GAMESCENES

EVENT: PASCAL GRECO (JULY 18—31 2025, ONLINE)

Urbain Altéré

digital video (3840 x 2160), colour, sound, 3’ 25”, 2024, Switzerland

created by Pascal Greco

vral.org

 

In Urbain Altéré (2024), Pascal Greco expands his investigation into the aesthetic and conceptual potential of game environments by shifting from still in-game photography to machinima. Created entirely within Stray (BlueTwelve Studio, 2022), this video navigates a virtual cityscape that evokes a speculative Hong Kong, now abstracted through layers of simulation, ambient sound, and procedural texture. The work eschews narrative in favour of observational drift, capturing overlooked architectural surfaces such as air conditioners, stairwells, neon signage, crumbling facades with a sensibility drawn from both street photography and cinematic slow time. Greco’s camera lingers on the habitual and uneventful, reframing synthetic urban detritus as material for meditative study. Backed by an AI-generated soundtrack, Urbain Altéré is less a portrait of a place than an ambient excavation of atmosphere, surface, and disappearance. In traversing this hyperrealistic non-place, Greco probes the boundaries of authorship, memory, and image-making in a context where photography is no longer indexical, but remediated through simulation.

Pascal Greco is a Swiss-Italian filmmaker and photographer based in Geneva. A self-taught artist working across cinema, photography, and digital media, his work explores the interplay between architecture, landscape, and technological mediation. His practice spans urban typologies, natural environments, and increasingly, virtual spaces generated within video games. His projects have been exhibited internationally and featured in The Guardian, Vice, CNN, and Monocle. Key publications include Kyoshu (2007), No Cliché (2013), and Hong Kong Neon (2021), a visual study of a disappearing cityscape. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Greco turned to digital environments, producing Place(s) (2021) in Death Stranding, and Place(s) Space(s) (2024), a machinima exploring duration and presence. Recent works such as Kwai Shing West Estate and Urbain Altéré (both 2024) continue his investigation into memory, simulation, and digital authorship.

WATCH NOW

PROJECT: IMGAME (2022-2025)

Launched in 2022 and funded by the Creative Europe Programme, ImGame is a research-based digital platform that combines immersive aesthetics with serious gaming to foster public engagement with contemporary art. Developed by a consortium of academic, artistic, and municipal partners across Latvia, Hungary, and Greece, the project seeks to fill a critical gap in art education by creating a virtual environment where users can explore the conceptual foundations, historical antecedents, and intertextual dimensions of new media art.

At the core of ImGame is an innovative VR experience designed to introduce audiences—especially those outside traditional art institutions—to the aesthetic strategies of contemporary digital art. Rather than offering a linear history or didactic overview, ImGame immerses the user in a spatialised environment that privileges exploration, affective engagement, and playful interaction. Viewers navigate an abstract virtual world shaped by the logics of game design, where they encounter artworks and theoretical references embedded within dynamic spatial cues.

In this environment, the concept of immersion is not simply technological, but aesthetic and psychological. ImGame defines immersion as the temporary suspension of the real-world frame in favour of a constructed, affectively resonant digital experience. Comparable to the absorption one might feel while reading a compelling novel, this form of immersion is used to model how contemporary art invites contemplation, critical distance, and presence all at once.

The project has yielded not only a functional prototype—accessible via imgame.va.lv—but also significant theoretical output. Two major research articles have been published: ImGame Project: a Comprehensive Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Gaming (2024) and ImGame: An Immersive Educational Environment to Teach Contemporary Art (2024), presented at international conferences including CSEDU (Angers), AIEEE (Valmiera), and UNLOCK. Collectively, these publications articulate a theoretical framework for immersive aesthetics, while also advancing discourse around serious art games as a pedagogical tool.

The project also supported the development of three emerging digital artists—Alvis Misjuns (Latvia), Kristóf Szabó (Hungary), and Vasilis Georgakopoulos (Greece)—whose works were integrated into the platform. This component reflects ImGame’s commitment to not only presenting but also producing contemporary digital culture.

Technically, ImGame introduces a novel node-based shader workflow built with A-Frame, allowing young creators to design multi-platform interactive experiences without advanced coding skills. This lowers the barrier of entry for creative technologists, making the project both educational and empowering.

By collecting and analysing current new media practices in Latvia, Greece, and Hungary, the research component of ImGame has also generated a comparative cultural map of immersive aesthetics across different European contexts. From ancient mythologies to theories of the sublime, the project ties together a diverse array of cultural reference points to offer users a richly contextualised encounter with digital art.

ImGame is not just a serious game or a VR prototype; it is a model for how interactive systems can be used to think with, about, and through contemporary art. It demonstrates that gaming can serve not only as entertainment, but as a medium for aesthetic education, critical reflection, and public access to complex cultural ideas.

LINK: ImGame (Special thanks to Ieva Gintere)

GAME ART: ESTELLE FLORES REMEMBERS THROUGH VIDEO GAMES

Estelle Flores: Contém Ingredientes de Verdade

May 17 - July 26 2025

MuMA Digital Art Center (Rua República Argentina, 3430 – Portão, Curitiba – PR)

Curated by biarritzzz

 

The Digital Art Center of the Curitiba Municipal Art Museum (MuMA) is currently hosting the exhibition Contém Ingredientes de Verdade (“Contains Real Ingredients”) by Estelle Flores. The solo show, which opened May 17 2025, is curated by biarritzzz, and examines video games as a site for artistic experimentation, performance, and personal memory. Spanning four years of creative work, Flores’s videos and images unfold within digital environments such as The Sims and Grand Theft Auto, interrogating the thin veil separating simulation from lived experience.

Adopting the video game platform as a kind of visual diary, the artist documents gestures of intimacy, ritual, and the minutiae of everyday life. In these works, play becomes more than recreation; it emerges as a speculative mode of existence, a canvas for imagining, recollecting, and re-enacting the self. Based in Curitiba, Estelle Flores has been exploring digital art practices with a particular emphasis on simulation games since 2020. Her practice fuses machinima with strategies of post-photography, situating games as both medium and method. Throughout her works, Flores engages the dual meanings of “play” (to game and to perform) while drawing connections to broader existential concerns about the nature of identity and narrative.

Estelle Flores,One Day, digital video, color, sound, 1', made with The Sims 4, 2021

For example, the video triptych History of Me, comprising the short videos One Day, Dreams, and Cargo, offers a pointed reflection on the occluded, inaccessible zones within virtual environments. Using a horizontal split-screen, these works invite viewers to reflect on how such digital occlusion mirrors the frustrated desires and deferred dreams generated by a society organized around spectacle.

Estelle Flores, A radical pursuit of happiness, Made with GTA San Andreas and Hydra Synth, 2024

Estelle Flores is a contemporary artist living in Curitiba-PR, graduated in Design from UP and currently studying for a master's degree in Communication and Semiotics from PUC-SP. Since 2020, she has been developing game art and machinima works, exploring simulation games such as The Sims 4 in investigations on performance and the unconscious. She is a member of the Brutas collective, with which she carries out actions and exhibitions. Her work has been presented in spaces such as the Museum of the Moving Image (USA) and Fu:Bar Glitchart Festival (Croatia).

LINK: Estelle Flores (tumblr)

LINK: Estelle Flores (instagram)

LINK: Coletivo Brutas 

EVENT: JONAS BLUME (JULY 4—17 2025, ONLINE)

Rhythm Zero Los Santos

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 112’ , 2019, Germany

created by Jonas Blume

 

What happens when an artist surrenders all agency in a game space designed for violence? In Rhythm Zero Los Santos (2019), Jonas Blume stages a durational performance inside Grand Theft Auto Online, transforming the volatile, multiplayer landscape of San Andreas into a theatre of procedural harm. The work draws on Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the artist remained passive as gallery visitors were invited to use seventy-two objects on her body, including a loaded gun. It also echoes Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), where vulnerability was staged through stillness and surrender. In both cases, the artist ceded control to the audience. In Blume’s version, bodily vulnerability is displaced onto a digital avatar, and the ethical stakes shift accordingly: the spectators are anonymous, the weapons are virtual, but the aggression remains disturbingly real. Across 112 uninterrupted minutes, Blume’s avatar — nearly nude, tattooed, inert — stands passively in various locales of Los Santos. Other players, unaware they are participants in an artwork, encounter him and react. Some attack, some posture, some ignore. 

Jonas Blume is a multimedia artist working across video, sculpture, and immersive installation. His work interrogates how digital systems shape identity, agency, and perception. He holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Museum für Gestaltung, and NRW-Forum. He currently lives and works between Berlin and Marseille.

WATCH NOW

Posted by Matteo Bittanti on 07/04/2025 in CONCEPTUAL, EVENT, GAME ART, GAME ENGINE, GRAND THEFT AUTO, INTERVIEW, LIVE STREAMING, MACHINIMA, NEWS, PERFORMANCE | Permalink

Standing before The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty), one is confronted by the chilling absurdity of purchasing the right to obliterate a city. In this interactive installation, Dutch Collective WERC lays bare the uneasy, visually seductive appeal of spectacular violence. The participant, posed as a player and a consumer, trades money for escalating scales of destruction, a grim parody of the transactional logic governing both entertainment and global politics.

In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen writes, “IA 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at the center of the Earth’s sun.”  This is a scenario so harrowing that it resists comprehension. Yet here, reduced to a button press and a digital detonation, mass destruction becomes a (visually compelling, dare I say) game. WERC’s work lays a finger on that ethical nerve, asking: what happens when the unimaginable becomes spectacularly consumable?

The installation’s command console, emblazoned with the phrase BUY AN EXPLOSION, places the audience in a position of ultimate agency, if only virtually. This simulated power to demolish an entire city in seconds resonates with Bakunin’s provocation, embraced by the artists: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” The idea that annihilation satisfies a creative or transformative impulse is especially sinister in a world where nuclear deterrence still relies on the threat of total erasure. The mantra of Silicon Valley broligarchs, creative destruction, acquires yet a new terrifying meaning in the age of nuclear accelerationism.

WERC’s pointed critique lands with uncomfortable force. Modern entertainment has fetishized explosions: film, games, and news cycles alike present destruction in high resolution, from every angle, as a feast for the senses. But when these explosions leave the realm of fiction and cross into possible futures, the moral calculus changes. The digital violence of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) is, in effect, a rehearsal for complicity: a mirror to our own appetite for ruin, disguised as spectacle.

