MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV onsite screening day #2
March 21 2025, 2—5 pm
MUBI Microcinema @ Vidiots
Los Angeles, California 90041
Programs:
03/19/2025
EVENT: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL ONSITE SCREENINGS #1 (MARCH 20 2025, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA)
MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV
onsite screening day #1
March 20 2025, 2—5 pm
MUBI Microcinema @ Vidiots
Los Angeles, California 90041
Programs:
GAME VIDEO ESSAY I| | MADE IN ITALY | REPROGRAMMED VISIONS
03/17/2025
EVENT: MARVELS OF MEDIA FESTIVAL 2025 (MARCH 27 - 29 2025, NEW YORK)
MARVELS OF MEDIA FESTIVAL 2025
MARCH 27-29 2025
MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE
36-01 35 Avenue
press release
The Marvels of Media Festival kicks off with a festive opening night celebration recognizing the outstanding work of autistic media-makers. Throughout the weekend, guests are invited to explore exhibitions: The Adventure of Nature and the Senses, featuring virtual reality experiences and video art, and Marvels of Media Game Lab Exhibition, showcasing playable video games. Join us for a workshop, networking mixer, and five film programs of new comedies, animations, and documentaries followed by panel discussions.
The free festival is part of the Museum’s year-round Marvels of Media initiative, which showcases, celebrates, and supports autistic media-makers of all ages and skill sets. The fourth annual Marvels of Media Festival expands the Museum’s accessibility efforts for autistic visitors through the creation of a sensory relief space in the Media Lab and sensory kits, which are available at the front desk.
This year’s festival was organized by MoMI’s Associate Curator of Public Programs Tiffany Joy Butler, MoMI’s Director of Education Leonardo Santana-Zubieta, Access Consultant Miranda Lee, Tour Consultant Sachar Mathias, and MoMI Intern Alex Poppe, with the Marvels of Media Steering Committee: filmmaker and playwright Jackson Tucker-Meyer, President and Founder of Strokes of Genius, Inc. Rosa Martínez, and Film Event Accessibility Consultant and Producer Yaara Kedem.
To create an inclusive environment, the festival will have accessible components for autistic and other neurodivergent visitors, such as a sensory relief room, sensory kit, and visual guide.
LINK: Marvels of Media Festival 2025
03/09/2025
EVENT: MÉLANIE COURTINAT’S THE SIREN (FEBRUARY 12 - MARCH 23 2025, SAN FRANCISCO)
Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren, 2023, video game.
Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren
February 12–March 23, 2025
Gray Area
2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110
press release
Gray Area is pleased to present Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren, a solo exhibition and the US premiere of a new video game work by French artist Mélanie Courtinat. Join us in the Gray Area Gallery on February 12 for an opening reception and guided playthrough with curator Wade Wallerstein.
The Siren (2024) is an interactive experience built with Unreal Engine that questions the traditional conventions of video games.
In the game, players embody a heroine wearing a shining suit of armor who wanders aimlessly along a beach at dusk. Once in control, players explore this beautiful and austere world under the watchful eye of an omniscient narrator. The narrator prompts players to undertake the seemingly arbitrary task—or side quest—of collecting bioluminescent seashells scattered across the sand. Only by collecting all of the shells can the player advance to the main quest: rescuing a damsel in distress.
Though rendered in ultra-high definition fidelity, resembling the hyperrealistic outputs of mass market AAA game studio productions, The Siren’s unique mechanics make it a distinctly different experience. The work elides a blockbuster main storyline and instead hones in on the droll imperatives and mundane taskings present in most video games. In this way, The Siren probes the meanings we assign to actions within gamespace, our relationships to the worlds we inhabit, and the motivations behind our playful engagements.
This experience is designed to be accessible to all visitors, including gaming newcomers, while also providing an additional meta-level of understanding for seasoned players.
The Siren is presented in San Francisco with support from Villa Albertine, in partnership with the Albertine Foundation, the Institut Français, and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs. Gray Area is proud to be a 2025 French Immersion Laureate institution.
The Siren was originally commissioned by the Pully Art Museum as part of their exhibition Vivre l’œuvre/Voyage aux frontières de l’art immersif contemporain.
Mélanie Courtinat (1993) is an award-winning artist and art director based in Paris. Considering video games as a major medium, she focuses on their extraordinary immersive properties and seeks to push their boundaries. Her work, crafted through the use of digital tools, encompasses CGI images and films, interactive experiences, as well as virtual and augmented reality projects. As an artist, her personal creations are consistently showcased worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries, and museums, from Tokyo to New York. As an art director, she collaborates on commissioned projects for clients in the luxury, fashion, culture, and music industries. Mélanie also teaches video game history at ÉCAL in Lausanne and virtual reality at Beaux-Arts de Paris, while regularly conducting lectures and workshops in academic settings.
Don't miss the workshop on March 17 2025.
LINK: Mélanie Courtinat
LINK: Gray Area
03/06/2025
EVENT: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV (MARCH 17-23 2025, LOS ANGELES AND ONLINE)
MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV
REBOOT/RESTART/RESET
MARCH 17—23 2025
Los Angeles, California and online
The Milan Machinima Festival MMXXV presents a curated selection of 31 machinima and game videos by 35 artists from 17 countries, including Belarus, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the USA. Spanning nine programs, the festival unfolds online (March 17–23, 2025) and onsite in Los Angeles, California (March 20–21, 2025), showcasing works that challenge storytelling conventions, repurpose game engines as cinematic tools, and interrogate the aesthetics and politics of virtual worlds.
02/25/2025
EVENT: RADICAL SOFTWARE: WOMEN, ART & COMPUTING 1960-1991 (FEBRUARY 28 - MAY 25 2025, VIENNA, AUSTRIA)
Dara Birnbaum, Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, 1980, © Courtesy Dara Birnbaum und / and Eletrconic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Radical Software
Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991
February 28–May 25, 2025
Exhibition opening: February 27, 7pm
Symposium: February 28, 9am–6pm
kunsthallewien.at
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien
press release
Kunsthalle Wien presents a major new exhibition examining the pioneering role of women in digital art. Organised in collaboration with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 brings together over one hundred works by fifty artists including painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts.
A principally analogue exhibition about digital art, Radical Software focuses on the decades that preceded the rise of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of digital information and images that ensued, shaping artistic production and visual culture in the following decades. The exhibition is titled after the magazine that Beryl Korot started with fellow artists Phyllis (Gershuny) Segura and Ira Schneider in 1970. They adopted the term software (as opposed to hardware) as a metaphor and powerful tool for social change. The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial model and mission to serve as “an evolving handbook of technology,” decentralising access to information, predated the World Wide Web by two decades.
Beginning with works from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition spans a period from the first years of integrated circuit computing to the “microcomputer revolution,” which led to the birth of personal computing in the 1980s. The first works date from a time in which artists, poets, writers and filmmakers experimented with mainframe and minicomputers alongside mathematicians, scientists and engineers to produce and exhibit the first computer-generated images and texts. During these three decades the computer migrated from the laboratory to private, domestic space. Yet with each retelling of this history, the significant engagement of women with the technology has been largely overlooked. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, this exhibition documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on women.
Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 also engages with contemporary questions of how technology interfaces with issues of identity and equality. The exhibition follows a renewed interest in the post-internet discourse of cyberfeminism, which highlights the role that women played in the creation of new digital technologies and engages critically with the entanglement of technology and power structures.
Artists: Rebecca Allen (b. 1953, Detroit), Elena Asins (b. 1940, Madrid–d. 2015, Navarra), Colette Stuebe Bangert (b. 1934, Columbus) & Charles Jeffries Bangert (b. 1938, Fargo–d. 2019, Lawrence), Gretchen Bender (b. 1951, Seaford, Delaware–d. 2004, New York City), Gudrun Bielz (b. 1954, Linz) & Ruth Schnell (b. 1956, Feldkirch), Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, New York City), Inge Borchardt (b. 1935, Szczecin, formerly Stettin), Barbara Buckner (b. 1950, Chicago), Doris Chase (b. 1923–d. 2008, Seattle), Analívia Cordeiro (b. 1954, São Paulo), Betty Danon (b. 1927, Istanbul–d. 2002, Milan), Hanne Darboven (b. 1941, Munich–d. 2009, Hamburg), Bia Davou (b. 1932–d. 1996, Athens), Agnes Denes (b. 1938, Budapest), VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Linz), Anna Bella Geiger (1933, Rio de Janeiro), Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Bad Oldesloe), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965, Strasbourg), Lily Greenham (b. 1924, Vienna–d. 2001, London), Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem), Barbara Hammer (b. 1939, Los Angeles–d. 2019, New York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland), Grace C. Hertlein (b. 1924, Chicago–d. 2015, Chico), Channa Horwitz (b. 1932–d. 2013, Los Angeles), Irma Hünerfauth (b. 1907, Donaueschingen–d. 1998, Kreuth), Charlotte Johannesson (b. 1943, Malmö), Alison Knowles (b. 1933, New York City), Beryl Korot (b. 1945, New York City), Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad), Ruth Leavitt (b. 1944, St. Paul, Minnesota–d. 2025, Baltimore), Liliane Lijn (b. 1939, New York), Vera Molnár (b. 1924, Budapest–d. 2023, Paris), Monique Nahas (b. 1940, Paris) & Hervé Huitric (b. 1945, Paris), Katherine Nash (b. 1910–1982, Minneapolis), Sonya Rapoport (b. 1923, Brookline–d. 2015, Berkeley), Deborah Remington (b. 1930, Haddonfield–d. 2010, Moorestown), Sylvia Roubaud (b. 1941, Munich), Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923, Toronto–d. 2015, Hampton Bays), Lillian Schwartz (b. 1927, Cincinnati, Ohio–d. 2024, New York City), Sonia Sheridan (b. 1925, Newark–d. 2021, Hanover), Nina Sobell (b. 1947, Patchogue), Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena), Tamiko Thiel (b. 1957, Oakland), Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952, Schwerte), Joan Truckenbrod (b. 1945, Greensboro), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp), Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942, Stockholm)
Symposium: Radical Software: On the first day of the exhibition, 28 February 2025, Kunsthalle Wien and TU Wien will host a symposium bringing together highly distinguished female researchers from the fields of art and science including Gerti Kappel, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Margit Rosen, Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Ina Wagner and artists Gudrun Bielz, Inge Borchardt, Anna Bella Geiger, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liliane Lijn, Sylvia Roubaud, Ruth Schnell, Nina Sobell, Tamiko Thiel and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven.
Exhibition publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication including essays by Tina Rivers Ryan, Margit Rosen and the exhibition’s curator, Michelle Cotton. Co-published with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, it features over 200 illustrations, a timeline and twenty-seven new interviews with artists from the exhibition.
Kunsthalle Wien is financed by the Magistratsabteilung Kultur der Stadt Wien (MA 7). The artistic programme is also supported by the members and patrons of the Kunsthalle Wien Club. The exhibition and symposium are made possible through the generous support of Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.
02/23/2025
EVENT: JUST PLAYIN’ AROUND (JANUARY 21 - APRIL 26 2025, PORTLAND, OREGON)
Matthew Earl Williams, Twentysix Gasoline Stations In Grand Theft Auto V, 2014-24, digital prints, Each 16 x 20 inches framed, © m. earl Williams, Courtesy of the artist.
Just Playin' Around
curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le GuinJanuary 21 - April 26 2025
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
PSU1855 SW Broadway
Portland, OR 97201
press release
Once our basic needs are met, we humans have always turned to play and art. Children learn how to navigate the world by playing. Adults depend on play to bring joy and connection to others. The United Nations recognizes play as a universal right of children, and mental health specialists increasingly recommend play for its therapeutic benefit at all ages.
Artists often talk about their work as a form of play involving materials, ideas, and imagination. Play can be part of the process of making art, but can also be its subject matter. Artists create meaning from childhood memories, toys, games, and sport, reframing the past, interpreting the present, or imagining the future. Play is also a way for artists to seek release from meaning, to resist others’ need to interpret or instrumentalize their work, as seen in absurdist art-historical movements such as Dada.
Industrialized societies often treat play as childlike or trivial, an obstacle to productivity. Our cultural institutions define which artworks and artists are worthy of attention, often presenting art in distinctly unplayful settings, equating seriousness with cultural value. This belies the ways in which playfulness, surprise, silliness, and humor in art are able to engage charged emotional, social, and political issues.
Not all art needs to be playful, but in the end, play and art may not be so different. In both, we seek freedom, release, and community. Sometimes we create and receive meaning through our games and our art, and sometimes we just want to have fun. Just Playin’ Around is a peephole into some of the many ways in which art is play, play is art, and both are in all of us.Just Playin’ Around is curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin. This exhibition is supported by The Ford Family Foundation, The Reser Family Foundation, the Jackson Foundation, Elements Roofing, the Richard and Helen Phillips Charitable Fund, and the JSMA Exhibition Circle.
LINK: Just Playin' Around
02/14/2025
GAME ART: LEYUAN LI’S HALF DAY TOUR (2024)
Leyuan Li, Half Day Tour, video installation, 2024, installation view, photo: HFBK Hamburg
Leyuan Li, Half Day Tour, video installation, 2024, screenshot, photo: HFBK Hamburg
Half Day Tour is a video installation by Leyuan Li, derived from a game he developed and recorded. In this work, the artist assumes the role of a guide, leading viewers through the mechanics of the game system. Set within a fictionalized natural environment, the game follows a boat - scanned by the artist after encountering it in Nigeria - that players navigate through a landscape shaped by his personal visual memories. As they progress, they encounter landmarks accompanied by whimsical, fictional background stories. Yet, any attempt to uncover hidden sites inevitably returns them to the starting point.
LINK: Leyuan Li
02/04/2025
EVENT: CODE-X: CONTEMPORARY CHICANX CODICES (JANUARY 9 - FEBRUARY 23 2025, DENVER, COLORADO)
Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices
curated by Rafael Fajardo
January 9 - February 23 2025
Vicki Myhren Gallery
2121 E. Asbury Ave.
Denver, CO 80210
press release
The Vicki Myhren Gallery is proud to present Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices, curated by DU’s own Rafael Fajardo, Professor of Emergent Digital Practices. This exhibition brings together the artworks of more than a dozen Chicanx artists who reimagine the long tradition of the codex as a dynamic space for Chicanx storytelling. Ranging from painting and prints to comic books, zines, and video games, these artworks bridge the analog and digital. The artists mix the ancient, colonial, and modern to explore the complexities of contemporary life, including migration, Mestizaje, and cultural survival. Featuring many interactive artworks, this exhibition invites all visitors to play and engage with these innovative and thoughtful reworkings of the codex.
One of the highlights of this remarkable exhibition is Leo Sailas' Barrio Bros., a platform game "set in an environment that draws heavily from Chicano and Mexican American heritage. Players navigate through levels teeming with various encounters and challenges. As Barrio, (the protagonist) players encounter imaginative enemies like hard taco monsters, (Crunchers WIP) navigating through platforms that blend traditional motifs we are all familiar with and fictional elements." (Sailas)
You can play Barrio Bros here.
01/22/2025
EVENT: ZEROED IN: BETWEEN WORLDS. VIDEO GAMES AND THE PHYSICAL (JANUARY 24 2025, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS)
𝔃𝓮𝓻𝓸𝓮𝓭 𝓲𝓷
Student Final Work from ART 250: Between Worlds, Video Games and the Physical @ University of Illinois Chicago
Friday, January 24, 2025
6:00 PM 9:00 PM
VGA Project Lab 2233 South Throop Street #843
Chicago, IL, 60608 United States
curated by
Jared Kelley-Hudgins, UIC ART 250 Instructor
Eleanor Schichtel, VGA Director of Exhibitions
with works by Avery Chang, Shawnie Higuera, Cristiana Salerno, Dante Moore
Amid hard deadlines for as many as five other college courses, the students featured in this exhibition developed intriguing projects in the feverish context of the late semester crunch. What’s more, these projects stand out in particular for demonstrating genuinely original inspiration from the beginner tutorials they received in creative coding, video game design, and augmented reality. These delightfully weird and unpretentious early works are a testament to experimentation in new media art education.
LINK: ZEROED IN