GAMESCENES

EVENT: AGAINST THE WILL, AGAINST STAYING STILL (MAY 15-18 2025, ATHENS)

 

 

Against the Will, Against Staying Still

Esto Association

24 Zaimi str. 10683

Athens Greece

May 15 - 18 2025

curated by Babak Ahteshamipour 

featuring Erifili Doukeli, Matthew D. Gantt, Berenike Gregoor, Nichole Shinn, Captain Stavros, and Pauvre Terre 

 

Against the Will, Against Staying Still is a group exhibition curated by Babak Ahteshamipour that frames urgency as both a creative method and a survival tactic in response to a world dominated by crises, algorithmic optimisation, and accelerated media environments. The participating artists — Erifili Doukeli, Matthew D. Gantt, Berenike Gregoor, Nichole Shinn, Captain Stavros, and Pauvre Terre — treat artmaking as a form of rapid response, deploying improvisation, upcycling, and fictional tools to navigate systems of control, including the figure of the curator cast here as a kind of authoritarian game master.

Set within the deliberately austere space of Esto Association — reminiscent of Foucault’s disciplinary institutions — the exhibition interrogates how aesthetic and procedural constraints mimic broader societal pressures: surveillance, self-optimisation, and commodified identity shifts. Drawing on thinkers such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Geert Lovink, Byung-Chul Han, and Nick Dyer-Witheford, the show critiques the burnout-inducing imperatives of late capitalism, while also exploring how immediacy, play, and glitch can serve as tactics for resistance.

Rather than reject urgency as debilitating, the exhibition proposes it as a weapon, capable of destabilising hyper-curated, algorithmic regimes of truth and meaning. It poses a central question: how might artists turn the logic of the system against itself, transforming gameplay into a form of subversive agency?

As Babak write, "the process of the show has been entirely gamified".

There'll be a game by Matthew D. Gantt as well.

LINK:  Against the Will, Against Staying Still 

LINK: Babak Ahteshamipour

EVENT: SEQUENCEBREAK// (MARCH 20 - JUNE 28 2025, ROCHESTER)

Screenshot from Anthology of the Killer (2024) by Stephen Gillmurphy

 

SEQUENCEBREAK//

March 20 - June 28 2025

Curated by Nilson Carroll

Visual Studies Workshop

36 King Street

Rochester, New York 14608

 

From March 20 to June 28, 2025, the Visual Studies Workshop presents SEQUENCEBREAK//, a wide-ranging, genre-subverting arcade of experimental games and digital artworks. This exhibition challenges commercial video game aesthetics and logic, offering a critical lens on the culture of play through works that collapse boundaries between software and art, interaction and observation, story and glitch.

Curated by VSW Assistant Curator Nilson Carroll, SEQUENCEBREAK// is not a nostalgic throwback to coin-op cabinets, but a radical reconfiguration of what an arcade, and a game, can be. It includes work by Stephen Gillmurphy (known online as thecatamites), Nathalie Lawhead, Philip Mallory Jones, Cassie McQuater, and the artist collective Heart Street (Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, and John Bruneau).

The exhibition title refers to the act of “sequence breaking”, a gaming term for disrupting a game's intended narrative or progression. Here, it becomes metaphor: each artist breaks the expected sequences of design, distribution, and interaction, revealing overlooked dynamics within digital culture.

Among the highlights is Out for Delivery, a first-person “playable documentary” by Heart Street. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work follows a Chinese food delivery worker navigating the surreal, sometimes threatening environments of lockdown-era Beijing. Combining live-action 3D footage and game mechanics, the piece probes global labour politics and surveillance culture. It has already earned critical acclaim, including Indiecade’s Impact Award and a BAFTA for Immersive Art.

Irish game maker Stephen Gillmurphy’s Anthology of the Killer twists the murder mystery genre into something alien and cartoonishly grotesque, using surreal humour and pixelated dream logic to disrupt narrative cohesion. Known for creating dozens of freeware games over the past two decades, Gillmurphy remains a central figure in the DIY games scene.

