GAMESCENES

EVENT: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2023: SHADOW WORK (JULY 6-16, TORONTO, CANADA)

Vector Festival 2023: shadow work

July 6–16, 2023

InterAccess
Unit 1
950 Dupont Street
Toronto ON M6H 1Z2
Canada

press release

Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices.

Vector Festival 2023: shadow work, curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi, engages the formal and informal and mundane and arcane ways that classification systems attempt to contain the messy realities of our lives and shape our conditions. Confronting the work that both maintains and disrupts these systems, shadow work presents interventions on labour, the calculability of human life, the ungovernable, the echoes and reverberations of colonization and propositions for new, “life-giving” languages.

Through a hybrid online and in-person program of exhibitions, performances, screenings, and workshops, this 10-day festival invites artists and audiences to come together as we navigate the systems uninformed of our humanity.

Details will continue to be announced at vectorfestival.org

Program highlights

shadow work
Flagship Exhibition, July 6–August 5, 2023
Curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi

Through AR, VR, solar power, and immersive projection, shadow workexplores classification systems in contrast with the messy reality of our lives.

Worldbuilding towards...
Game Jam, July 7–16, 2023
Curated by Bracy Appeikumoh

This participatory game jam encourages game makers to create worlds radically different from our current realities, ones that foster care, compassion, and community. Together, we’ll ask (and work to answer): what world would you like to live in?

Anthropo-digitalism
Multi-site exhibition, July 6–July 16, 2023
Curated by keiko Hart

How does the digital (re)animate our environments? How do we imprint our humanness upon the digital, and how does digitalness imprint upon us humans? Ruminate on your human/digital reflections with the anthropomorphic inventions of Marisa Fulper-Estrada, Jon McCurley, Kristin McWharter, Lorna Mills, Sunny Nestler, and Seth Scriver.

a language of bodies
Screening, July 12, 2023    
Curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa

This screening brings together artists who are each transcending sealed forms and exploding the classification systems which govern “bodies”. By engaging physical bodies, bodies of water, and bodies of knowledge, these artists are working in the spaces between, celebrating the undefined and uncontrollable.

ponyHAUS performance
Performance, July 14, 2023
Curated by ponyHAUS

In true hybrid fashion, you're invited to a night of moving in and out of screen-based worlds. Contrast and draw parallels between our IRL and URL lives, supported by a selection of experimental music performances.

A Very Human Screening
Screening, July 15, 2023
Curated by Insomniac Film Festival

Go outside! Touch Grass! Logging off has become harder and harder to do. Our jobs, our social lives and our societal infrastructures have all moved online. Our identities, our bodies even, are shaped by the internet. So what now? Do we fight harder for our three-dimensional lives, or do we submit to the digital one we have? Joining us in pondering these questions with Insomniac in the genuine, outdoor, real life world.

Festival After Party
July 16, 2023
Details TBA, stay tuned.

Workshop series

SinkInSync: Creating Interactive VR with Brainwave Data
Online via Zoom, July 8
Facilitated by Tiange Wang and Xin Feng

Explore creating interactive and responsive VR environments leveraging brainwave data using Unity3D, Muse Headband, and Oculus VR Headset (Muse Headband or the VR Headset not required to participate). Upon completion of the workshop, participants will have created a 3D environment with dynamic visual elements responsive to data, and obtained the knowledge to independently implement neurofeedback VR experiences with commercially-available tools.

Tiling into AI
In-person, July 9
Facilitated by Blaine Cambell and Mohamed Somani

Patterning is an accessible activity regardless of age and skill that has deep roots across cultures. It is also a way for people to connect in verbal and non-verbal ways—in the moment of the activity but also across geographies and time. Join us in a freeform pattern making workshop where participants create individual or group patterns using various coloured cut geometric mat board shapes. These creations will be augmented by an AI model which will insert a collaborative “buffer” to connect our creations and create a cohesive, continuous pattern.

Utopics
In-person, July 13
Facilitated by Geoffrey Pugen

In this workshop Geoffry Pugen will demonstrate how to create a labyrinth as a 3d asset and export a rendered video walk through of the scene. Using Unreal engine 5.1 and Blender 3.5

Making a Solar-Server: DIY Web Design & Eco Media Art
In-person, July 22
Facilitated by Imogen Clendinning

Learn about DIY Internet technology and solar-powered media with one of Vector Festival 2023’s exhibiting artists. Participants will be led through the creation of a static HTML web server hosted on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and a live demonstration on powering a microcomputer using solar energy.

Registration, more details, and updates with workshops soon to be announced. More programming announcements to come!

Keep in touch with us at @interaccessto on Instagram and at vectorfestival.org
If you have any questions about the Vector Festival or our programming, please email [email protected].

