Video installation: One-channel video, 23 min., HD video pro rez.MOV file. / Motion capture studio, blue, illuminated grid in the space / Free-standing projection architecture, sunloungers, and beach chairs
Currently on display at the German Pavillion of the 56th Venice Biennial, Hito Steyerl’s massive video installation Factory of the Sun is possibly the greatest Game Art work of 2015. Installed in the cave-like room of the Teutonic bunker, the piece is a meditation on lights, politics, gaming and ideology in a techno-neo-liberal world where Germany is replaced by Deutsche Bank, protesters are killed on a daily basis, and the virtual labor of gaming has become a coercive kind of work for the masses. Euro pop tunes, Just Dance gameplay, anime aesthetics, motion capture and state-surveillance constitute the main ingredients of this irresistible, visually overwhelming video.
Factory of the Sun redefines the potential of Game Art.
Video installation: One-channel video, 23 min., HD video pro rez.MOV file. / Motion capture studio, blue, illuminated grid in the space / Free-standing projection architecture, sunloungers, and beach chairs
Born 1966 in Munich, Hito Steyerl lives and works in Berlin. In addition to her artistic practice, she teaches Experimental Film and Video (New Media) at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Steyerl’s works have been shown around the world in numerous exhibitions and at a range of film festivals, most recently in the Artists Space, New York (2015), at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (2014), the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2014), the Art Institute of Chicago (2013), and the Biennale di Venezia (2013). In 2007 she took part in documenta 12.
Below is an excerpt from the press release:
Factory of the Sun slips into the form of a computer game, so as to draw on the narrative structure of popular entertainment and establish a more favourable position from which to do battle. For it is about nothing less than sounding out the remaining freedom of action that political individuals and subjects have in the face of the inextricable interlacing of digital streams of information, economic interests, and social and cultural distortions. As a result, everything in this game is based on the immateriality of light as a medium of information, physical bodies, and values.
Like the diverse modes of a computer game, the film switches between different levels of reality. The narrator is Yulia, who at the same time is also the programmer of the game, whose protagonists are initially introduced to us as slave labourers in a motion capture studio—the technical dispositif that transforms the movements of a figure into light impulses, the basis of all the virtual reality in a computer game. In a frantic montage, the dance scenes act as the motor in an incessant stream of changing images. At the same time, the act of dancing represents the most playful form of resistance for the young protagonists in their struggle against the supremacy of their invisible opponents.
LINK: German Pavillion at the 56th Venice Biennial
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (more photos available here)
