GAMESCENES

EVENT: SLIP.STREAM.SLIP (PART 2) RESISTANCE AND VELOCITY IN GAME ENGINE CULTURE (OCTOBER 13 - DECEMBER 16 2022, MANCHESTER, ENGLAND)

Slip.Stream.Slip (Part 2)—resistance and velocity in game engine culture

Curated by Valentino Catricalà

Modal gallery at the School of Digital Arts (SODA), Manchester, England

October 13–December 16, 2022, Monday–Friday, 12–5pm

 

press release

Modal is a brand new digital gallery showcasing artists working at the forefront of creative technology, based at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Join us for part two of our inaugural exhibition, Slip.Stream.Slip – focusing on game engine culture and the shift toward gamification as a model for understanding our lived experiences. The exhibition explores the tensions and contested spaces that open up when the micro politics of everyday living meet complex, simulated worlds.

Featured artists: Dara Birnbaum, Joseph DeLappe, Mishka Henner, Pierre Huyghe, Trevor Paglen, Quayola, Hito Steyerl, and a selection of DIS artists.

This is the follow up to Part 1  (24 June – 18 September 2022).

Joseph DeLappe, Killbox: A Game About Drone Warfare, Interactive Installation, 2015-2016

Hito Steyerl, The Tower, Three channel high-definition video installation, environment and sound, 2015

LINK: Slip.Stream.Slip (Part Two)

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

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: 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.

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EVENT: XMUSEUM.ORG (ONLINE)

press release

Artists: Kim Laughton, Gabriel Massan, CheeseTalk, ayrtbh

X Virtual Incubator is the inaugural project of X Virtual—an assemblage of virtual worlds that provides 3D meetups for art enthusiasts and creative intellectuals. The project features first-person exploration of new digital art commissions and is a result of the project team’s two-year research on virtual environments and online exhibitions. X Virtual Incubator brings together four artists working across China, the UK, and Brazil, whose practices spark new methodological archetypes for the impending network of virtual art. The project is co-curated by Poppy Dongxue Wu and Pete Jiadong Qiang.

The speculative future of The Spatial Web prompts the deployment of new digital infrastructure on a global scale whilst art practitioners enlightening by the oldest pioneer of the metaverse—massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). With the game engine becoming a prominent tool beyond the gaming industry, a broader group of artists started to create various works ranging from digital sculpture and audio-visual space to performance and indie games. This new protocol of art production in the virtual context has reconfigured the existing cultural and technological interface, spiking new branches in the expanded field previously framed by physical-virtual division. From the construction of an eerie archaeological temple standing in an untrodden desert to a series of intra-related virtual worlds conceptually threaded by violence and freedom, the artists in the show weave fictional civilisation, immigration histories and cross-continent geopolitics into uncanny cyberrealities, extending new territories between art and technology.

The project delves into spatiality and its multiple connotations in the virtual environment by commissioning artists to work primarily on X Virtual’s online community. From algorithmic music clips scattered around a meditative and boundless virtual space to AI chatbots in a fictional agency for hybrid cyborgs, the artists in the show envision new forms of audio-visual experience, after-image of the digital object, as well as potential sentient mutants brought by the accelerated development of cyborgs. X Virtual Incubator grounds interdisciplinary attempts that destabilise and re-envision the intricate web between digital art, virtual space and video game through text, sound, video, scene, AI chatbot and indie games.

A physical showcase of the project, including two immersive installations will be on view from September 2022 at X Museum in Beijing. With offline participation, new meanings that do not pre-exist in the online virtual worlds will be generated by artists and audiences. This project is in strategic partnership with Silicon Valet.

Join our Discord server here.

LINK: X MUSEUM

EVENT: ULTRA UNREAL (JULY 22 - OCTOBER 2 2022, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA)

Lu Yang, installation view, Ultra Unreal, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022. Image courtesy and © the artist. Photograph: Alex Davies

Ultra Unreal
New myths for new worlds
July 22–October 2 2022

Curated by Anna Davis

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Circular Quay West
140 George Street
Sydney NSW 2000
Australia
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–5pm,
Wednesday 10am–9pm

press release

Ultra Unreal at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) features the works of six artists and collectives. Club Ate (Sydney), Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic (Bangkok & New York), Lawrence Lek (London), Lu Yang (Shanghai), and Saeborg (Tokyo) create worlds that blend myth and reality, simulating more-than-human futures, evolving belief systems and fluid frameworks of being.

The fantastical worlds created by these artists are grounded in personal experience and politics. Populated by hybrid creatures and genderfluid beings, their worlds are spread across physical and virtual spaces at the MCA.

Ultra Unreal reflects on the relevance of mythmaking and its role in navigating complex realities of the present. Drawing inspiration from Ning Ken’s theory of the ultra-unreal, it examines how mythologies can be used to reveal hidden histories and reorientate visions of the future.

Works by Club Ate and Saeborg have emerged from the politics of the dancefloor, embodying the vitalities of underground and LGBTQIA+ nightclub communities. Works by Arunanondchai and Gvojic, Lek, and Lu, similarly pulse with late-night energy and investigate ideas that include Sinofuturism, reincarnation, empathy and nonhuman consciousness.

Curator Anna Davis says, “The artists and collectives in Ultra Unreal ask questions about belief and technology, empathy and consciousness. In our complex present, thinking critically about the worlds we want to create and inhabit is more important than ever before.”

Lawrence Lek, Geomancer, 2017. Installation view, Ultra Unreal, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022. Dingle-channel video, HD, colour, sound. Image courtesy and © the artist. Photograph: Anna Kučera

Exhibition highlights include:
Club Ate’s new video, sound and textile installation Ang Idol Ko / You are My Idol (2022) draws on Filipinx mythologies and club cultures to evoke queer, trans and animist idols for today. The installation combines ancestral figures from the Buwaya (crocodile) and Kinnari (bird) mythologies, and draws on historical accounts of the Babaylan; queer and trans shamans in the Philippines who act as intermediaries between visible and invisible worlds.

The brightly coloured rural world in Saeborg’s installation Slaughterhouse (2021–22) masks a darker commentary on gender roles and stereotypes in Japan. Using the role of livestock as an analogy for society’s treatment and expectations of women, Saeborg aims to highlight issues of gender-based power and control in human and nonhuman lives. Slaughterhouse began as a series of costumes and performances for the Tokyo nightclub Department H.

Lu Yang creates virtual environments to contemplate the nature of consciousness, suffering, death, and rebirth. “I imagine my worlds to be open-ended, non-binary and multi-dimensional” says Lu, whose digital worlds are populated with genderless avatars. Lu has been working on his latest avatar DOKU for several years. In this new series of works, DOKU appears in six different environments, each representing one of the six realms of rebirth and existence in Buddhist cosmology.

Exhibited for the first time in Australia, No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2018) is from a series of works Korakrit Arunanondchai has been developing for the past decade. This fifth episode examines unseen forces shaping our reality, and relationships between humans and more-than-human beings in the context of contemporary Thai mythology. Made in collaboration with Alex Gvojic, the immersive installation features Tosh Basco as the Naga, a recurring character inspired by a mythical serpent and anarchic spirit that can take human form.

Named after a fictional drug for forgetting sorrow in ancient Greek mythology, Lawrence Lek’s series Nepenthe explores connections between memory, virtual worlds, and environments geared towards healing. Nepenthe AR is a new augmented reality (AR) project commissioned by the MCA Australia that invites visitors to discover a series of restorative worlds on each level of the Museum. Nepenthe AR (2022) was inspired by the phenomenon known as the “doorway effect”; when people forget why they have walked into a room as they enter it.

The exhibition includes daily screenings of Lu Yang’s Delusional Mandala (2015) and DOKU—Documentary (2020); Lawrence Lek’s Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD)(2016), and Saeborg’s Pigpen Movie (2016).

LINK: Ultra Unreal

LINK: John McDonald's review of the exhibition

EVENT: PETRA SZEMAN'S OPENINGS!!! (AUGUST 3 - AUGUST 24 2022, ONLINE)

Petra Széman's latest artwork can be experienced in full glory at artreview.com until August 24 2022 as part of ArtLoversMovieClub.com.

‘Yourself’, the protagonist of Petra Szemán’s Openings !!! (2022) rides local trains through intermedial landscapes. Fragments of different worlds segue into view, signalling perceptual ruptures that seemingly force subjectivity outside of itself, into strange new relationships of interdependency and intoxication with the moving image. ‘There’s a world I can only see when I’m turned away from it’, they observe. Part of the artist’s ongoing exploration of the radical potential of animation and fandom, Openings !!! rejects its own filmic boundaries, surrendering instead to the free play of a multi-planar and ultimately elusive meta-worldview. Referencing anime credit sequences, video game loading screens and regional train journeys, Szemán’s film intensifies the gaps between the layers of animated imagery in an attempt to grasp the kinds of experience that may lie beyond human perceptual boundaries.

About the artist

Petra Szemán (they/them) is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Their practice focuses on the murky borderlands separating real and fictional, and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore threshold situations and spaces to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen) – to walk the line situated
between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons. Szemán graduated graduated from Newcastle University (2013-2017) with a BA in Fine Art, and has since exhibited at NEoN Festival, Dundee, Scotland; Big Screen Southend; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; ICC, Tokyo; and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. After spending two years in Japan as a recipient of a research scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture (2018-2020), Petra is now based between North-East England and Tokyo, Japan. They’re currently running ‘On Animatics’, a project to commission video works that fuse moving image, games and anime; and co-authoring the accompanying book WEEB THEORY with Jamie Sutcliffe (Banner Repeater, 2022).

LINK: Openings!!!

LINK: Petra Széman

EVENT: YALOO AND SIAN FAN MY GARDEN, MY SANCTUARY (JULY 21 - OCTOBER 9 2022, LIVERPOOL)

View of My Garden, My Sanctuary, FACT Liverpool, UK, 2022. Photo: Rob Battersby.

Yaloo and Sian Fan
My Garden, My Sanctuary
July 21–October 9, 2022

Curated by Carrie Chan

FACT Liverpool
88 Wood Street
Liverpool L1 4DQ
UK
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm

press release

FACT launches the summer exhibition My Garden, My Sanctuary: a collection of new, immersive artworks by Yaloo and Sian Fan—two artists using creative technology to tell stories of ancestry and self-discovery in a hyperconnected world.

Presented by FACT’s 2022 Curator-in-Residence, Carrie Chan, My Garden, My Sanctuary immerses visitors in playful, watery worlds. From anime and K-pop, to lotus flowers and seaweed, artists Yaloo (South Korea) and Sian Fan (UK) weave commodified symbols of east Asia throughout their work to reclaim their cultural identities, and remix their coming-of-age stories. The new commissions transform the galleries, taking shape as large-scale animated installations and interactive gaming environments.

Combining ancient Korean traditions and beliefs with family histories, Yaloo presents a mystical installation environment. Birthday Garden (2022) begins with a temple-like gateway, leading visitors into an underwater seaweed garden and giant, animated sheet mask. The work explores the challenge of shaping self-identity and cultural stories against the commercial context of Korean culture within global media.

As part of FACT’s work around how young people craft and embody digital identities, Yaloo expands on the themes in her work to include young people’s views and critique of popular culture and social media. A series of conversations with members from the University of Liverpool’s K-pop Society, and a group of young people from Liverpool, will result in a K-pop inspired dance, public performance and a podcast documenting their creative process.

Sian Fan, Lotus Root, 2022

Sian Fan combines imagery found in anime and fantasy video games with commercialised depictions of East-Asia. In her new commission Lotus Root (2022), Sian presents an anime fantasy video game set in a sanctuary of lotus flowers and lily pads. Hyper-real avatars are nestled within the space, inspired by the characters from anime series Sailor Moon and video games Final Fantasy and Grandia. Deity (2022) is a shrine to the virtual self. Multi-angle ‘mirrors’ wrapped in root-like sculptures present a digital performance, combining motion capture and physical movement. An avatar of the artist responds to audience interaction, revealing the connection with our virtual selves. The immersive installations challenge romanticised ideas of East-Asian culture and standards of femininity found in gaming and animation.

Sian Fan, Deity, 2022

Established in 2019, FACT’s annual residency programme invites curators to develop their ideas and research into a major exhibition and public programme of events. Carrie Chan, 2022 Curator-in-Residence at FACT, said: “The exhibition has been curated to feel like a rite of passage: a journey where visitors encounter two artists whose works reflect on their own identities and cultural heritage within a technology-driven, alternative world. My residency at FACT has enabled me to explore diverse curatorial approaches in narrating stories on ancestry, identities and belonging, and has given me the opportunity to bring two acclaimed digital media artists to Liverpool – a city with a strong history of Asian immigrants and diaspora.”

My Garden, My Sanctuary forms part of Radical Ancestry, FACT’s current year-long programme. Maitreyi Maheshwari, Head of Programme at FACT, said: “From ‘alternative museums’ of artworks that question how science and technology have shaped our understanding of the past, to the ways in which the stories and songs we inherit help define key moments in our lives, the Radical Ancestry programme is an exploration of our changing sense of self. This exhibition continues our journey from the past into a present in which the artists playfully remix symbols from their familial heritage with pop cultural references, creating new possibilities and hybrid identities. Carrie has introduced us to ambitious new artists whose outlooks and practices convey the energy and the difficulties in trying to forge a new way of being.”

My Garden, My Sanctuary is now open at FACT until October 9, 2022. The exhibition will be accompanied by a public programme of family friendly events including food-based workshops, curator tours, a talk exploring stereotypes and representation in gaming, and artist performances.

LINK: Yaloo And Sian Fan My Garden, My Sanctuary