, 7’ 06”, Hungary/Canada

Created by Gina Hara

vral.org

 

Inspired by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) software in mental health contexts, Gina Hara uses the world of Minecraft as a backdrop for a series of exchanges with an AI-powered chatbot, called Robin, developed specifically for the project. Both the process and the resulting narrative are documented in this short machinima.

Gina Hara is a Hungarian-Canadian filmmaker and artist. She holds an MA in Intermedia, an MFA in Film Production and worked with film, video, new media, gaming, and design. Waning (2011), her first fiction film, was nominated for a Best Canadian Short award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Your Place or Minecraft (2016), a machinima web series focusing on game studies, is currently available on YouTube. Hara’s full length documentary Geek Girls (2017) explores the notion of subculture from women’s perspective and was screened internationally, including IULM University in 2018 during an event entitled Gender Play. Her artworks have been exhibited by several institutions including the New Museum in New York, the Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montreal. Hara lives in Montreal, where she works as Creative Director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.

 

WATCH NOW

EVENT: EXPANDED ANIMATION 2022 (SEPTEMBER 9 - 11 2022, LINZ, AUSTRIA)

Expanded Animation 2022

September 9 - 11 2022

Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria

 

A killer list of speakers!

press release

The tenth edition of the Expanded Animation Symposium, organized by the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and Ars Electronica, will take place from September 9^th to 11^th 2022 as part of the Ars Electronica Festival 2022.

In its ten-year history, the Expanded Animation Symposium has continually examined the vast and constantly evolving field of animation and its myriad connections to other disciplines. Along this journey, the symposium has featured prominent and upcoming people, projects and perspectives that have significantly shaped the current animation landscape. In addition to becoming a regular part of the Ars Electronica Festival, the symposium itself has also continued to expand, developing from an initial one-day event to a three-day affair that includes multiple tracks, exhibitions, performances and even an additional symposium, Synaesthetic Syntax.

After two years of virtual events hosted by the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, this year’s symposium will return as a physically accessible venue for the first time at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz. Over the course of the three-day event, the speaker panels will feature several international artists, researchers, and developers who will discuss—in a live setting—current processes of change in the expanded field of animation.

LINK: Expanded Animation 2022

EVENT: IN-GAME PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP WITH ROC HERMS (SEPTEMBER 11 2022, ONLINE)

Workshop: In-game photography with Roc Herms

10:30am - 4 pm Sunday 11 September 2022 BST

Organized by The Photographer's Gallery in London

Learn how to take great photographs inside video games in this online workshop with exhibiting artist Roc Herms

What is in-game photography? How can photography document the interactions that happen in online games and digital realms?

Description

Enjoy a one-day workshop with How to Win at Photography exhibiting artist Roc Herms. We’ll start with a theoretical introduction to in-game photography and quickly move on to a series of practical activities and exercises. Using Roblox to play with composition, colour and perspective, develop a new portfolio of images while also socialising with other players and engaging with more traditional concepts of photography. By the end of the session, participants will have co-produced a digital publication of the day's experiences.

This workshop is suitable for photographers, artists and others interested in photography's relationship to game worlds, as well as those interested in exploring new approaches to landscape and portrait photography.

This event is part of How to Win at Photography, an exhibition currently on display at The Photographer's Gallery.

Schedule

10.30 Introduction (on Zoom)
10.35 Presentation on in-game photography/on-line games/multiverses
11.30 Dive into Roblox: Playing different online games to learn the mechanics of in-game photography
12.30 Break
13.00 Roblox photoshoot activities and exercises
13.30 Roblox in-game photoshoot
15.00 Design of the publication (group exercise)
16.00 Workshop end

Details on how to access the workshop will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place.

Biography

In 1978 Gary Thurek and his assistant Carl Gartley sent the first mass email with advertising purposes, reaching 393 users at the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (called the ARPANET), unaware that they just sent the first example of what would later be known as SPAM. That same year, over 9000 kilometers away, Roc Herms was born in Spain. 28 years later he discovers photography as a tool to learn, and he manages to combine it with his interest in the Internet, video games and parallel realities: showing his passion for technology and the need to take a step further in photographic practice. Postcards From Home and “ ”, his two long term projects published in book form, try to shed some light on the life we live inside the computer. “Hacer Pantallazo” is an intimate diary made with screenshots, a capture process that he ends up understanding as the ultimate step on photography’s digitalisation. His work has been exhibited in “From Here On”, Centre d’Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona and “Photography 2.0”, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid both curated by Joan Fontcuberta, as well as in the Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands; Platine Festival, Germany; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Hammer Museum, USA; CCCB, Barcelona and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France.

LINK: In-game photography workshop

LINK: Roc Herms

EVENT: ZUZA BANASIŃSKA (AUGUST 19 - SEPTEMBER 1 2022, ONLINE)

ROAD OF FEELINGS

digital video (1920x1080), color, sound, 8’18”, 2022, Poland

Created by Zuza Banasińska

August 19 - September 1 2022

Introduced by Gemma Fantacci

vral.org

A teenage girl’s room. When she ingests a handful of pills, it start to grow. Normally, as she works out, 1,2,3... 1,2,3... 1,2,3... her muscles can carry stones. Now, they are literally carried. The room walks with her as she touches the ground. In the rhythm of the workout, the walls open up and start chewing the world. Road of Feelings is a video animation created with the Unity 3D engine as part of the artistic collective Ellen Muscle’s LARP (Live Action Role Playing). The scenario was based on a queer-feminist narrative, set in a world where extreme muscle growth is encouraged, especially for teenage girls. Every girl has to take pills that enhance body musculature. Some teens begin to overdose, shortly discovering that the phenomenon enables them to produce hybridized connections. Those hybridizations happen through the muscles themselves. Teens start building and experiencing global networks between things and beings.

Zuza Banasińska (b. 1994) is an audio-visual artist making video-based environments. In her works, virtual and real elements are hybridized beyond distinction in an effort to move from representation towards affective mapping. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Universität der Künste in Berlin, and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. In 2020, she won first prize in the Polish Experimental section at Short Waves in Poznań and On. Art in Wrocław. Her works have been shown at the U-Jazdowski CCA in Warsaw, Dům Umění Mesta Brna in Czech Republic and Blindside in Melbourne. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

WATCH NOW