Nathalie Lawhead, a longtime advocate for open-source tools and experimental storytelling, presents BlueSuburbia, a hallucinatory interactive world that expands upon their legacy of net art and zine-making. Their work is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s game collection and Rhizome’s ArtBase, and often critiques systems of control through absurdity and digital bricolage.

Philip Mallory Jones’ Time Machine: Bronzeville projects a speculative 3D reanimation of 1940s Chicago, chronicling Black life through immersive archives. With a career spanning over 50 years in media arts, Jones blends scholarship, historical preservation, and digital art in ways that make history tactile and haunting.

Cassie McQuater’s Black Room reclaims feminine iconography and retro aesthetics to craft a fragmented, contemplative space. McQuater’s cyberfeminist practice mines internet ephemera, turning visual debris into critique. Her past work has appeared at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Rhizome, and indie gaming festivals globally.

In addition to the exhibition, SEQUENCEBREAK// features an active public programme that includes artist talks, walkthroughs, and outdoor workshops, all of which extend the ethos of collective experimentation. Events include an opening party (March 20), a conversation with Philip Mallory Jones (March 27), a live stream with Nathalie Lawhead (May 8), and a final celebratory gathering (June 26). Workshops like “Coding in the Park” on June 14 invite participants to break and remake code as a shared creative act.

Backed by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the William & Sheila Konar Foundation, SEQUENCEBREAK// asserts itself not only as an exhibition but as a platform, a call to rethink the conditions under which games are made, played, and valued.

In a moment when game culture feels increasingly corporatised and censored, SEQUENCEBREAK// reminds us that play remains political, porous, and profoundly strange.

LINK: SEQUENCEBREAK// (thank you, Nilson!)

EVENT: STAIRWAY TO MELON: VIDEO WORKS BY VIKTOR TIMOFEEV (MAY 27 2025, NEW YORK)

Stairway To Melon: Video Works by Viktor Timofeev

May 27, 2025, 7pm

e-flux Screening Room

172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

press release

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, May 27 at 7pm for Stairway To Melon, a screening of works by Viktor Timofeev, followed by a conversation with artist and filmmaker Ericka Beckman.

“Stairway To Melon” presents six works by Viktor Timofeev created between 2015 and 2024, each exploring the poetics and structures of rule-based systems. Spanning cinematic works made in game engines, experimental alphabets, performative simulations, and collaborative drawing sessions, the program traces a throughline in Timofeev’s practice: a sustained interest in how does functioning of systems—linguistic, algorithmic, or behavioral—impacts one’s agency and govern expression.

Rather than reinforcing order or imposing clarity, systems in Timofeev’s work are open to uncertainty, generating drift and variation. Game environments become sites of misdirection or ritual repetition: alphabets reconfigure into abstract languages, artificial agents follow logics based on improvisation. Across Timofeev’s films and videos, meaning does not arrive fully formed—it flickers, stutters, and reorganizes itself in real time. Through this approach, Timofeev invites viewers into speculative worlds where structure and chance remain in constant tension offering a view not of resolved narratives, but of dynamic, generative conditions for thought and perception.

Following the screening, Timofeev will be joined by Ericka Beckman to discuss cinematic worldmaking, generative aesthetics, and abstraction as a method of reconfiguring systems of meaning.

Films

Alice, Bob, Carol and David (2024, 22 minutes)
A short film created in a game engine blending game mechanics, chance operations, and choreographic loops to explore interdependent character dynamics. Alice, Bob, Carol and David by Viktor Timofeev is an interdisciplinary work combining film, gaming, and performance into a unique choreographic system. Using the Unity game engine, the installation presents four characters—named after cryptographic placeholders—engaged in a loop of improvised, interdependent movements. Inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s generative scores from the 1960s, their repetitive, everyday actions synthesise chance and structure, reflecting control, autonomy, and emotional resonance.

Continuum (2017, 8 minutes, black and white, sound)
Continuum was shot within a digital environment made with the Unity game engine. This was Timofeev’s first attempt at making a cinematic work using this process. The video cuts between first-person perspectives of two groups of entities that occupy a desert-like landscape—a group of bugs that live on the ground and a swarm of drones that fly around them. The entities act out their interdependent relationship as they observe, pursue, and escape each other in what is meant to feel like a tense and ritualistic, endless loop, all without coming into proximity or contact. The first-person view serves as the common, overlapping shot between both sets of characters in the video to emphasize its basic empathic potential, allowing viewers to “occupy” both entities’ positions.

Proxyah (2015, 8 minutes, color, sound)
Proxyah is a collage-based game originally made for a site-specific installation at kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga in 2015, where it was played by touching an egg-shaped joystick. The basic premise of the game is a struggle to simply exit a room, made difficult by various obstacles that interfere with the player’s agency: a two-dimensional snake game in the main field of view, random collage-based cuts to another world, reconfiguration of assigned controls, and more. The game was developed during a period of chronic physical pain. Game engines became a means of engaging rule-making as an artistic strategy, and games, as understood here, served as a medium for working with agency itself.

Artificial Life and Death (2020, 3 minutes, black and white, sound)
Video collaboration with Jaakko Pallasvuo, music by Viktor Timofeev.
The video is a timelapse of a collaborative online drawing made with Jaakko Pallasvuo. During the COVID pandemic, while based in New York and Helsinki respectively, the two artists began exploring how to continue collaborating across distance. Using newly emerging remote-work brainstorming platforms, they would speak and draw together, likening the process to doodling during telephone conversations. Timofeev began recording these sessions, eventually editing a few of them to a track from his 2020 EP Exocursion, released by Futura Resistenza in Brussels. The result became the music video for the track.

Hexbugs (2016, 4 minutes, color, sound)
A studio documentation of Timofeev’s experiments with making soft boundaries for electronic toy bugs that were featured in an exhibition at Cordova project space in Vienna. The bugs follow a simple rule: they move forward until they hit a wall, at which point they turn left or right. The artist played with making “soft” walls that would confuse this rule set, then placed multiple bugs into an enclosed system and recorded the results. The process led to a projection of personality and narrative onto the bugs’ interactions.

Chat (2021, 4 minutes, color, sound)
Chat was part of an exhibition at Interstate Projects, NY (2021). Originally part of a three-channel installation that included an invented writing system—an alphabet based in time—this version is a single-channel edit. The alphabet is generative: it takes the standard pool of English letters and systematically abstracts them by cutting and rearranging their parts. The resulting twenty-six abstracted letters form an animated key. A corresponding text is continuously updated to reflect these permutations. The process reorients familiar components and mutates them to appear foreign, recalling fictional languages and asemic writing systems. The result is a continuous defamiliarization of the alphabet from itself—an algorithmic language without a national identity.

LINK: Stairway To Melon

LINK: Viktor Timofeev

EVENT: MANY GHOSTS, MANY SHELLS (MAY 1 - 31 2025, LONDON)

Many Ghosts, Many Shells

David Blandy and Petra Szemán; John Powell-Jones; Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

 

Curated by Rebecca Edwards

Seventeen

1st – 31st May 2025
PV 1st May 6pm

270-276 Kingsland RoadLondonE8 4DG

t. +44(0) 207 249 7789

press release

Many Ghosts, Many Shells debuts new collaborative work by Petra Szemán and David Blandy, in parallel with other artists working in the realms of identity and selfhood, reality and simulation. Each artist uses radical gameplay practices to ask where the self ends and the character begins, and what gets left behind. Also featuring works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and John Powell-Jones, Many Ghosts, Many Shells presents gaming experiences as devices for establishing surrogate modes of existence, a new world through new selves.

When identities are increasingly fragmented across digital landscapes, these artists question how we reconcile our dispersed selves within today’s  techno-political milieu. By bridging gaps between player and world, character and creator, the works in the exhibition challenge the very nature of agency and identity in a hyper-connected age where Away From Keyboard is never quite separate from Meatspace. Alter egos are often used to describe a concealed or contrasting side of a person’s personality, but in the case of playable characters or in the case of this exhibition, these alter egos become imbued with a sense of possibility – figures existing in a state of perpetual becoming, never fully whole but never entirely detached. Breaching a biographical narrative, the works in the exhibition question nostalgia, self-construction, and the processes of negotiating trauma and lived experiences that often percolate unsaid.

Sharing imaginaries across different practices, cultures and generations allows for a co-creation of richer, more inclusive visions, grounded in diverse experiences, knowledge systems, and values. In their game Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1 Blandy and Szeman share layered references to games of their youth, nostalgic artefacts and anime inspirations in a pixelated landscape of memory. Lucid game structures, immersive storytelling, and nonlinear narratives allow the works to invite a navigation into speculative futures and alternate pathways of existence. For Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley this means confronting histories of violence and mutilation through the uncovering of familial ties and oral testimony, asking questions of accountability and acceptance; while John Powell-Jones’ Web Wide World animated choose-your-own-adventure game and related ephemera encourages encounters with strange beings as we seek to understand the new universe of Durt where the protagonist Atamur has awoken void of a protective skin layer. From interrogating power and erasure in digital archives, to uncovering shared imaginaries that transcend cultures and generations, the exhibition positions gameplay as a radical tool for rethinking action in embodied engagement.

Featured works:

Petra Szemán and David Blandy, Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1, 2025
John Powell-Jones, Web Wide World, 2021
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, I’m Not Doing This For The Likes, 2022

David Blandy is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives; Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence,  through visual poetry and immersive play.  https://davidblandy.co.uk/

Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, new forms of cultural production and artistic development, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. https://rebeccaedwards.xyz/

John Powell Jones is an artist whose work includes 3D and 2D animations, life-size characters. comic books, ceramics and wall hangings. He takes inspiration from European folklore, horror and science fiction. https://www.johnpowell-jones.co.uk/

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin and London-based artist. They received an BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works in animation, sound, performance and video game development. Their practice focuses on combining lived experience with fiction to archive Black Trans existence and challenge the audience’s moral standing. https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/

Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Their practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line 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 liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from thinking of the cyberspace as a radically ’other’ realm, Petra hopes to walk the line situated between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons.  https://www.petraszeman.com/

LINK: Many Ghosts, Many Shells

EVENT: GAMEPLAY. PLAYING FOR IMPACT (APRIL 17 - NOVEMBER 16 2025, VILNIUS, LITHUANIA)

Gameplay. Playing for Impact

curated by Agnė Kuprytė, Laura Schmidtù

MO Museum

Pylimo str. 17, Vilnius, LT-01141

press release

The fact that digital games have developed into a leading medium is nothing new. The social and aesthetic significance of this interactive and multimedia form can no longer be overlooked. 

Over 60 years have passed since the emergence of digital games and much has changed. Digital games have freed themselves from their origins as laboratory experiments and toys, becoming the defining medium of digital society. Positioned between pop culture, entertainment, and art, games now permeate every aspect of modern life. They shape how we learn, socialize, and perceive reality. Video games have increasingly attracted talented artists and independent developers who push boundaries and question established conventions in digital games and design, exploring unconventional subjects, aesthetics, and game mechanics.

By combining traditional art forms – graphics, film, animation, music, sculpture, and literature – digital games offer artists an unprecedented opportunity to communicate with audiences and have become a medium of artistic expression. “GamePlay – Playing for Impact” invites you to play, reflect, and learn more about the multifaceted forms that video games can take. 

This exhibition is a product of a collaboration with the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany and is an adaptation of their acclaimed gaming exhibition “zkm_gameplay. the next level”. This exhibition at MO Museum focuses on three key areas: games that push creative and aesthetic boundaries, games that address current social and political issues, and games that foster empathy through personal narratives.

MO Museum, a personal initiative of Lithuanian scientists and philanthropists Danguolė and Viktoras Butkus, functioned as an art museum without walls for close to ten years. The collection of around 6 000 modern and contemporary pieces contains major Lithuanian artworks from the 1960s to this day.

From October 18th, 2018 MO has become an excellent place to spend free time. MO invites visitors to attend exhibitions, film screenings, educational activities, concerts and events geared to all age groups. One of MO’s goals is to create an active community of MOdernists who support the idea of MO and want to help us create a new kind of museum – together!

LINK: Gameplay. Playing for Impact

GAME ART: MAK2’S HOME SWEET HOME BACKYARD: GOLDEN HOUSE (2025)

Mak2, Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House 1, 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas, triptych, and video game, 55 1/2 × 98 2/5 in | 141 × 250 cm

In Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House, Mak2 takes the commodification of art to its logical, if absurd, extreme. This latest series, debuting at Art Basel Hong Kong, comprises seven unique triptychs on canvas, each tethered to a custom-built video game. The mechanics are deceptively simple: players navigate a virtual world to mine gold, and the in-game yield translates into real-time price adjustments of the corresponding physical artwork. For every tranche of virtual gold unearthed, the value of the associated painting increases by 5%, with a maximum cap of 20% over the course of the fair.

The more you play, the more it costs.

Mak2’s integration of game mechanics into the art market is neither gimmick nor satire: it’s a lucid, disarming demonstration of how value is constructed, manipulated, and performed in contemporary art. By converting player engagement into monetary inflation, the artist literalizes speculation and exposes its artifice. The game, in this case, is the market, looped back into itself with the elegance of a recursive script.

Born in Hong Kong in 1989, Mak2 has long been preoccupied with the interplay between control and chaos, authorship and delegation, reality and simulation. Her Home Sweet Home series, ongoing since 2019, exemplifies this tension. Built within The Sims, a ubiquitous American life simulation game, these digital dioramas, often populated by surveillance equipment, rooftop flower pools, or the ghostly residue of millennial malaise, are screen-captured and divided into thirds. Each segment is then outsourced to a different painter found via Taobao, China's sprawling e-commerce platform. By relinquishing authorial control and diffusing artistic labor, Mak2 creates intentional dissonance, emphasizing the structural fractures between image and intention, labor and capital, original and copy.

With Golden House, she pushes this strategy further, making economic feedback not just a subtext but a formal mechanism of the work itself. The audience is no longer merely a passive viewer but an active co-producer of market value. The artwork performs itself through transaction.

Mak2’s practice extends far beyond painting and simulation. Her 2017 work You Better Watch Out—a chaotic assemblage of snow globes, QR codes, bouncing balls, and CCTV cameras was included in the exhibition .com/.cn, co-presented by MoMA PS1 and the K11 Art Foundation. It drew a sharp line between entertainment and surveillance, between participation and control. That duality - now commonplace in the infrastructures of the internet - suffuses much of her work.

Mak2’s exhibitions include The Principle of Hope (Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, 2021), We Didn't Mean To Break It (But It’s OK, We Can Fix It) (Pedro Cera, Lisbon, 2019), Invisible Cities (Crow Collection, Dallas, 2017–18), and Reversal Ritual (de Sarthe, Hong Kong, 2017), among others. Across formats - installations, social media interventions, stand-up comedy, and even Instagram filters - her practice refuses the distinction between the serious and the ludic. She inhabits the contradictions of late capitalism with an artist’s eye and a troll’s timing.

With Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House, Mak2 doesn’t just comment on the art market. She builds it into the work. Or rather, she turns the work into a market, one that players can influence, but never quite control. Just like everything else.

Mak2 lives and works in Hong Kong.

LINK: Mak2

EVENT: WEIRD HOPE ENGINES (MARCH 21 - MAY 10 2025, NOTTINGHAM, UK)

Image: Andrew Walter Boggins

Weird Hope Engines

Curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe

Exhibition: Sat 22 Mar 2025 - Sat 10 May 2025

Opening Friday 21st March  6-8pm

Bonington Gallery

Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, Nottingham, NG1 4GG

United Kingdom

 
press release

Weird Hope Engines embraces the culture of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) to explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility. The first exhibition of its kind, it foregrounds the practices of innovative designers, artists, and writers in the field of independent game design, and brings their work into dialogue with fellow-travellers in the field of critical art practice.

Weird Hope Engines, curated by Dying Earth Catalogue, is an experimental exhibition that reimagines Bonington Gallery as a hybrid lab—at once a testing site for the development of new worlding experiences, an active gaming hub, and an archive of maps, concept artworks, rulebooks, and gaming curiosities. Visitors will be invited to participate in both solo and collaborative gaming experiences that foreground questions of collective responsibility, personal testimony, and colonial legacy, reframing our expectations of gaming imaginaries as potent sites for rethinking social organisation, cross-cultural understanding, and personal reverie.

Migrating between the dreamworlds of science fiction, fantasy, folkloric myth, and pressing social realities, a series of newly commissioned play experiences by David Blandy, Chris Bisette, Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko utilise a range of mechanics, from dice rolls and diary keeping to tumble towers and the recording  of personal anecdotes, to encourage new approaches to immersive play. 

Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang (Melsonia Arts Council) showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, in which image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling.

An essay-film devised by the curators and based upon Jamie Sutcliffe’s essay ‘Playing Games’ (Art Monthly, Issue 484, March 2025) has been produced in collaboration with Adam Sinclair and Lotti Closs, exploring the shared experience of game space as a conflicted site of simulation and hallucinatory possibility.

LINK: Weird Hope Engines

CALL FOR PAPERS: GAME ENGINE CULTURE(S) (DiGRA 2025, MALTA)

 

GAME ENGINE CULTURE(S), DiGRA 2025

June 30th at DiGRA2025 (University of Malta)

The workshop intends to explore the implications of the widespread use of videogame engines in visual culture and the creative industries. Game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine have transcended their initial confines in videogame development, evolving into versatile platforms that now influence a wide array of creative and scientific fields. These powerful tools are not just limited to gaming; they have reshaped Hollywood visual effects, virtual production, and even pre-visualisation of movie sets, as well as contemporary art and architecture. Game engines are also utilised to create training simulations for various industries, including the military.

As these engines standardise aesthetic and functional practices, they simultaneously raise critical questions about artistic authorship, expressive diversity, accessibility, environmental sustainability, and the impact of increased digital consumption. The workshop aims to critically examine the contemporary use of game engines within the visual arts. It seeks to explore the convergence of media studies, game studies, platform studies, curatorial practice, and art history.

The workshop draws on the ongoing work of the curators in this field. They have organised an art exhibition (School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2022), a workshop (University of Liverpool, 2023) and are now curating an edited collection on the subject (Mimesis International, to be published in 2025).

The workshop will take place on June 30th at the University of Malta, in the framework of DiGRA2025. Participants will deliver 20-minute presentations of their work, followed by Q&A. Presentations will be divided into sub-thematic sessions, and presenters within the same session will be expected to read each other’s paper. Both in-real-life and online presentations will be possible. In selecting the final list of speakers we will be mindful of issues of representation in relation to gender, race, geographical background and career level.

Please submit a 300-word abstract by Friday 4th April to the organisers:

Paolo Ruffino [email protected]
Matteo Bittanti [email protected]
Valentino Catricalà [email protected]

Notification of acceptance: Monday 21st April

Workshop date: June 30th (University of Malta)

Essential bibliography

Atkinson, Paul, and Parsayi, Farnaz, ‘Institutionalized Aesthetics: Video Games and the Contemporary Art Gallery’, Games and Culture, 0.0 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241246839.

Charrieras, Damien, and Ivanova, Nadejda, ‘Emergence in Video Game Production: Video Game Engines as Technical Individuals’, Social Science Information, 55.3 (2016), pp. 337-356, https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018416642056.

Chia, Aleena, Malazita, James, Young, Chris J., Nieborg, David B., Joseph, Daniel J., and Gantt, Matthew D., ‘The Engine Is the Message: Videogame Infrastructure and the Future of Digital Platforms’, paper presented at AoIR2022: The 23rd Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Dublin, Ireland, 2-5 November 2022.

Chia, Aleena, ‘The Artist and the Automaton in Digital Game Production’, Convergence, 28.2 (2022), pp. 389–412, https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221076434.

Chia, Aleena, ‘The Metaverse, but Not the Way You Think: Game Engines and Automation Beyond Game Development’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 39.3 (2022), pp. 191–200, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2080850.

Chia, Aleena, Keogh, Brendan, Leorke, Dale, and Nicoll, Benjamin, ‘Platformisation in Game Development’, Internet Policy Review, 9.4 (2020), https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platformisation-game-development.

Freedman, Eric, The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture (London: Routledge, 2019).

Foxman, Maxwell, ‘United We Stand: Platforms, Tools and Innovation With the Unity Game Engine’, Social Media + Society, 5.4 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880177.

Lohmeyer, Eddie, Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

Malazita, Jim, Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024).

Nicoll, B., and Keogh, B., The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2019)

Nideffer, Robert F., ‘Game Engines as Embedded Systems’, in Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, ed. by Victoria Vesna (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 211–232.

Curators bio

Paolo Ruffino is Senior Lecturer in Digital Curation and Computational Creativity at the department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK. Ruffino has been investigating the independent production of videogames, labour unions in the videogame industry, and nonhuman and posthuman play in the digital age. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2018), editor of Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics (Routledge, 2021) and author of articles for Games and Cultures; Television and New Media; Critical Studies in Media Communication; and GAME The Italian Journal of Game Studies. He is currently working on a new monograph for MIT Press, titled Videogames for the Post-Anthropocene (to be published in Fall 2026).

Matteo Bittanti is Associate Professor in Media Studies at IULM University in Milan, Italy and a Lecturer in the Faculty of the Master of Arts in Algorithmic and Networked Photography at ELISAVA, in Barcelona, Spain. Bittanti is the artistic director of the Milan Machinima Festival and director of the online platform VRAL. His latest publications include Game-driven Video Art. Cinema, videogames, machinima (Mimesis Edizioni, 2025), Fotoludica. Photography, video games 3 between art and documentation (with Marco De Mutiis, Mimesis Edizioni, 2025), The Photographer’s Guide to Los Santos (with Marco De Mutiis, Mimesis International, 2024). Bittanti lives in Los Angeles.

Valentino Catricalà is the curator of the SODA Gallery, Modal, in Manchester (UK) and a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research and curatorial practice focus on the relationship between artists and new technologies. Valentino holds a PhD from Roma Tre University and has been a visiting lecturer in at ZKM (Karlsruhe), Tate Modern (London), University of Dundee (Dundee), and LIMA (Amsterdam). As a curator, he has worked for many international art institutions such as the Hermitage (San Petersburg), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco), New York Media Center (New York), Fondazione Stelline (Milan), MAXXI Museum (Rome), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), Ca' Foscari (Venice), Indian Art Faire - New Dheli Italian Cultural Institute (India), and Spatiu Intact (Romania).

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

GAME ART: LOVE HULTÉN'S STUNNING DEVICE ART

Love Hultén, R - K A I D - R, Portable arcade console in solid wood

Love Hultén,  O R I G I N X, arcade cabinet in solid wood, Dimensions: 61x51x31cm, Raspberry Pi 4, 19" 4:3 LCD (incl custom barrel distortion to mimic CRT monitors)

​Love Hultén,, P Y U A, Conceptual tribute to Nintendo

 

​Love Hultén, E V O B O X X, synthesizer based on the cellular automaton Game of Life (1970)

 

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Love Hultén, P O C K E T   S P I N, Portable game console for arcade spinner titles​

 

 

Love Hultén, , C A B I N E T  o f   A L G O R I T H M I C   C U R I O S I T I E S, conceptual arcade cabinet based on a collection of three mathematical exploration games created by Happybits

Love Hultén, born in 1984 in Gothenburg, Sweden, is an audiovisual artist and woodworker renowned for his unique fusion of traditional craftsmanship and modern technology. He earned his bachelor's degree from HDK Steneby in 2014 and has since been creating bespoke synthesizers, sound sculptures, and custom game consoles. Working from his studio at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg, Hultén handcrafts each piece, blending form and function to challenge conventional perceptions of art and design. His work has attracted a diverse clientele, including notable figures such as Eminem, A$AP Rocky, and Michael B. Jordan. Hultén's creations are celebrated for their playful yet understated aesthetic, drawing inspiration from retro-futurism and mid-20th-century design principles. By integrating tactile elements into his designs, he fosters a deeper connection between users and technology, offering a personalized alternative to mass-produced digital interfaces. ​

LINK: Love Hultén (all images (c) Love Hultén)