By harnessing the Unreal Game engine to question our participation in this cycle of destructive desire, WERC confronts us with the pleasure we take in omnipotence, whether virtual or real. It is a moment that unravels our moral comfort, exposing a deep ambivalence between condemnation and consumption. In a contingency where, as Jacobsen warns, nuclear guardians may fail catastrophically, the work resonates as a cautionary reflection on how easily we aestheticise mass death, trading ethics for a brief illusion of control.

In The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty), the interval between press start to game over is incredibly short. 

The artist collective WERC creates and develops interactive media art that bridges nature, theatre, science, and technology. At the heart of their practice lies a commitment to humanising technology and exploring the dynamic interplay between people, nature, and machines. Through their installations and performances, WERC probes the threshold between the physical and the digital, asking where one world ends and the other begins—and whether such a division can truly be made. WERC consists of Olav Huizer, Joachim Rümke, and Jelle Valk, who met while studying at the Minerva Academy in Groningen. United by a shared passion for digital art and site-responsive projects, they have since worked collectively to challenge perceptions of how art can inhabit and transform contemporary environments.

Credits
Concept: WERC
Business coordination: Jesse Korte
Sound design: Nicholas Thayer
Photos: Nienke Maat
Co-design: Britt Reijners
Software advice: Timo van Dijk
Additional design: Nia Paleshnikova

Gallery

LINK: WERC COLLECTIVE (Special thanks to Joachim Rümke)

Call for Contributions: The Almanac of Artificial Seasons

Edited By Delta Ark/World Engines Lab & Ilan Manouach w/ the support of Src Material (Seattle) and Echo Chamber (Brussels)

What are the (synthetic, mental, etc) landscapes that emerge from the deregulation of climate, the acceleration of machine learning technologies and trend towards neo-feudalism? 

The Almanac of Artificial Seasons is a collection exploring the unstable territories emerging at the intersection of these forces. 

We invite theoretical articles, comics and documentations for artistic projects such as Unreal Engine environments, motion capture performances and interactive narratives, that delve into the shifting landscapes where climate transformation, ai technologies, network (and anti- network) politics and artistic practice converge.

To grasp the current changes in climate, acceleration of ML technologies and global trend towards neo-feudalism is to engage with a massive, nonlocal entity—one that is composed of thousands of disparate models, operates on incompatible scales, and is derived from diverse data collection practices and heterogeneous objects. These systems transcend the limitations of human spatiotemporal specificities, rendering any attempt at understanding them from a conventional epistemological distance insufficient.

Instead, these phenomena require us to embrace multiple disciplinary perspectives that can collectively capture their intricate dynamics. As climate instability disrupts traditional state functions, decision-making shifts toward automated systems, where predictive analytics dictate migration policies and algorithmic models optimize disaster response—sometimes reinforcing inequalities rather than resolving them. No single field can fully elucidate the layers of interactions and feedback loops present in these dynamics.

This anthology (book and site) creates a space for exploring these emerging territories. The works collected here suggest that our future might not just be a story of adaptation or collapse, but of transformation into forms we can barely begin to imagine - some promising, some terrifying, many both at once.

#machinelearing #multiagentsystems #digitalhumans #ecosimulation #environmentalsensing #simulation #unnrealengine #gameengines #motioncapture #manga #comics #conceptualcomics #borne #vandermeer #drownedcities #bacigalupi #blame! #nihei #thebookofkoli #nausicaaofthevalleyofthewind #theskycrawlers #ergoproxy #haibanerenmei #firehunter #horizonzerodawnbutnodinosaurs #cavesofqud #xenogears #hyperlightdrifter #nierautomata #life3.0 #lifeasnooneknowsit #situationalawareness #networkstates #darwinamongthemachines #symbiogensis #technium #warintheageofintelligentmachines #biopunk #postcyberpunk

Submission Requirements:

Short bio (150 words)

Abstract (250 words)

Visual documentation (up to 10 images and/or 1 min. of video)

Send to: [email protected] 

Info: https://www.echochamber.be/en/opencalls/almanac/

Timeline:

Deadline for abstracts: July 1st, 2025

Notifications of acceptance: August 1st, 2025

Src Material is a proud supporter of The Almanac of Artificial Seasons

LINK: THE ALMANAC OF ARTIFICIAL SEASONS (Special thanks to Marianne Goldin/Src Material)

A Poet in the (Parallel) World

digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 7′ 45”, 2023, Italy.

created by Luca Miranda, Riccardo Retez

VRAL

June 20-July 3 2025

 

A Poet in the (Parallel) World reimagines the relationship between poetry, photography, and virtual environments. Part of an ongoing series examining remakes and adaptations within video game spaces, this machinima reconstructs fragments from Denise Levertov’s writings and Robert Adams’ photographic series A Parallel World (2020), translating them into a visual-poetic language shaped by the logic of the game engine. The avatar, navigating the hostile, post-apocalyptic landscape of Days Gone, becomes both witness and medium, channeling the poet’s voice and the photographer’s gaze while traversing a world governed by violence and algorithmic control. Set in a fictional Oregon two years after a fictional pandemic, the terrain echoes Adams’ contemplative images of dunes, windswept trees, and the Pacific coast, refracted through a dystopian lens. Levertov’s 1973 collection The Poet in the World serves as a conceptual anchor, framing the machinima’s central question: What does beauty mean when glimpsed within a world designed to simulate catastrophe and survival? Through in-game photography and synthetic narration, Miranda and Retez constructs a parallelism between what is seen and what is spoken, between the virtual and the poetic, proposing a subtle inquiry into perception, memory, and aesthetic resistance.

