GAMESCENES

EVENT: GAME SOCIETY (MAY 12 - SEPTEMBER 10 2023, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA)

Game Society
May 12–September 10, 2023

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu
03062 Seoul
South Korea
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday 10am–6pm
Friday–Saturday 10am–9pm

Organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
Curated by Hong Leeji
Curatorial Assistant: Sojung Jang 
Technical support by Lee Giljae and Jiyoung Han

Artists: Cory Arcangel, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Harun Farocki, Jacky Connolly, Kim Heecheon, Lawrence Lek, Lu Yang, Ram Han

press release

Game Society is an exhibition that examines how the grammar and aesthetics of video games have influenced contemporary art and visual culture, and permeated our society and daily lives over the five decades since the launch of the first video game. Video games encompass interface design for visual and auditory stimulation, storytelling that spurs the imagination, immersive experiences and social interactions, which makes them the most relevant media form today. Game Society takes a closer look at the process of powerful synchronization between society and video games that has been accelerated by the pandemic. It explores the context in which society becomes virtual spaces and the reality of those spaces becoming part of everyday life, examining what experiences games can communicate and share with us. The exhibition features 9 video games and more than 30 artworks by contemporary artists who have been influenced by the grammar and aesthetics of video games. The games on display include Korean video games and select loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which have been acquiring games since the early 2010s.

To read is to imagine a world, to watch a movie is to observe that world, and to play a video game is to live in that world; the imagination and realism have become a shared experience and visual grammar in modern society. To play a game is analogous to contemplating and appreciating contemporary art in that it requires active participation in a work of art, during which the audience can attain a moment of art. However, the worlds within games are still imperfect. There is a marked lack of diversity in games, where virtual worlds are populated by hyperbolically perfect physiques, and women, the aged, weak, or disabled are either not represented or appear as non playable characters. As in real life, it can be difficult for them to find ways to access games and their digital environments. In contextualizing digital spaces and games in an exhibition, the MMCA, as a space of inclusion, proposes a reimagining of our society where gamification has become part of everyday life, examining gaps and empty spaces in games. In the end, presenting games in the museum is directly linked to the issue of the museum’s accessibility. Playing a video game is not different from viewing an art exhibition in that a video game’s tutorials resemble an exhibition guide with its set routes, exits, and entrances; the accumulation of experience and skill by playing a game resembles the increasing fluency and appreciation of art by visiting exhibitions and museums.    

All the video games in this exhibition are available for play. Audiences can play them with Gaming Accessibility Controller designed and developed by the Korea National Rehabilitation Center Assistive Technology Open Platform, along with Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller devices. As video game critic C. Thi Nguyen noted, games are “the art form of agency.” As such, the exhibition offers audience ways to gain fresh perspectives on the issues that emerge when they gamify their daily lives by providing universal and expansive controllers. In a similar spirit of inclusiveness and accessibility, the exhibition also provides online projects organized with PACK.

For the MMCA, this exhibition is a celebration of what video games and art museums share in their experiences. The exhibition is also an active endeavor to share the common act of accessing and reflecting on video games and the art museum, observing the roles and spheres of the individual and the public. In both video games and art, it is the application of contemporary knowledge and social experiences, and the speculation that it provokes, that creates an opportunity for us to reevaluate the world we live in. In this sense, the intention of Game Society is to provide the audience with the opportunity to contemplate and question the efforts and attention required to make public places and games more inclusive, reframing where we might wish to redefine our common goals. Through games as an artistic medium with cross-generational appeal, the exhibition hopes to provide the full sensory gamut to each individual in a unique way that serves the artistic experiences and values of each person best.

LINK: Game Society

EVENT: NOW WHAT? (APRIL 25 - JULY 9 2023, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA)

Theo Triantafyllidis, BugSim (Pheromone Spa), 2022, Live Simulation

 

NOW WHAT?
April 25–July 9, 2023

 

SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art
1238 Dongil-ro, Nowon-gu
01783 Seoul
South Korea

 

Artists: Riar Rizaldi, Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid Productions, Theo Triantafyllidis, Jaewon Kim, Internet Mountain Club, Yoon Jeewon

press release

2023 marks the tenth anniversary of SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art. With its mission to build sustained connections to the local community, the museum has experimented with a variety of exhibitions and programs. It is in this context that the museum presents NOW WHAT?, an exhibition that requires a deeper level of engagement from the museum, artist, and the audience.

In our contemporary digital media environment, new media is the medium enjoyed by most people. Yet, even such attributes of new media started to stutter and did not work very dramatically as they entered the format of the white cube. It happened since the new media were not inherently unilateral. Historically, attitudes toward art exhibitions have evolved to emphasize the importance of experience and interaction. Yet, there are still some points that leave something to be developed. In particular, the video art that we want to examine in this exhibition has not escaped the limits of receiving the audience on a white wall like an old painting, even in an explosive circulation of the media ecosystem. The experiential layers of video art must be presented in a more complex and autonomous way. Therefore, we materialize the numerous elements that make up their works in a “game-like scenography.”

We invited artists who work with new media in various ways such as film, documentary, interactive video, and live simulation. We then focused on researching their works that resulted in the single-channel video format. First and foremost, Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid Productions is a filmmaker and game developer who created IMMORTALITY (2022), a game that raises questions about the nature of video art by deconstructing the unidirectionality and monolinear structure of traditional cinema. In IMMORTALITY, the player sits in the editing room to unfold and reassemble all the scenes of the three unmerged films to infer the unfilmed events. It is an important and inspirational example that is closely connected to how the exhibition came about. Jaewon Kim talks about the lives of queer people, those infected with HIV/AIDS, and his relationship with his lovers. His works are composed in the form of letters to lovers through the fragmentation of images or reconstruction of memories. We transformed these works into a performative dimension and placed devices for pseudo-emotional experience. Riar Rizaldi focuses on individuals and specific groups in Indonesia and Hong Kong who are marginalized from a socio-economic perspective. In the exhibition, the audience will become marginalized individuals or particular groups in no time through spontaneous performative acts. The mountaineering documentary True of Landscapes (2023) by Internet Mountain Club allows us to take a closer look behind the scenes of the mountain that was not visible to the eyes of mountain hikers. They tell the holistic story of our time—ethnicity, identity, culture, generation, climate—on the actual topographic map of a “mountain”and ask the audience to be witnesses of the times. Taking on the determination of this video work, we concretized our actions and experiences as witnesses. In the meantime, Theo Triantafyllidis creates a live simulation in which an autonomous ecosystem operates. This work in the exhibition space becomes an object of observation and exploration by itself. The intention is to have this work interact with the audience with a sense of observing an ant’s nest as we did as homework when we were young or with an intention to have it as a mirror to reflect on reality. Finally, artist and filmmaker Yoon Jeewon presents a new video work A VERY ABSOLUTE EFFECT ON THE PERCEIVER (2023). It is hoped that the audience will appreciate the exceptional golden ratio and infer the rules that constructed the work. The best way to watch the video works with the most delicious taste might be to learn the rules and connect what is possible within them for an emergent viewing. 

We prepared game-like texts to facilitate the interaction between the interpretive layers of the video works and the fragmented experiences. Among the various formats of games, we focused on “immersive simulation”games. While the player’s actions were limited to essential actions in the early games, it is possible to interact with almost every element of the environment in immersive simulation games. Players can have autonomy and thus practice emergent gameplay in a given environment regardless of their original obligations. In addition, the proficiency accumulated through trial and error creates a deep understanding and immersion in the game’s worldview. 

Taking this into account, the scenography of the exhibition is set in the gray area of the city, which also happens to be the psychological background of the uncertainty of our time and the participating artists. In particular, the exhibition houses an “underpath of an imaginary bridge.” The underpath is a limbo-like space where the audience’s failures return not as defection but as experiences and skills. Here, artists and curators talked about what it would take for an individual’s media experiences and subjective memories to move beyond mere appreciation and become part of a collective experience, memory, and language. The process devised in the underpath has become an activity sheet and is given to all players. While the placeness of this exhibition primarily gives a sense of déjà vu, the activity sheet works as a tutorial and a list of tasks that help the artists to master the experiences and languages they want to deliver through the live action. Now, with the list of missions in hand, the audience (player) will be able to recall our question. 

“NOW WHAT?”
The exhibition expects that the audience to become the player, and determine their own path at will and absorb the rules or languages of artworks through their explorative interaction at the experiential level. We hope the audience to get deeper into the pleasure of watching video art and the essence of what the artists tell in their works. 

LINK: Now What?

EVENT: ART AND/OR GAME: SYMBIOSIS OR DISSONANCE? (MAY 16 - 20 2023, PARIS)

Post Growth Toolkit (The Game), Disnovation.org, 2020, game table of the installation, photo : iMAL, Bruxelles/Brussels

Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance?

Centre Culturel Canadien

130 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris, France

16 May 2023 -> 20 May 2023

Curated by Lynn Hughes
Artist, independent curator and Emeritus Professor at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Assistant Curators
Nathalie Bachand
Independent curator and artistic co-director at Sporobole, Contemporary Art Centre (Ndakina/Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada)

Catherine Bédard
Curator and Deputy Director, Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris, France)

press release

Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance? is an exhibition that looks at some current practices in the very vibrant area where experimental games meet related art practices. Experimental games seek to resist the hegemony of the huge international digital games industry by presenting a profusion of local, personal and community-based alternatives that stretch the game form expressively and critically. 

The exhibition brings together a selection of artists and game designers from Canada and France with very different approaches to this interstitial space. The works range from the explicitly political and activist to those with more implicit and poetic integration of social critique, from the very figurative to the abstract, and from more traditional screen game formats to ones with physical interfaces of different types.

The game-work by the collective Disnovation.org is part of ISEA’s official programming. This project is funded by the European MASC-RISE programme under grant agreement n°101007915.

Visitors are invited to play on site with all the games presented in the exhibition.

Featured artists
Disnovation.org (France), ISEA2023 laureate artists collective
Ahreum Lee (Canada), Enric Llagostera (Canada), Raphaëll Maïwen (Canada), Santiago Tamayo Soler (Canada), Tatiana Vilela Dos Santos (France)

 

LINK: Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance

EVEN: OPEN SYSTEMS 1_OPEN WORLDS (MAY 4 - AUGUST 10 2023, SINGAPORE, ONLINE)

Open Systems 1_Open Worlds
May 4–August 10, 2023

Curated by Duncan Bass

curatorial text

Press release

Singapore Art Museum (SAM) launches Open Systems (OS), its first dedicated initiative exploring technology and virtual spaces as sites for exhibition and art production, focused on the examination of the impacts of contemporary digital culture on creative expression. OS presents online exhibitions, interventions and virtual programmes where the sites of their production—video games, creative code, the browser—serve as the locus for both artistic expression and inquiry.

From May 4 to August 10, 2023, audiences are invited to reimagine the metaverse through Open Systems 1_Open Worlds (OS1) at opensystems.sg, a browser-based art experience exploring the dynamics between real and virtual realms. Bringing together artists and thinkers who imagine scenarios challenging logics of enclosure, privatisation, and artificial scarcity imposed on virtual realms, OS1 maps the inequities that transfer between lived and digital realms, positing that video games, game engines and virtual environments may function as sites to rehearse alternative and novel modes of social, political, and spatial organisation.

Unfolding across six thematic chapters fortnightly, the artworks presented in OS1 seek to reframe virtual spaces as sites for practicing alternative modes of organisation within society, from the shared reality of global financial systems and major cities to the multiplicity of personal interactions and individual expression. As the boundaries between real and virtual spaces continue to degrade—another opening of worlds—interventions in virtual realities increasingly reflect upon our physical realities, for worse and for better. OS1opens possibilities of reimagining our shared spaces, investigating a world that is no longer a niche pastime.

OS1.1_Virtual Capital Available 4–17 May 2023

Alice Bucknell, Lawrence Lek, and Bahar Noorizadeh, Rudá Babau & Waste Paper Opera (Klara Kofen, James Oldham, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Anna Palmer)

Through satirical storytelling and science-fiction narratives, Virtual Capital demonstrates how virtual cultures simultaneously reflect and react to tangible impacts on real, lived experiences.

OS1.2_WoW, Unite! Available 18–31 May 2023

Cat Bluemke, Joshua Citarella & Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, and Mario Mu

Exploring video games as unexpected sites for collective action and organisation, WoW, Unite! considers labour rights issues, exploitation, and organisational conditions in the video game industry.

OS1.3_Landscapes of the Political Imaginary Available 1–14 Jun 2023

Zheng Mahler, Shabtai Pinchevsky, and Firas Shehadeh

Through the concept of the nation-state as constructed by both physical environments and the collective imagination, viewers are invited to reassess their understanding of video games in Landscapes of the Political Imaginary and the underlying assumptions that are built into their virtual landscapes.

OS1.4_Unrealpolitik Available 15–28 Jun 2023

Yeyoon Avis Ann & George Chua, Grayson Earle, and Clemens von Wedemeyer

Focusing on the ubiquitous nature of violence in video games, Unrealpolitikunpacks the societal tensions and assumed neutrality of ideologies embedded in gaming software while highlighting the potential for intervention and political resistance in gamified environments.

OS1.5_Dematerialised Zones Available 29 Jun–12 Jul 2023

Antoine Chapon, Hayoun Kwon, and Total Refusal

Subverting stereotypical perceptions of violence often associated with video games by expanding on sites of conflict as liminal spaces, Dematerialised Zones illustrates how virtual spaces can serve as sites of healing.

OS1.6_Intimate Encounters Available 13–26 Jul 2023

Kara Güt, Sara Sadik, and Xáfier Yap

Intimate Encounters reflects on notions of nurturing one’s identity and intimacy within virtual spaces by drawing on old-school aesthetics, comparing character development in role-playing games to processes of personal identity construction.

A series of accompanying programmes featuring artists and collaborators titled OS Broadcasts will be hosted on the popular live-streaming platform, Twitch, and broadcasts of prior programmes can also be found on the Open Systems platform.

 

LINK: OPEN SYSTEMS

EVENT: MACHINE VIOLENCE (MAY 5 - 31 2023, NEW YORK)

MILTOS MANETAS, RGB, 1998, oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in 101.6 x 121.9 cm (MM0001)

 

Machine Violence
May 5 - 31, 2023
Opening reception Friday, May 5
6 - 8pm  Postmasters 4 Bond Street, 10012, NYC

press release

Featured artists: Chando Ao, Damjansi, Huntrezz Janos, Gracelee Lawrence, Miltos Manetas, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw,Eddo Stern

Postmasters 5.0 is a moving target - our next exhibition will occupy a spectacular ground floor space on Bond Street in downtown Manhattan.

Machine Violence is a show for this moment, a visually stunning exhibition of topical relevance. It will bring together works in all media from software to painting.  Several historic projects by digital pioneers (McCoys, Matteses, Manetas) will be presented alongside current works of the new generation (Huntrezz, Damjanski).

Machine violence invariably fosters fear and disruption on an individual or societal scale. As artworks in this exhibition attest, it is left to humans - artists, in this case - to redirect, subvert, and/or transcend the literal narrative.

Fitting the current moment of intense uncertainty along the art-technology axis, this show can potentially triangulate two significant museum exhibitions currently on view in New York: Signals at MoMA and Refigured at The Whitney Museum.

The exhibition location, a former carpentry shop with skylights, brick walls and a 20 foot-tall ceiling, will be cleaned but otherwise left “as is” - raw - freeing the artists’ projections, screens, sculptures, prints and paintings from the homogeneity of a white box. Art can survive anywhere. Joining a salient history of co-opting raw spaces for art: Gavin Brown's Harlem space, Triple Candie, The Project, Sculpture Center - we will continue this countering flow at the moment of extreme showroom effect.

The exhibition centerpiece will be Horror Chase (2002) by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, who have worked collaboratively since early 2000 (Kevin McCoy is also widely recognized for creating the first art NFT in 2014). Newly remastered into 4K, Horror Chase is based on the climactic chase sequence from the film Evil Dead 2 re-enacted on a custom stage set. Each shot is digitized individually and processed by a custom computer program that selects clips randomly. The chase becomes a continuously variable incarnation of an endless - and futile - escape attempt. The images are projected on a cinematic scale, and the computer hardware is installed in a black briefcase which forms a part of the installation. Given the recent explosion of interest in generative art, the McCoy's piece may be one of the earliest examples of algorithmically created cinematic footage - a software/hardware combination of object and projection.

EVA AND FRANCO MATTES, Freedom, 2010, single-channel video(color, sound), monitor, inflatable mattress, cables, media player(optional), dimensions variable; running time: 8:56 mins, edition of 3 (#2/3), (EFM072)

 

Eva and Franco Mattes are the notorious Italian artist's team working with internet and digital media since the late 1990s. One of their most iconic works, Biennale.PY, Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine (2001-2003) is an aesthetically alluring, customized computer encased in plexiglass, with all parts exposed. It only has two software programs installed:  the virus that the artists made in 2001 for the Venice Biennale, and the "Norton Utilities" antivirus patch. The computer is in a perpetual mode of being infected, then disinfected, then rebooted; a machine locked forever in a fight between good and evil.

EDDO STERN, Vietnam Romance, 2003 digital video, NFT Time 19:09 (ES0018)

 

MILTOS MANETAS, Flames, 1997, digital video file, machinima, NFT, time 23:49, Edition of 3 (MM0002)

 

There will be three early key works of machinima in the show: Miltos Manetas’ Flames (1997) of Lara Croft committing suicide; Eddo Stern’s masterwork Vietnam Romance (2003) where key war scenes are recreated through video games like Grand Theft Auto and MASH; and Eva and Franco Mattes’ Freedom (2010), a haunting montage of death scenes from iconic first-person shooter games.

 

Damjanski will present his app, Bye, Bye Camera (2020), the AI-powered camera for the post-human era, which automatically removes people from any picture someone takes. The tool digitally detects and erases body shapes, but keeps human traces like shadows. The app will be shown along with photographic prints of Post Human Dog (2020),  his pandemic-time series of dogs with no owners.Gracelee Lawrence will present two large scale, 3D-printed sculptures of fragmented, battered bodies.

 

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw  are making a lamp, a huge, functioning, fruit flies - killing zapper encased in plexiglass.

 

Chando Ao’s kinetic sculpture in the show will be a computer driven chair/cradle for grownups that belies its mean and ominous torture device look, to soothingly rock the sitter.

 

Huntrezz Janos will show - as AR - two Instagram filters that recast the user as armored, warrior-like characters and a related 3-D printed sculpture.

 

Also on view will be Miltos Manetas still life paintings of computer components from 1998-2010. A mid-show performance is planned where Manetas will, via WhatsApp and a local assistant, paint a still life remotely from Bogotá.

 

LINK: MACHINE VIOLENCE

EVENT: WORLDBUILDING: VIDEO GAMES AND ART IN THE DIGITAL ERA (JUNE 10 2023 - JAN 15 2024, METZ, FRANCE)

Theo Triantafyllidis, Pastoral, 2019

 

Worldbuilding: Video Games And Art In The Digital Era

Centre Pompidou-Metz
1 Parvis des Droits de l'Homme
57020 Metz
France

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London

press release

Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”. Around a hundred years ago, in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the source of culture.

More recently, in his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that games, particularly video games, are a distinct type of art which “let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own”. As such, gaming has the potential to unleash powerful psychic forces. Video games have proven to be an effective tool for the development of training and strategy. Indeed, scientists have made good use of video games simulating biological systems to speculate on the possible origins and destination of life. Accordingly, video games as a digital art form offer a means for an existential quest beyond the embodied physical world and into the multiverse. By their very nature, they open the potential to imagine and build new worlds.

Several of the featured artists in the exhibit began making work that refers to video games as early as the 1980s while most of the others were just born around that time. For the works in this show, artists have addressed video games in various ways. Some have adapted their themes and visual style to make videos. Others have modified, hacked, and subverted existing video games. Finally, some have created their own video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist writes, “traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people…producing games with a very limited perspective. This is now changing rapidly… Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to create [their own] virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion”. Through these means, the artists are taking this format beyond pure entertainment value to probe social, political, and aesthetic questions. While video games have been the topic of numerous exhibitions in recent years, most of these highlighted their legitimacy as an artistic medium or focused on aspects of “game art”.

Worldbuilding is the first transgenerational, multinational show of this scope to examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their chosen form of expression. In so doing, this exhibit presents a plurality of voices and a multitude of perspectives.

With works by Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, Meriem Benanni, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Kim Heecheon, Institute of Queer Ecology, Rindon Johnson, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, Sturtevant, Theo Triantafyllidis, Suzanne Treister, Angela Washko, Lu Yang, among others.

LINK: Worldbuilding

See also

CALL FOR ARTWORKS: THE ART OF GAMES IN GREECE 2023

The Athens Digital Arts Festival (ADAF) and the Game Developers Association of Greece (GDA Greece) are organizing The Art of Games in Greece (A.G.G.) 2023, inviting creators to reimagine digital games in Greece.

This joint project aspires to promote game development in Greece and contribute to the recognition of digital game as a form of contemporary art while encouraging creators and audiences to engage in this field. A.G.G. consists of three complementary parts: the “Crown” and “Blossoms” competitions, and the “Pollen” series of seminars and workshops.

The competition section is focused on games related to the theme of ADAF 2023, “Welcome to the Uncanny”. Both competitions are exclusively for digital games made in Greece, accessible from computers. Winners and finalists, selected by a five-member jury, will exhibit their works on the festival’s online platform, where the audience can play and vote for their favorite games.

CROWN
Crown invites developers with existing games, which they have already announced or published, related to the theme “Welcome to the Uncanny” to submit them through the relevant form to claim mentions and promotion on the festival’s online platform during the event.

BLOSSOMS
Blossoms invites developers to create new games inspired by the theme of ADAF 2023 and claim a cash prize of €1000, in addition to the awards and the promotion on the online platform of the festival.

POLLEN
Pollen, the educational component of A.G.G., consists of a series of sessions aimed at introducing new creators to game development by established professionals in the field. These sessions will be freely accessible on the festival’s online platform.
The detailed program of Pollen will be announced soon.

 •••

The Athens Digital Arts Festival and the Game Developers Association of Greece are working together to highlight the digital game as a work of art. The Art of Games in Greece aspires to create a new point of interest for the development of digital games in Greece and promote them both locally and internationally.

Find more information click here

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*/ The Art of Games in Greece 2023: Κάλεσμα Συμμετοχής

Το διεθνές φεστιβάλ ψηφιακών τεχνών της Ελλάδας, Athens Digital Arts Festival (ADAF) και ο Σύλλογος Δημιουργών Ψηφιακών Παιχνιδιών Ελλάδος (GDA Greece) διοργανώνουν το The Art of Games in Greece (A.G.G.) 2023 και καλούν τους δημιουργούς να επανοραματιστούν το ψηφιακό παιχνίδι στην Ελλάδα.

Η κοινή αυτή δράση φιλοδοξεί να προωθήσει τη δημιουργία ψηφιακών παιχνιδιών (game development) στην Ελλάδα και να συμβάλει στην ανάδειξή τους ως μορφή σύγχρονης τέχνης, παροτρύνοντας συγχρόνως δημιουργούς και κοινό να εμπλακούν με το πεδίο των ψηφιακών παιχνιδιών. Το A.G.G. απαρτίζεται από τρία συμπληρωματικά μέρη: τους διαγωνισμούς “Crown” και “Blossoms”, και τη σειρά σεμιναρίων και workshops “Pollen”.

Το διαγωνιστικό κομμάτι αφορά σε παιχνίδια που σχετίζονται με την θεματική του ADAF 2023 “Welcome to the Uncanny”. Και οι δυο διαγωνισμοί είναι αποκλειστικά για ψηφιακά παιχνίδια made in Greece, προσβάσιμα από ηλεκτρονικούς υπολογιστές. Νικητές και φιναλίστ, που θα επιλεγούν από πενταμελή κριτική επιτροπή, θα εκθέσουν τα έργα τους στην διαδικτυακή πλατφόρμα του φεστιβάλ όπου το κοινό θα μπορεί να παίξει και να ψηφίσει τα αγαπημένα του παιχνίδια.

CROWN
Tα Crown προσκαλούν developers με ήδη ανακοινωμένα ή δημοσιευμένα παιχνίδια που σχετίζονται με τη θεματική “Welcome to the Uncanny” και διαθέτουν δωρεάν demos να τα καταθέσουν μέσω της σχετικής φόρμας για να διεκδικήσουν μνείες και προβολή στην διαδικτυακή πλατφόρμα της διοργάνωσης κατά την διάρκεια του φεστιβάλ.

BLOSSOMS
Tα Blossoms καλούν τους developers να δημιουργήσουν νέα παιχνίδια που εμπνέονται από τη θεματική του ADAF 2023 και να διεκδικήσουν χρηματικό έπαθλο της τάξης των 1000€, επιπρόσθετα με τα βραβεία και την προβολή των έργων στην online πλατφόρμα του φεστιβάλ.

POLLEN
Tο Pollen, το εκπαιδευτικό τμήμα της διοργάνωσης, θα αποτελείται από μία σειρά συνεδριών με σκοπό την εισαγωγή νέων δημιουργών στην παραγωγή ψηφιακών παιχνιδιών (game development) από καταξιωμένα άτομα του χώρου. Οι συνεδρίες αυτές θα είναι προσβάσιμες δωρεάν στην διαδικτυακή πλατφόρμα της διοργάνωσης.
Το αναλυτικό πρόγραμμα του Pollen θα ανακοινωθεί σύντομα.

 •••

Το Athens Digital Arts Festival και ο Σύλλογος Δημιουργών Ψηφιακών Παιχνιδιών Ελλάδος συνεργάζονται για να αναδείξουν τα ψηφιακά παιχνίδια ως καλλιτεχνικά έργα. Το The Art of Games in Greece φιλοδοξεί να δημιουργήσει έτσι μια νέα κοιτίδα ενδιαφέροντος για την ανάπτυξη του ψηφιακού παιχνιδιού στην Ελλάδα και την προώθησή τους τόσο σε εγχώριο όσο και διεθνές επίπεδο.

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες για τη συμμετοχή σας μπορείτε να βρείτε στο online.adaf.gr/GDA_the_art_of_games_in_greece_2023

EVENT: LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL (APRIL 28 - SEPTEMBER 17 2023, LIVERPOOL)

LuYang show at the Zabludowicz collection, London. (Credit: David Bebber)

LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL

April 28-September 17 2023

FACT Liverpool
88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ

 

Tokyo-based virtuoso LuYang astounds in a monumental opening of FACT Liverpool's 20th anniversary program with an exhibition of multimedia, playable video game works that transform the gallery into an interactive retrofuturist arcade. LuYang Arcade Liverpool invites visitors to embark on a journey through the prodigious artist's eccentric digital spaces, which merge the realms of anime, video games, and sci-fi. LuYang's interactive works are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking, immersing visitors in a world that is at once dark and bizarre. These works of art probe the concept of 'living on the internet,' inviting us to abandon binary understandings of identity, time, and space.

In LuYang's own words: "Creating a game is like constructing your own universe. The works exhibited in my solo show at FACT are interactive works - game works - from my art practices. The digital spaces I create are a meeting point of Buddhism, popular culture, and my research into neuroscience and technology, designed to stretch the exploration of morality, the mechanics of the human body and mind, and transcendence beyond the binary. Welcome to my worlds."

This upcoming exhibition is a testament to the power of video games as an art form, and a must-see for those interested in exploring the intersection between technology and art.

LINK: LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL

EVENT: ROCK BOTTOM: ABE SUGARMAN (MARCH 16-APRIL 25 2023, LONDON)

Abe Sugarman, still from Rock Bottom game, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

ROCK BOTTOM: ABE SUGARMAN

Curated by Rebecca Edwards

Part of arebyte 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi
Opening Event: Thurday 16 March 2023 6:30-9pm
Exhibition runs until 15 April 2023

arebyte Gallery London
Java House, 7 Botanic Square
London City Island, E14 0LG

press release

arebyte’s new exhibition Rock Bottom, by Abe Sugarman, transforms the gallery into an immersive game experience where the physical and the virtual collide. Set deep inside a cryptic ocean trench, a bottomless abyss that no light can penetrate, visitors embark on a choose-your-own-adenture journey composed of games, video works and sculpture.

The show represents the culmination of arebyte’s annual hotel generation programme, which is designed to mentor the next generation of UK digital artists during the critical early stages of their careers and whose 2022 edition was awarded to Abe Sugarman.

The exhibition explores concepts of queer and jellyfish temporalities, where restarting and rejuvenation become the metaphorical pointers to introduce the narrative of survival.

The installation expands the gameplay into the physical space through life-size characters and theatrical props, encouraging players to become entangled in game worlds both virtual and physical. The gallery is divided into zones dedicated to different areas of investigation within the exhibition: Northern values and patriotism, the transitory Jellyfish life cycle, and reconciliation of the dual fear and temptation of the unknown.

The exhibition explores how ecological disasters can form new bodily relationships with futures and survival. Familiar and otherworldly locations, from the depths of the River Calder Valley to the Jellyfish Fields, reflect a time of instability, with unfolding crises of the environment, gender stereotyping and the silencing of cast-aside voices. Encouraging us to understand worlds we don’t yet know, Rock Bottom verges into science fiction in its imagining of major environmental change and exploration of the meaning of time at the bottom of the ocean.

Our protagonist’s descent into the darkest ocean trench reveals the inherent struggle towards escape when we truly hit rock bottom. When we interact with the characters that we find there, they reveal death drive behaviours and sentiments through strange conversations, actions, and emotes. It becomes apparent that within the struggle and darkness of localised and planetary pain, light and optimism will emerge through the rethinking and recontextualising of spacetime.

The judging panel for the 2022 edition of hotel generation consisted of artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Head of Digital Arts Computing BSc at Goldsmiths Rachel Falconer, cultural producer Yinka Danmole and curator of Digital at the V&A Melanie Lenz. This exhibition concludes arebyte's 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi which looks at fictioning and alternative futures through a series of exhibitions, live performances, online experiences and educational activities.

Rock Bottom is accompanied by a booklet featuring texts by arebyte’s curator Rebecca Edwards, academic Jack Halberstam and artist Abe Sugarman.

A programme of talks, online gameplay events and workshops accompanying the exhibition can be viewed here.

Abe Sugarman is a multimedia artist based in West Yorkshire, who operates as an agent within a game. Abe uses their political proposal ‘Jellyfish temporality’: as a non-linear model of queer time and survival against geological stratification. Abe combines the circular and entwined web of bodies and systems that exist in the bio-membrane, where a diagrammatic tissue of lies and life cycles emerges through reverberation, compulsion, and restarting. In this newly formed ‘Anthrobussy’, the rehearsal assembles. Abe enjoys SpongeBob SquarePants, cuttlefish, and Gordon Riggs Garden Centre. Abe graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Previous solo and group exhibitions include: Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London; Ruskin Project Space, Oxford; Five Folds, London.

Abe Sugarman, still from River Calder Roblox game, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

Abe Sugarman, still from Rock Bottom game, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

Abe Sugarman, still from Jellyfish Fields film, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

All images courtesy of arebyte

LINK: Abe Sugarman

LINK: ROCK BOTTOM: ABE SUGARMAN

GAME ART: AFRAH SHAFIQ'S WHERE DO THE ANTS GO? (2022-2023)

Afrah Shafiq, installation view of Where do the Ants Go?, 2022–23, at Dhaka Art Summit, 2023. Photo by Farhad Rahman. Courtesy of Dhaka Art Summit 2023.

Afrah Shafiq, Where do the Ants Go?, 2022–23, still. Courtesy of the artist.

WHERE DO THE ANTS GO? is an interactive sculpture that mimics an ant hill, with the actions and outcomes of the colony determined by those interacting with it. Designed as a multi-lingual, participatory experience, it responds to both pre-programmed algorithms and real-time inputs. Inspired by the visions of web 3.0 and speculative futures of the internet, this sculpture brings together elements of the natural world, human consciousness, and technology to provide a space for reflection, observation of patterns, and potential resetting. Think of it as a cross between SimAnt and Minecraft. Here, the theme of play is mediated through a video game format, where visitors become the puppetmasters of a colony of digital ants living within the expansive screens that enshroud the interior of the sculptural installation. WHERE DO THE ANTS GO? purports to explore the relationship between the individual ant and its colony, and by extension, the relationship between humanity and the world at large.

Read more about the project here

Afrah Shafiq is a talented multi/new media artist based in Goa, India. With a focus on research as a form of artistic expression, she blends archival materials, history, memory, folklore, and fantasy to create unique, speculative worlds. Her work transcends various mediums, combining the traditional techniques of folk art with the digital language of the internet and video games. Afrah has shown her work at prestigious venues including the Asian Art Biennale in Taiwan (2021), Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe (2021), Lahore Biennial (2020), Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018), Anant Art Gallery (2020), The Guild Art Gallery (2018) in India, Florida Digital Graffiti Festival (2018), The Fusebox Festival in Texas, and the Computer Space Festival in Bulgaria. She has also been a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, France, and has participated in artist residencies at Fluent Collaborative in Austin and the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art."

LINK: Afrah Shafiq