GAMESCENES

GAME ART: SAVEME OH'S BOOSTER NIGHTS (2021)

"Dance when the booster gets down": this is where we are now.

The virtual alter-ego of Oscar Wagenmans - a Dutch theatre director and actor - SaveMe Oh is an infamous character in Second Life, where she is often labelled as a troll, griefer and even virus. The artistic community of Linden Lab’s virtual world is terrified by the idea that SaveMe Oh could show up unannounced during a vernissage, creating havoc. In the attempt to prevent a possible raid, the sims (or rather her haters) have been trying to protect themselves by banning her since 2007, when Wagenmans first appeared online. SaveMe Oh’s interventions in Second Life disrupt both the social conventions and shared rules of the real world, which are replicated online. Why do people feel obliged to act in Second Life as if they were in IRL, instead of realizing their full creative potential? This is the key question posed by SaveMe Oh. This retrospective includes a series of absurd, irreverent, often grotesque machinima starring SaveMe Oh produced between 2012-2019.

LINK: SaveMe Oh

GAME ART: ARCH8'S TETRIS (2016-)

 

Inspired by the game Tetris the dancers dance with the walls, the hall. This extremely physical dance quartet explores how we connect with one another, building a private language to communicate, and then invite others to enter into our world. The village will come alive.

Based in the Netherlands, ARCH8 is an innovative dance company which encourages interactivity and active viewing, a participatory imagining on the part of the public. The company has performed around the globe, including St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Cairo, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Senegal, and throughout Europe. The company has also made collaborative performances with local artists in Benin, Senegal, Alexandria, Cairo, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Utrecht, the Hague, Maastricht, and Hasselt.

LINK: ARCH8

Game Art: Jennifer Petuch's Within Time’s Grip (2017)

A phenomenal dance choreography inspired by videogames and digital technology, Within Time's Grip is divided into four acts. My favorite is ""World III: Game-on", featuring Jennifer Petuch in collaboration with Bridget Close, Scott Lindenberg, Andre Lumpkin, Ryan McMullen, and Samantha Scioneaux. The soundtrack includes "Mega Man 3: Intro Music" by Yasuaki Fujita, "SNES Top Gear Cover" by Blix, "Cantina Band (8 Bit Mad about me)" by Music Legends, "Triumph" by nervous_testpilot.

Jennifer Petuch is a Master of Fine Arts Graduate candidate at Florida State University’s School of Dance Program. Since attending FSU, she has performed in multiple pieces including a Tedx Talk in the Spring of 2015 and has been collaborating with the FSU Computer Science faculty and students creating an original interactive software for the stage called ViFlow.

Stills from Jennifer Petuch MFA concert show, Within Time's Grip, 2017.

LINK: Jennifer Petuch

Event: BitCoins Love (December 20, 2016, Milan, Italy)

BitCoins Love

Tuesday December 20, 2016

7 - 10 pm

KTV, Via Luca Signorelli 2, Milano

Curated by Placentia Arte in collaboration with #girlsinmuseum

"Cannibalization of affective relationships, emotional objects in freefall, and technologies of care are the subjects explored in BitCoins Love. The exhibition will last just for one night, and it will take place in the rooms of a karaoke house.

BitCoins Love presents works and performances by Italian artists Mara Oscar Cassiani, Elisa Giardina Papa and Kamilia Kard, and in the foyer of KTV the work of six international artists: Cybertwee, Faith Holland, Tavi Lee, Helin Sahin, Miyö Van Stenis, and Szonja Szendi. The exhibition stems from the encounter of these nine artists, that often happened online and led to a constant discussion on the construction of gender, bodies, and intimacy in the scenario of advanced technocapitalism. During the three hours of the exhibition, the artists will present works in progress that intentionally leave room for the contamination of each other art practice, but also with the very place where the works are installed: a rented karaoke house. The artworks, loaded directly on the karaoke’s screens, are constantly interrupted by song lyrics. BitCoins Love presents artworks that can be contemplated and observed, but also sung and cannibalized." (Placentia Arte)

LINK: BitCoins Love (Special thanks to #GIRLSINMUSEUMS)

Game Art: Ermira Goro's "See You in Walhalla" (2006/2007)

An amazing project by Ermira Goro, See You in Walhalla is a meditation on new media, identity, videogames, and performance in a technology-saturated world. As Goro writes:

A woman slightly obsessive and familiarly lonely plays a new video game – Walhalla. She creates her avatar and guides her through various journeys taking place in an imaginary cityscape, game environment composed of real, urban imagery. While looking for an alternative way of surviving the density, danger and psychosis of urban existence, the player experiences a series of physical and psychic dissociations and becomes herself an imaginary avatar within a real environment, a real city. Both of the roles represent the subjective perception of reality, interpreted through our own desires, fears and misconceptions. So Walhalla – the mythic land of Viking warriors – becomes the battlefield of contemporary urbanity. The performance aims to provoke the audience to notice the uneasy relations between avatars and real people and to pose the question of who finally has control: the player of the game or the game itself?

See You in Walhalla was presented in 2007 in various European art festivals.

Ermira Goro is a dancer and an artist. She started dancing at Art Lyceum of Albania and graduated from the Greek National School of Dance. With scholarships from Koula Pratsika Foundation and Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) she continued her studies in New York where she collaborated with international dance companies and created her first choreographic works.