Luca Miranda is an Italian artist, writer, and independent researcher whose work explores the intersections between reality and simulation, with a particular focus on the aesthetic and political capacities of video games. Through machinima, game photography, and hybrid audiovisual forms, he investigates the avatar, procedural environments, and the ideological grammars embedded in game systems. His practice engages with concepts such as immersion, interpassivity, and the tensions between authorship and automation. Miranda holds degrees from the University of Bologna and IULM University. In 2018, he co-founded Eremo, a Milan-based collective working across video games, sound art, and performance. From 2020 to 2024, he was part of the curatorial team at the Milan Machinima Festival. His first book, published in 2021, examines the aesthetics and design of walking simulators. His work has been presented at venues including the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Metronom Gallery, IAFF Animator, Spazio InSitu, and Le Cube Garges.

Riccardo Retez is a multimedia designer, researcher, and adjunct professor with a focus on media sociology. His work explores the intersections of video games, digital art, and communication, with particular attention to the role of spectatorship and the dynamics of contemporary digital ecosystems. He holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Media Studies from IULM University in Milan and teaches at several institutions across Italy, including the University of Padua, the SAE Institute in Milan, and LABA in Florence. Retez contributes regularly to international academic journals and edited volumes, and curates events dedicated to contemporary visual culture. His research investigates how media practices shape perception and engagement in technologically mediated environments. He is the author of Machinima Vernacolare (Concrete Press, 2020) and the editor of The Real Aftermath: How COVID-19 Changed the Way Science Fiction is Conceived, Read, and Interpreted (Vernon Press, 2023).

WATCH NOW

Exhibition identity artwork: Keiken & Gabriel Massan, Uxkme / Morphogenic Angels: I know who I am, although I have forgotten who I am (2025)

 

Console Spirituality

Curated by LAN Party (Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop)

Feral File

June 24 2025

press release (abridged) 

Opening June 24th on Feral File, Console Spirituality is curated by LAN Party (Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop), a Paris- and Tokyo-based duo whose practice centers on digital art, internet culture, and video games. Their curatorial approach draws from gaming subcultures, technostalgia, and worldbuilding—exploring how the narrative structures and symbolic systems of games shape digital visual culture and challenge the conventions of contemporary art.

The exhibition brings together five artists working at the intersection of game logic, glitch aesthetics, and digital mythmaking. Works by Emi Kusano, Keiken & Gabriel Massan, John Provencher, and Sabato Visconti channel the emotional power and ritual intensity of video games—and they’re so much more than images. Each is a portal into worlds shaped by identity, memory, technostalgia, and speculative faith. Born from the same conditions that have made gaming a dominant cultural form of the 21st century, these artworks glitch existing systems, render new ones, and ask what it means to make art in an age when our gods are avatars and our temples are rendered in Unity.

Long embraced by experimental creators, art games and game-informed practices remain undervalued within contemporary art. But as a generation raised on game logic begins to shape the art world—both as artists and collectors—the visual language and systems thinking of games are becoming central to how culture is made, experienced, and understood. Console Spirituality foregrounds this evolution, positioning gaming’s thematic and aesthetic frameworks not as peripheral gestures, but as a foundational layer in the evolving landscape of contemporary art.

LINK: FERAL FILE (Thanks, Kieran!)

Described as an experimental work, Kent Sheely’s Frameworks (2025–ongoing) reanimates the visual grammar of early 3D video game modelling through a process that is simultaneously manual, sculptural, and painterly. Each composition begins with a stitched wireframe, embroidered directly onto raw canvas, evoking the skeletal geometry of polygonal modelling used in digital environments before textures, shaders, or physics are applied. These underlying meshes, typically invisible to players, are then painted over with acrylic, producing a surface that oscillates between the illusionistic and the structural, the pictorial and the procedural. 

Here, the term “framework” refers to the unseen scaffolding that shapes how objects, avatars, and terrains appear in virtual space. By physically laboring over these frameworks, Sheely insists on their materiality, recuperating the body in a medium, digital gaming, that usually occludes it. The embroidered lines, often done in bright, synthetic thread, retain the angular precision of low-poly design, but their tactility subverts the computational sterility associated with game engines. In short, these are simulations of wireframes, elevated into an aesthetic as well as a conceptual strategy.

Fig. 1 Kent Sheely, Duck Ribbon, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing. 

In Duck Ribbon (2025), for example, the polygonal silhouette of a goose bends into abstraction against a flat ultramarine background. The title hints at digital topology, the “ribbon” perhaps referencing the common 3D modelling technique used to animate wings or cloth, but here it takes on a handmade, even whimsical aspect. As with many of Sheely’s works, the irony is subtle: a goose, a domesticated icon of chaos in game culture (think Untitled Goose Game as well as Nintendo's classic Duck Hunt), rendered with reverence and minimalism.

Fig. 2 Kent Sheely, Escape, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing. 

In Escape, the most overtly referential of the series, a stylized polygonal bird, stitched in neon blue, ascends above an oppressive grey cityscape, flanked by smokestacks and boxed architecture. The glowing red ring encircling the bird could be read as an apocalyptic sun, a forcefield, or a portal, ambiguous iconography borrowed from gaming HUDs and alert systems. It is not just an image of flight, but of glitch, rupture, or defiance: the bird’s departure breaks the rigid geometry of the city below. The work recalls Soviet Constructivist aesthetics, merging utopian design and the propaganda of dystopian regimes.

Fig. 3 Kent Sheely, Sandvich, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing. 

The third example, Sandvich, literalizes the absurdity of game logic. A floating sandwich, exploded into its component parts—olive, bread, tomato, cheese, meat—hovers in impossible suspension. The structure is architectural: each ingredient rendered as a folded polygon, exaggerated in its volume and physics-defying levitation. It evokes both in-game consumables (a staple of inventory mechanics) and the 'logic' of itemization in first-person shooters. One might think of Team Fortress 2’s infamous healing sandwich or games in which foodstuffs become tools, currency, or comic relief. But in Sheely’s treatment, the irreverent and the absurd has been formalized: the sandwich is now an object of reverent, Cubist still life.

Frameworks is a material critique of digital illusionism. By foregrounding the wireframe, usually hidden behind a glossy finish, Sheely breaks the fourth wall of simulation and invites reflection on the scaffolding of digital representation itself. After all, wireframes are a constant motif in his oeuvre. Consider, for instance, Impressions of Play (2024), collages of unstable wireframe structures composited into long-exposure game screenshots, homaging Rosemarie Fiore. Sheeley’s process merges computational syntax with textile labor, collapsing the binaries between code and craft, image and object, representation and infrastructure. These works render visible the visual epistemology of gaming: how digital worlds are structured, ‘stitched’, and experienced. By embroidering code into canvas, Frameworks literalizes the invisible and paints the procedural.

LINK: Kent Sheely

Intrusion

digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 15’ 42” seconds, 2021, Taiwan

created by Poyuan Juan

vral.org

 

Intrusion draws upon the server migration incident that occurred between 2007 and 2011, when a large number of Chinese World of Warcraft players relocated to Taiwan servers following regulatory conflicts and censorship in mainland China. The video work reimagines this episode through the visual logic of the game itself: character models, rendered en masse, are subjected to simulated clustering algorithms and move in erratic, involuntary spasms, gesturing toward the violence of digital displacement and network congestion. Using stripped-down aesthetics — geometric primitives, textureless surfaces, and graphical glitches — the piece constructs a barren, destabilized environment suggestive of a digital ruin: a deserted server, abandoned infrastructure, a space left behind in cyberspace. At its core, Intrusion is a reflection on digital geography and geopolitical frictions. The migration to the Taiwan servers, prompted by stalled updates and censorship in China, resulted in login delays, overcrowding, and a degradation of the in-game experience. It also brought political tensions to the fore, with simplified Chinese characters dominating chat channels, gold-farming operations disrupting gameplay, and cross-strait hostilities surfacing in virtual space. By re-staging this moment, Intrusion contemplates the porous boundary between virtual architecture and real-world conflict, and how digital platforms unwittingly become zones of political entanglement.

Poyuan Juan is a Taipei-based artist whose work investigates the cultural afterlives of digital platforms, with a focus on online games, virtual environments, and the aesthetics of technological obsolescence. His solo exhibitions include presentations at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Digital Art Center, and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. His work has also been featured internationally at the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Videotage (Hong Kong), videoclub (UK), the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, and the Milan Machinima Festival, where his War Game Map and Sino-French War was shown in 2022. Juan’s practice operates at the intersection of digital archaeology and new media art, tracing the residues of networked interaction and interrogating the material conditions of virtual experience. Drawing on his background in visual arts and his immersion in post-internet culture, he integrates machinima, game engines, and 3D imaging tools to create time-based works that explore cyberqueer narratives, online communities, and the collapsing boundary between simulation and memory. His work asks what remains when virtual worlds decay, and how histories unfold within algorithmic architectures.

WATCH NOW

GAME ART: WERC’S THE VOYEUR OF UTTER DESTRUCTION (AS BEAUTY) (2025)

Standing before The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty), one is confronted by the chilling absurdity of purchasing the right to obliterate a city. In this interactive installation, Dutch Collective WERC lays bare the uneasy, visually seductive appeal of spectacular violence. The participant, posed as a player and a consumer, trades money for escalating scales of destruction, a grim parody of the transactional logic governing both entertainment and global politics.

In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen writes, “IA 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at the center of the Earth’s sun.”  This is a scenario so harrowing that it resists comprehension. Yet here, reduced to a button press and a digital detonation, mass destruction becomes a (visually compelling, dare I say) game. WERC’s work lays a finger on that ethical nerve, asking: what happens when the unimaginable becomes spectacularly consumable?

The installation’s command console, emblazoned with the phrase BUY AN EXPLOSION, places the audience in a position of ultimate agency, if only virtually. This simulated power to demolish an entire city in seconds resonates with Bakunin’s provocation, embraced by the artists: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” The idea that annihilation satisfies a creative or transformative impulse is especially sinister in a world where nuclear deterrence still relies on the threat of total erasure. The mantra of Silicon Valley broligarchs, creative destruction, acquires yet a new terrifying meaning in the age of nuclear accelerationism.

WERC’s pointed critique lands with uncomfortable force. Modern entertainment has fetishized explosions: film, games, and news cycles alike present destruction in high resolution, from every angle, as a feast for the senses. But when these explosions leave the realm of fiction and cross into possible futures, the moral calculus changes. The digital violence of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) is, in effect, a rehearsal for complicity: a mirror to our own appetite for ruin, disguised as spectacle.

By harnessing the Unreal Game engine to question our participation in this cycle of destructive desire, WERC confronts us with the pleasure we take in omnipotence, whether virtual or real. It is a moment that unravels our moral comfort, exposing a deep ambivalence between condemnation and consumption. In a contingency where, as Jacobsen warns, nuclear guardians may fail catastrophically, the work resonates as a cautionary reflection on how easily we aestheticise mass death, trading ethics for a brief illusion of control.

In The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty), the interval between press start to game over is incredibly short. 

The artist collective WERC creates and develops interactive media art that bridges nature, theatre, science, and technology. At the heart of their practice lies a commitment to humanising technology and exploring the dynamic interplay between people, nature, and machines. Through their installations and performances, WERC probes the threshold between the physical and the digital, asking where one world ends and the other begins—and whether such a division can truly be made. WERC consists of Olav Huizer, Joachim Rümke, and Jelle Valk, who met while studying at the Minerva Academy in Groningen. United by a shared passion for digital art and site-responsive projects, they have since worked collectively to challenge perceptions of how art can inhabit and transform contemporary environments.

Credits
Concept: WERC
Business coordination: Jesse Korte
Sound design: Nicholas Thayer
Photos: Nienke Maat
Co-design: Britt Reijners
Software advice: Timo van Dijk
Additional design: Nia Paleshnikova

Gallery

LINK: WERC COLLECTIVE (Special thanks to Joachim Rümke)

CALL FOR PAPERS: THE ALMANAC OF ARTIFICIAL SEASONS (DEADLINE: JULY 1 2025)

Call for Contributions: The Almanac of Artificial Seasons

Edited By Delta Ark/World Engines Lab & Ilan Manouach w/ the support of Src Material (Seattle) and Echo Chamber (Brussels)

What are the (synthetic, mental, etc) landscapes that emerge from the deregulation of climate, the acceleration of machine learning technologies and trend towards neo-feudalism? 

The Almanac of Artificial Seasons is a collection exploring the unstable territories emerging at the intersection of these forces. 

We invite theoretical articles, comics and documentations for artistic projects such as Unreal Engine environments, motion capture performances and interactive narratives, that delve into the shifting landscapes where climate transformation, ai technologies, network (and anti- network) politics and artistic practice converge.

To grasp the current changes in climate, acceleration of ML technologies and global trend towards neo-feudalism is to engage with a massive, nonlocal entity—one that is composed of thousands of disparate models, operates on incompatible scales, and is derived from diverse data collection practices and heterogeneous objects. These systems transcend the limitations of human spatiotemporal specificities, rendering any attempt at understanding them from a conventional epistemological distance insufficient.

Instead, these phenomena require us to embrace multiple disciplinary perspectives that can collectively capture their intricate dynamics. As climate instability disrupts traditional state functions, decision-making shifts toward automated systems, where predictive analytics dictate migration policies and algorithmic models optimize disaster response—sometimes reinforcing inequalities rather than resolving them. No single field can fully elucidate the layers of interactions and feedback loops present in these dynamics.

This anthology (book and site) creates a space for exploring these emerging territories. The works collected here suggest that our future might not just be a story of adaptation or collapse, but of transformation into forms we can barely begin to imagine - some promising, some terrifying, many both at once.

#machinelearing #multiagentsystems #digitalhumans #ecosimulation #environmentalsensing #simulation #unnrealengine #gameengines #motioncapture #manga #comics #conceptualcomics #borne #vandermeer #drownedcities #bacigalupi #blame! #nihei #thebookofkoli #nausicaaofthevalleyofthewind #theskycrawlers #ergoproxy #haibanerenmei #firehunter #horizonzerodawnbutnodinosaurs #cavesofqud #xenogears #hyperlightdrifter #nierautomata #life3.0 #lifeasnooneknowsit #situationalawareness #networkstates #darwinamongthemachines #symbiogensis #technium #warintheageofintelligentmachines #biopunk #postcyberpunk

Submission Requirements:

Short bio (150 words)

Abstract (250 words)

Visual documentation (up to 10 images and/or 1 min. of video)

Send to: [email protected] 

Info: https://www.echochamber.be/en/opencalls/almanac/

Timeline:

Deadline for abstracts: July 1st, 2025

Notifications of acceptance: August 1st, 2025

Src Material is a proud supporter of The Almanac of Artificial Seasons

LINK: THE ALMANAC OF ARTIFICIAL SEASONS (Special thanks to Marianne Goldin/Src Material)

EVENT: LUCA MIRANDA, RICCARDO RETEZ (JUNE 20—JULY 3 2025)

A Poet in the (Parallel) World

digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 7′ 45”, 2023, Italy.

created by Luca Miranda, Riccardo Retez

VRAL

June 20-July 3 2025

 

A Poet in the (Parallel) World reimagines the relationship between poetry, photography, and virtual environments. Part of an ongoing series examining remakes and adaptations within video game spaces, this machinima reconstructs fragments from Denise Levertov’s writings and Robert Adams’ photographic series A Parallel World (2020), translating them into a visual-poetic language shaped by the logic of the game engine. The avatar, navigating the hostile, post-apocalyptic landscape of Days Gone, becomes both witness and medium, channeling the poet’s voice and the photographer’s gaze while traversing a world governed by violence and algorithmic control. Set in a fictional Oregon two years after a fictional pandemic, the terrain echoes Adams’ contemplative images of dunes, windswept trees, and the Pacific coast, refracted through a dystopian lens. Levertov’s 1973 collection The Poet in the World serves as a conceptual anchor, framing the machinima’s central question: What does beauty mean when glimpsed within a world designed to simulate catastrophe and survival? Through in-game photography and synthetic narration, Miranda and Retez constructs a parallelism between what is seen and what is spoken, between the virtual and the poetic, proposing a subtle inquiry into perception, memory, and aesthetic resistance.

Luca Miranda is an Italian artist, writer, and independent researcher whose work explores the intersections between reality and simulation, with a particular focus on the aesthetic and political capacities of video games. Through machinima, game photography, and hybrid audiovisual forms, he investigates the avatar, procedural environments, and the ideological grammars embedded in game systems. His practice engages with concepts such as immersion, interpassivity, and the tensions between authorship and automation. Miranda holds degrees from the University of Bologna and IULM University. In 2018, he co-founded Eremo, a Milan-based collective working across video games, sound art, and performance. From 2020 to 2024, he was part of the curatorial team at the Milan Machinima Festival. His first book, published in 2021, examines the aesthetics and design of walking simulators. His work has been presented at venues including the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Metronom Gallery, IAFF Animator, Spazio InSitu, and Le Cube Garges.

Riccardo Retez is a multimedia designer, researcher, and adjunct professor with a focus on media sociology. His work explores the intersections of video games, digital art, and communication, with particular attention to the role of spectatorship and the dynamics of contemporary digital ecosystems. He holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Media Studies from IULM University in Milan and teaches at several institutions across Italy, including the University of Padua, the SAE Institute in Milan, and LABA in Florence. Retez contributes regularly to international academic journals and edited volumes, and curates events dedicated to contemporary visual culture. His research investigates how media practices shape perception and engagement in technologically mediated environments. He is the author of Machinima Vernacolare (Concrete Press, 2020) and the editor of The Real Aftermath: How COVID-19 Changed the Way Science Fiction is Conceived, Read, and Interpreted (Vernon Press, 2023).

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EVENT: CONSOLE SPIRITUALITY (JUNE 24 2025, ONLINE)

Exhibition identity artwork: Keiken & Gabriel Massan, Uxkme / Morphogenic Angels: I know who I am, although I have forgotten who I am (2025)

 

Console Spirituality

Curated by LAN Party (Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop)

Feral File

June 24 2025

press release (abridged) 

Opening June 24th on Feral File, Console Spirituality is curated by LAN Party (Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop), a Paris- and Tokyo-based duo whose practice centers on digital art, internet culture, and video games. Their curatorial approach draws from gaming subcultures, technostalgia, and worldbuilding—exploring how the narrative structures and symbolic systems of games shape digital visual culture and challenge the conventions of contemporary art.

The exhibition brings together five artists working at the intersection of game logic, glitch aesthetics, and digital mythmaking. Works by Emi Kusano, Keiken & Gabriel Massan, John Provencher, and Sabato Visconti channel the emotional power and ritual intensity of video games—and they’re so much more than images. Each is a portal into worlds shaped by identity, memory, technostalgia, and speculative faith. Born from the same conditions that have made gaming a dominant cultural form of the 21st century, these artworks glitch existing systems, render new ones, and ask what it means to make art in an age when our gods are avatars and our temples are rendered in Unity.

Long embraced by experimental creators, art games and game-informed practices remain undervalued within contemporary art. But as a generation raised on game logic begins to shape the art world—both as artists and collectors—the visual language and systems thinking of games are becoming central to how culture is made, experienced, and understood. Console Spirituality foregrounds this evolution, positioning gaming’s thematic and aesthetic frameworks not as peripheral gestures, but as a foundational layer in the evolving landscape of contemporary art.

LINK: FERAL FILE (Thanks, Kieran!)

GAME ART: KENT SHEELY’S FRAMEWORK SERIES (2025-ONGOING)

Described as an experimental work, Kent Sheely’s Frameworks (2025–ongoing) reanimates the visual grammar of early 3D video game modelling through a process that is simultaneously manual, sculptural, and painterly. Each composition begins with a stitched wireframe, embroidered directly onto raw canvas, evoking the skeletal geometry of polygonal modelling used in digital environments before textures, shaders, or physics are applied. These underlying meshes, typically invisible to players, are then painted over with acrylic, producing a surface that oscillates between the illusionistic and the structural, the pictorial and the procedural. 

Here, the term “framework” refers to the unseen scaffolding that shapes how objects, avatars, and terrains appear in virtual space. By physically laboring over these frameworks, Sheely insists on their materiality, recuperating the body in a medium, digital gaming, that usually occludes it. The embroidered lines, often done in bright, synthetic thread, retain the angular precision of low-poly design, but their tactility subverts the computational sterility associated with game engines. In short, these are simulations of wireframes, elevated into an aesthetic as well as a conceptual strategy.

Fig. 1 Kent Sheely, Duck Ribbon, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing. 

In Duck Ribbon (2025), for example, the polygonal silhouette of a goose bends into abstraction against a flat ultramarine background. The title hints at digital topology, the “ribbon” perhaps referencing the common 3D modelling technique used to animate wings or cloth, but here it takes on a handmade, even whimsical aspect. As with many of Sheely’s works, the irony is subtle: a goose, a domesticated icon of chaos in game culture (think Untitled Goose Game as well as Nintendo's classic Duck Hunt), rendered with reverence and minimalism.

Fig. 2 Kent Sheely, Escape, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing. 

In Escape, the most overtly referential of the series, a stylized polygonal bird, stitched in neon blue, ascends above an oppressive grey cityscape, flanked by smokestacks and boxed architecture. The glowing red ring encircling the bird could be read as an apocalyptic sun, a forcefield, or a portal, ambiguous iconography borrowed from gaming HUDs and alert systems. It is not just an image of flight, but of glitch, rupture, or defiance: the bird’s departure breaks the rigid geometry of the city below. The work recalls Soviet Constructivist aesthetics, merging utopian design and the propaganda of dystopian regimes.

Fig. 3 Kent Sheely, Sandvich, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing. 

The third example, Sandvich, literalizes the absurdity of game logic. A floating sandwich, exploded into its component parts—olive, bread, tomato, cheese, meat—hovers in impossible suspension. The structure is architectural: each ingredient rendered as a folded polygon, exaggerated in its volume and physics-defying levitation. It evokes both in-game consumables (a staple of inventory mechanics) and the 'logic' of itemization in first-person shooters. One might think of Team Fortress 2’s infamous healing sandwich or games in which foodstuffs become tools, currency, or comic relief. But in Sheely’s treatment, the irreverent and the absurd has been formalized: the sandwich is now an object of reverent, Cubist still life.

Frameworks is a material critique of digital illusionism. By foregrounding the wireframe, usually hidden behind a glossy finish, Sheely breaks the fourth wall of simulation and invites reflection on the scaffolding of digital representation itself. After all, wireframes are a constant motif in his oeuvre. Consider, for instance, Impressions of Play (2024), collages of unstable wireframe structures composited into long-exposure game screenshots, homaging Rosemarie Fiore. Sheeley’s process merges computational syntax with textile labor, collapsing the binaries between code and craft, image and object, representation and infrastructure. These works render visible the visual epistemology of gaming: how digital worlds are structured, ‘stitched’, and experienced. By embroidering code into canvas, Frameworks literalizes the invisible and paints the procedural.

LINK: Kent Sheely

EVENT: POYUAN JUAN (JUNE 6—19 2025, ONLINE)

Intrusion

digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 15’ 42” seconds, 2021, Taiwan

created by Poyuan Juan

vral.org

 

Intrusion draws upon the server migration incident that occurred between 2007 and 2011, when a large number of Chinese World of Warcraft players relocated to Taiwan servers following regulatory conflicts and censorship in mainland China. The video work reimagines this episode through the visual logic of the game itself: character models, rendered en masse, are subjected to simulated clustering algorithms and move in erratic, involuntary spasms, gesturing toward the violence of digital displacement and network congestion. Using stripped-down aesthetics — geometric primitives, textureless surfaces, and graphical glitches — the piece constructs a barren, destabilized environment suggestive of a digital ruin: a deserted server, abandoned infrastructure, a space left behind in cyberspace. At its core, Intrusion is a reflection on digital geography and geopolitical frictions. The migration to the Taiwan servers, prompted by stalled updates and censorship in China, resulted in login delays, overcrowding, and a degradation of the in-game experience. It also brought political tensions to the fore, with simplified Chinese characters dominating chat channels, gold-farming operations disrupting gameplay, and cross-strait hostilities surfacing in virtual space. By re-staging this moment, Intrusion contemplates the porous boundary between virtual architecture and real-world conflict, and how digital platforms unwittingly become zones of political entanglement.

Poyuan Juan is a Taipei-based artist whose work investigates the cultural afterlives of digital platforms, with a focus on online games, virtual environments, and the aesthetics of technological obsolescence. His solo exhibitions include presentations at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Digital Art Center, and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. His work has also been featured internationally at the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Videotage (Hong Kong), videoclub (UK), the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, and the Milan Machinima Festival, where his War Game Map and Sino-French War was shown in 2022. Juan’s practice operates at the intersection of digital archaeology and new media art, tracing the residues of networked interaction and interrogating the material conditions of virtual experience. Drawing on his background in visual arts and his immersion in post-internet culture, he integrates machinima, game engines, and 3D imaging tools to create time-based works that explore cyberqueer narratives, online communities, and the collapsing boundary between simulation and memory. His work asks what remains when virtual worlds decay, and how histories unfold within algorithmic architectures.

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