LINK: Vector Festival 2023

EVENT: THOMAS HAWRANKE AND LASSE SCHERFFIG (JANUARY 6-19 2023, ONLINE)

COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE – THE MOVIE

Digital video (1024 x 1024), sound, color, 55’ 33”, 2022, Germany  

Created by Thomas Hawranke and Lasse Scherffig

January 6 - 19 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

An adaptation sui generis of an early text-based adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure - The Movie remediates the program developed by Will Crowther in 1976 based on the architecture of the Mammoth Cave complex in Kentucky. The original game used text to describe the environment whereas the animated film uses AI-generated visuals. Every eight seconds, the AI system receives a new textual description, taken from Colossal Cave Adventure’s source code, comprising 379 inputs ranging from narrative descriptions of nature to jargon from the vocabulary of speleologists to single words meaning an object, a compass direction, or an exclamation. The camera constantly moves downwards, digging through geological layers and exposing new cave spaces again and again.

Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human-animal-machine relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern of his is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and received a PhD from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the zkm_gameplay in Karlsruhe and the RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Lasse Scherffig is an artist and scientist with a background in cognitive science/machine learning and computer science. Scherffig is interested in the relationship of humans, machines, and society; cybernetics and the technological infrastructures of communication and control; and the cultures and aesthetics of computation and interaction. His work oscillates between computer science and experimental artistic practices, engineering and amateur/DIY methods, science and humanities. A professor of Interaction Design at Köln International School of Design, he previously served as the Department Chair of Art and Technology at San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught as assistant professor. Scherffig co-founded the artist group Paidia Institute and off topic, magazine for media art. His art projects have been shown at numerous exhibitions. Lasse holds a doctoral degree in Experimental Computer Science from KHM, Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: STEVEN COTTINGHAM (NOVEMBER 18 - DECEMBER 1 2022, ONLINE)

 

CHAIN-LINK

single-channel HD video (1920 x 1080, MPEG-4 AAC, H.264) comprising machinima, 3D animation, and found footage with sound, 90’ 1”, 2022, Canada

Created by Steven Cottingham

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

WORLD PREMIERE

 

Bruce Sterling famously stated that the future is “old men, in cities, afraid of the sky”. In Steve Cottingham’s cyberpunk masterpiece filmed with/in an unrecognizable Grand Theft Auto V, Chain-link, the future is even more nightmarish: pervasive surveillance, carceral capitalism, and techno-feudalism.

Steven Cottingham is an artist based in Vancouver. His work concerns the politics of visualization. Recent exhibitions include Natalia Hug Galerie (Cologne, 2022), Artists Space (New York, 2022), The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, 2021), and Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, 2021). From 2018 to 2021, Cottingham co-edited the art theory periodical QOQQOON, and in 2021–2022 he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Chain–link (2022) is his first feature film.

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EVENT: SLIP.STREAM.SLIP RESISTANCE AND VELOCITY IN GAME ENGINE CULTURE (JUNE 24 - SEPTEMBER 18 2022, MANCHESTER, UK)

Slip.Stream.Slip

Curated by Valentino Catricalà

From 24 June 2022, 10am – 4pm

MODAL gallery, SODA, New School of Digital Arts

Manchester Metropolitan University

School of Digital Arts (SODA),
14 Higher Chatham Street,
Manchester,
M15 6ED

Featuring nine international artists, our inaugural exhibition celebrates game engine culture and how our relationship to images, sounds and interactivity has been transformed by technologies such as the Unity and Unreal engines.

The inaugural exhibition at Modal gallery focuses on game engine culture and the shift toward gamification as a model for understanding our lived experiences. Slippage between real life and simulated worlds has reinforced a lexicon of competition, changing our relationship to social interaction, media production, and time and space.

The game engine sits behind processes that go beyond creative production into healthcare and manufacturing, cementing its place as the central authoring tool of our time. Slip.Stream.Slip explores the tensions and contested spaces that open up when the micro politics of everyday living meet complex, simulated worlds.

Featured artists: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Auriea Harvey, Cécile B. Evans, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela, Joshua Citarella, Juan Cortés, Lu Yang, Rachel Maclean, and DIS.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Liminal Lands

Lu Yang, DOKU Digital Alaya

Read more here

LINK: Slip.Stream.Slip (all images courtesy of SODA/MODAL)

LINK: Modal Gallery

EVENT: FELIX KLEE (MAY 13 - MAY 26 2022, ONLINE)

My paws are soft, my bones are heavy

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound (stereo), 4’ 57”, Germany, 2021

Created by Felix Klee, 2021

vral.org

 

Can an artificial intelligence dream? Apparently, yes. In this oneiric short, it imagines itself as a virtual mountain lion wandering through digital landscapes. After jumping off a cliff, the animal dives into the ocean, looking for some tranquility. Written by an artificial intelligence, narrated by a text-to-speech converter and shot within a modified video game, My paws are soft, my bones are heavy is blatantly post-human.

Felix Klee is studying documentary filmmaking at the University of Television and Film in Munich, Germany. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich — where he studied time-based media under Julian Rosefeldt and painting under Pia Fries — Klee previously studied painting under Thomas Hartmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and was a guest student at Universidad de las Artes Aguascalientes México. He co-founded the ReKollektiv, a collective of media artists and directors working towards the democratization of footage and a collectivist approach to film editing. From 2020-2022 he served as an advisory board member at Locarno Film Festival. Klee lives and works in Munich, Germany.

WATCH NOW

VRAL is now on Patreon

EVENT: SPECULATIVE FUTURES SYMPOSIUM (APRIL 7 2022, VANCOUVER, CANADA)

Epic Games, MetaHuman Creator (still), 2022. Video. Courtesy of Epic Games.

Speculative Futures

April 7, 10am–3:30pm

Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street
Vancouver BC V6Z 2H7
Canada

press release

To what extent have technology and the promise of digital futures co-opted and compromised our sense of self and identity? How can we decolonize digital space or build new digital infrastructure?

Presented in conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery's exhibitionThe Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the Speculative Futures Symposium examines artificial intelligence and the specific uses of technology in its multifarious dimensions. Across four different lectures and panel conversations, leading thinkers of today will explore the ethical implications of technology and discuss how they are working to address these issues in cultural production.

Featured speakers include: Dr. Ramon Amaro (University College London), Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble (University of California, Los Angeles, and MacArthur Fellowship Honoree), Jiayang Fan (The New Yorker Magazine), Nalo Hopkinson (University of British Columbia), Larissa Lai (University of Calgary), and Ken Liu (author).

Moderated by Melissa Karmen Lee, Director of Education and Public Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery and Dr. Kavita Phillip, President's Excellence Chair in Network Cultures, University of British Columbia.

The Speculative Futures Symposium is presented in partnership with the University of British Columbia’s Public Humanities Hub, the UBC Library and the UBC School of Information, the English Language & Literatures Department, the President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures and the School of Creative Writing, with additional media support from Canadian Literature.

LINK: The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

EVENT: IAN CHENG: WORLDING (MARCH 2–JULY 3, 2022, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA)

Ian Cheng: Worlding
March 2–July 3, 2022

Leeum Museum of Art
60-16, Itaewon-ro, 55-gil, Yongsan-gu
140-893 Seoul
South Korea

Curated by Gina Lee, Curator, Leeum Museum of Art

press release

Leeum Museum of Art presents Ian Cheng: Worlding, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Through his pioneering works comprising virtual ecosystems created with artificial intelligence and game engine, Ian Cheng (b. 1984) creatively explores and philosophically contemplates the nature of human consciousness. Ian Cheng: Worlding is the first exhibition to bring together all of the virtual worlds that Cheng has created. The artist’s boundless imagination and futuristic vision are on full display in all five of the featured works, the latest of which was produced with support from Leeum.

Ian Cheng, Emissary in the Squat of Gods, 2015, still from simulation

Included in the exhibition is the Emissaries trilogy (2015–2017), the unique series that brought Cheng to the attention of the international art world. In this live simulation, which the artist describes as a “video game that plays itself,” AI-based characters and environment are contained in a virtual ecosystem in which new and unforeseen events continuously arise.

Ian Cheng, BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–2019)

In BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–2019), an artificial creature that resembles a snake explores the inner workings of human consciousness. Just as every person has different faces and traits that can appear in a given situation, BOB consists of multiple artificial intelligences with various motives. Using the customized app, audience members are invited and encouraged to help form BOB’s personality and beliefs.

Cheng’s latest work in the show is Life After BOB: The Chalice Study (2021), a feature-length animation created with support from Leeum, The Shed (New York), the LUMA Foundation, and Light Art Space (LAS, Berlin). Telling the story of Chalice Wong, a ten-year old girl with an AI “BOB” brain implant, this work reveals the artist’s imagining of a future in which humans and artificial intelligence coexist. After viewing the work, the audience can use a link to gain access to the interactive “World Watching” mode to explore Cheng’s animated world in even greater depth.

About Leeum Museum of Art: Leeum Museum of Art was established in 2004 by the Samsung Foundation of Culture to preserve the cultural assets of Korea and to share with the public its expansive collection ranging from traditional Korean art to modern and contemporary art of the world. The museum is dedicated to enhancing appreciation and understanding of art through exhibitions, artist support programs, education, research, and publications. Three of the world's most renowned architects designed the three buildings of the museum. Mario Botta designed the terracotta building (M1) for the museum's traditional Korean art collection, Jean Nouvel designed the rusted stainless steel building (M2) for the museum's modern and contemporary art collection, and Rem Koolhaas designed the futuristic black concrete and glass edifice for the museum's special exhibitions and Child Education & Culture Center.

LINK: Leum Museum of Art

LINK: Ian Cheng

GAME ART: CORY ARCANGEL'S roʊˈdeɪoʊ (2021)

Cory Arcangel

/roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let's Play: HOLLYWOOD

Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

March 5th - April 17th, 2021

"/roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ (pronounced like "Rodeo" in "Rodeo Drive") is a one of a kind Deep-Q machine learning super computing system which can play, and learn as it is plays, open ended RPG games. For the debut deployment — /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let's Play: HOLLYWOOD — it will be playing Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a casual free-to-play role-playing Android game where players aim to increase their reputation by gaining fans in order to become A-List celebrities. [...] 

/roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ has been in development since 2017 by the R & D division of the Cory Arcangel fine arts studio in Brooklyn, New York, and Stavanger, Norway, and delivers significant computational performance with its AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core 32-Thread processor & (x2) EVGA 24G-P5-3975-KR GeForce RTX 3090 XC3 Ultra GPU's connected together by a Rog Crosshair Viii Dark Hero motherboard. Running NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture accelerated YOLO real-time object detection on a Darknet neural network framework with Dark Flow tensorflow interfacing with custom Deep-Q learning software, /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ can "see" games, make choices, and evaluate those choices.

LINK: Cory Arcangel's roʊˈdeɪoʊ (all images courtesy of the Artist)

GAME ART: TOTAL REFUSAL'S CIRCUMVENTING THE CIRCLE OF DEATH (2018)

Total Refusal - Digital Disarmament Movement is a collective comprising Austrian artists Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel and Michael Stumpf funded in 2018 which promotes a subversively pacifist approach to violent video games. The trifecta operates as an "ideological antidote, unveiling the regressive characteristics of contemporary gaming media and reopening them as playgrounds for practicing creative disobedience and dissent." As they write,

The vast majority of contemporary video games is characterized by combative gameplay. This seems especially remarkable now that video games have long arrived in the entertainment mainstream and have managed to drop the boy’s room stigmata. With gaming becoming both commercially and culturally more and more relevant, the question arises how artists can modify and make use of this media for their own  purposes. In “Total Refusal”, artists Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf aim to peacefully appropriate the existing mechanics of digital gaming media in order to find new use for their virtual combat zones. As such, “Total Refusal” is a pacifistic statement, realized in digital space.

Circumventing the Circle of Death is a performance - hereby documented as a machinima piece - in which the artists highlight the absurd behavior of some computer game algorithms. In this case, by keeping two armies of a real-time strategy game in constant motion so that they do not come in "frontal view" with each other and thus begin an armed confrontation, the game becomes something else, that is, a virtual dance (and potentially interminable) between two factions. We hear the soldiers shouting menacingly at each other, and yet shots are not fired. Destruction is replaced by distraction. Inspired by the tactics of the International Situationists, the artists sabotaged the game without tempering with the code: gameplay is subverted by exploiting the algorithm's "blindness". And yet, the almost comical dance is no less absurd that the urge to destroy and annihilate. If anything, the former produces sweat, while the latter blood. 

Total Refusal - Digital Disarmament Movement has produced several other performances, installations, and video pieces including Landscape for a Battle Panorama (64 Soldiers hiding from the Player), Sculptering a Peace Model, Operation Jane Walk, and the upcoming How to Disappear.

Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel and Michael Stumpf, Circumventing the Circle of Death, 2018, installation view.

LINK: Leonhard Müllner

Event: Ian Cheng's Emissary Forks At Perfection (May 24 - November 25, Venice Italy)

Ian Cheng

Emissary Forks At Perfection

May 24 - November 25

Espace Louis Vuitton

Venezia Calle del Ridotto 1353

Opening hours: Monday to Saturday from 10 am to 8.00 pm and on Sunday from 10.30 am to 8.00 pm. Open on public holidays. Free entrance

For its third exhibition produced in the framework the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program, the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia is pleased to present American artist Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks At Perfection. The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program showcases previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice and Beijing, thus carrying out the Fondation’s intent to realize international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

The video installation Emissary Forks At Perfection (2015-2016) is the second chapter of the Emissaries trilogy created by Cheng between 2015 and 2017. These three episodes, located in the same space but addressing different eras, trace the evolution of ensembles of beings and the way they adapt to their environment. Each features an “emissary”, a “narrative agent”, whose actions will modify the course of events. With Emissary Forks At Perfection, Cheng leads us to question the human mind’s adaptive capacities and human evolution in the face of otherness, randomness and the unpredictability of an ever-changing world.

LINK: Ian Cheng

LINK: Espace Louis Vitton