LINK: Ermira Goro

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti 

 

Game Art: Damien Pairon's Bodyscape - Dar Winners (2015)

Born in Anderlecht in 1982, Damien Pairon investigates the porous borders between reality and simulation. A truly multidisciplinary artist, well versed in video art, street art, audiovisual sculpture, Pairon's new project is titled Bodyscape - Dar Winners. Two dancers Virág Arany and Júlia Hadi question the role and function of the human body in the digital age. As Pairon writes, 

The music is created from sounds of the body, or from sounds of actions carried out by the body and the visual is modified and influenced by the sound in different ways. This way the three components of the performance have a real time, action-reaction relation rather than an illustrative connection. Like an organic system, where a change of one component affects all the others, however the sensitivity of this system is more direct, mechanical, more like a machine. The two dancers dressed in the same costume raise the questions of identity, cloning. Functioning in this mechanical system like a video game reflects on recent tendencies of our lives ruled by technology. How can these two figures relate to each other?

LINK: Damien Pairon

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti

Event: Video Game Suite (October 23, 2014, Stanford University)

Video Game Suite
Thursday, October 23, 2014, 7:00 pm
Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford University, Stanford, California

"Video Game Suite is an evening of three short "pop up" dance pieces on the theme of video games created by Bay Area choreographers and staged informally in an art gallery setting. Three short dances by: Marcos Vedoveto, Tracy Hazas, Diane Frank with Elise Knudson"

Producer Erik Flatmo's statement:

"I posed a challenge to three young choreographers: create a short dance piece based on a video game. Video game animation and technology has become amazingly sophisticated. Unlike the clunky old games of yesterday, they're cinematic, almost photorealistic. People, landscapes, and objects are rendered so convincingly that viewers (and gamers) often believe they’re witnessing events and actions firsthand. They've crossed a line, from representational and symbolic to a believable virtual reality. From a dance perspective, I’m less curious about how video games are similar to real life, more interested in how they’re different. How does a real human being versus a digital one move? What’s the difference and what does that say about the limitations and possibilities of digital technology?"

LINK: Video Game Suite

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti

Game Art: lamegame's "STREETfight" (2012-ongoing)

lamegame, STREETfight performance in Hamburg, 2013

Irresistible street performance by Kathleen Rappolt and Nils Deventer, directed by Stefanie Rejzek and Gwendolin Lamping aka lamegame, whose goal, motto and mantra is to invent "low tech/no tech streetgames and performances" (my kind of games). Rejzek and Lamping met at the University of Arts of Berlin, where they were getting their degree in Theater Pedagogy. Lamegame was launched in 2011. Their first performance, "Celebrity Stalking", debuted at the You Are Go! Festival in Berlin. Their second game, STREETfight, went public for the first time in 2012 at the Playpublik Festival in Berlin. Since then, STREETfight, has been invited to various theater and urban streetgame festivals including 100° Berlin, Let's Play Poznan in Poland and Kaltstart Festival Hamburg. This makes Oculus Rift look even lamer than it already is.

So what is STREETfight,about? Here's the official description

You don’t find avatars in computer games anymore, you find them on the streets around your corner. So get your team together, chose the character of your avatar and start entering the real world. But be aware… you’re not alone. There are techniques to be learned and fights to be fought. (lamegame)

LINK: lamegame

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (Images and video courtesy of the artists)

Game Art: Fabien Prioville's "Jailbreak Mind" (2009-2011)

"What kind of process is a person running amok going through just before he is going to kill people? What kind of effects has a computer game like “Grand Theft Auto” on these people and the way they are observing reality? For his solo Fabien Prioville, former dancer of Tanztheater Wuppertal and the company La La La Human Steps, was inspired by an article widely publicized in the press concerning a man suddenly has randomly stabbed dozens of people in Tokyo. In his choreography Fabien Prioville is searching for an abstract perspective without disregarding the emotional aspects. Which consequences do images with such a suggestive power have on a person’s mind?"

I find the two questions raised by the artist - "What kind of process is a person running amok going through just before he is going to kill people?" & "What kind of effects has a computer game like “Grand Theft Auto” on these people and the way they are observing reality?" - badly formulated, quite disconnected - a non sequitur - if not openly dishonest. And yet, that does not prevent me to find Prioville's performance truly hypnotic. 

LINK: Fabien Prioville

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (video by Uli Sigg)

Game Art: Jake Jonghwa Kim et al.'s "Space Maestro" (2013)

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Image credit: Handmade Studios



"Space Maestro is an interactive Kinect experience that enables players to create their own musical universe through free-form movement in physical space. By spatially moving both hands like a maestro conducting an orchestra, players fuse gas clouds in space into stars. As new stars are born, collide, and die, they trigger musical stingers that compose a unique audio-visual experience"

Designed by Jake Jonghwa Kim (a game designer from Korea studying Interactive Media at USC, which played the role of Creative Lead & Kinect Engineer for this project), Julian Kantor (Audio Director/Engineer), Michael Murdock (Art Director), Alexa Bona Kim (Producer), Steven Gernes (Composer), David Bertok (Composer) and Michelle S Lee (Composer) at USC Interactive Labs, Space Maestro will be on display at USC, in Los Angeles between 5/9 to 5/16 2013 and it will also be showcased at IndieCade during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

LINK: Space Maestro

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti