GAMESCENES

EVENT: CHLOÉ DESMOINEAUX (NOVEMBER 26 - DECEMBER 9 2021, ONLINE)

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LIPSTRIKE

live recording of online performance

digital video (1280 x 720), sound, color, 10’, 2021 [2016], France

Created by Chloé Desmoineaux

vral.org

 

Originally created in 2016, Lipstrike is an online performance in Counter-Strike that uses an unusual device as a weapon: a lipstick. Each time the artist applies cosmetics on her lips, her gun unleashes a torrent of bullets. She broadcast her performances on Twitch, receiving thousands of snarky comments by angry gamers, which were subsequently collected and published in a limited edition booklet. Five years later, the artist has updated the original iteration for VRAL. One question remains: has anything changed since #Gamergate?

Interested in tactical media, hacking culture, and cyberfeminism, Chloé Desmoineaux creates media experiments through performances, installations, and hijacked video games. She is particularly concerned about the place given to women as well as dissident and “minority” people in the video game industry and she tries to create spaces of visibility and reflection to discuss these issues. She is a member of the Freesson Collective which focuses on supporting creative practices and electronic music. It also organizes events and workshops on digital art and culture. Co-organizer of the Art Games Demos (2017-2019) initiative with Isabelle Arvers, Desmoineaux has curated several exhibitions about the culture, aesthetics and ideology of gaming in the past decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She led several workshops on alternative controllers, glitch aesthetics, interactive animations, and video games. Desmoineaux lives and works in Marseille.

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EVENT: YUCEF MERHI: OPEN (SEPTEMBER 2 - NOVEMBER 2021, MIAMI)

Yucef Merhi: OPEN

On view Sept. 2 – Nov. 20 2021

The Bonnier Gallery

3408 NW 7th Avenue

Miami, Florida33127

Yucef Merhi is the Nam June Paik of Game Art. OPEN is his unmissable retrospective at the The Bonnier Gallery in Miami.

full press release

"The Bonnier Gallery is pleased to announce Yucef Merhi's upcoming solo exhibition "OPEN" will be on view from September 2nd - November 20th, 2021. Throughout his 30+ year journey, Merhi's work has remained front and center in the current thinking about art and technology. Opening up a panoramic view of Merhi’s inner worlds, the upcoming exhibition consists of works from five different series that capture the far-reaching consequence of Merhi's orbit around contemporary culture and map out his creative diaspora.

In 1985, when pioneer digital artist Yucef Merhi was only eight years old and growing up in Caracas, he reverse-engineered his ATARI 2600 and turned it into a programmable computer. He used the Atari Video Computer System to produce generative videos based in language instructions. A leading art critic at the time saw this and proclaimed: “What you have created here, Yucef, will be considered a work of art in years to come.” Decades later, Merhi’s seminal creations would be exhibited at the New Museum in New York and would travel all over the world in international exhibitions, celebrated as the first works of art crafted from a videogame console. Watch a video that demonstrates one of these original 1985 works. One year later, at the age of nine, Merhi figured out how to calibrate the atomic clock of Venezuela, and the National Ministry of Defense commended him for achieving this breakthrough.

From data hacking as protest art against totalitarianism and police brutality, to his new vision called Retrocycling that rescues obsolete tech devices from landfills . . . from perfecting a universal language as new source code for planetary awakening, to digital interventions that make poems come alive . . . throughout his 30+ year journey, the artist’s work has remained front and center in the current thinking about art, and especially digital art. Opening up a panoramic view of Merhi’s inner worlds, the new show Yucef Merhi: Open at The Bonnier Gallery captures the far-reaching consequence of his orbit around contemporary culture. For the viewer experiencing Merhi’s art, this often results in mind-expanding encounters with language.

The gallery show presents 15 works, from five different series that map out his creative diaspora. The show ushers in the eagerly anticipated return of Miami’s Art Basel season, and opens on September 2 at the Bonnier Gallery in Allapattah, Miami’s burgeoning art district. “This new show will allow people to experience digital art that is of substance, as opposed to the speculative NFTs that seem to dominate that conversation,” says Grant Bonnier, the curator of this show and owner of the Gallery. “Yucef Merhi has packed the equivalent of several lifetimes leading up to this critical mid-career point of his trajectory,” adds Bonnier. “Merhi is poised at the leading edge of the technology and art.” Yucef Merhi has produced bodies of work that engage a wide spectrum including poetry, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, sound, virtual reality, hacking, and retro video games. By ensuring that his works always connect with the warmth of human engagement through language, Merhi’s momentum continues ahead of the curve."

Atari Ex Machina, 2007

Atari 2600, cartridge, keyboard, TV

72 x 24 x 24 in. / 182.9 x 61 x 61 cm

Copyright The Artist

Photo: The Artist

 

 

Atari Poetry VI, 2006

Atari 2600, Atari cartridge, TV

39 x 16 x 16 in. / 99.1 x 40.6 x 40.6 cm

Copyright The Artist

Photo: The Artist

 

 

Compassion, 2020

5 CRT TVs, 5 Atari 2600 game consoles, custom Atari cartridges, directional sound system

80 x 60 x 70 in.

Copyright Yucef Merhi

Photo: Zachary Balber

 

Among Yucef Merhi's most powerful works is Mission Taliban 2.0 (2002), a 20 year old VR computer game which, for some reasons, feels so incredibly fresh.

 

 

LINK: Yucef Merhi: Open

LINK: Yucef Merhi

EVENT: HOW TO WIN AT PHOTOGRAPHY – IMAGE-MAKING AS PLAY (JUNE 5 - OCTOBER 10 2021, WINTERTHUR, SWITZERLAND)

 

How to Win at Photography - Image-Making as Play

June 5 - October 10 2021

Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

Curated by Marco de Mutiis and Matteo Bittanti 

official site

How to Win at Photography – Image-Making as Play explores the relationship between photography and play. It investigates the notion of image play, creating unexpected connections between the history of photography, the gamification of the visible as well as practices of image making with and within computer games.

The group exhibition How to Win at Photography includes more than forty positions from contemporary and 20th century photography. Through an assemblage of multimedia artworks and vernacular images, the exhibition questions the very meaning and function of photography today.

 

Are we playing with the camera or is the camera ultimately playing us? Are we really in charge or are we mere pawns in larger technical, social, cultural and economic networks? What can a playful photographer achieve on a political and sociocultural level? Who and what is performing the act of seeing and capturing – humans, machines or a combination of both? Who is playing along? And finally, can this game be won? These are just some of the questions posed by How to Win at Photography. The exhibition invites visitors to focus on the playful aspects of photography. It looks at artists and photographers who play with – and sometimes against – the camera, document the environments of video games and question the notion of identity, gender and class.

With works by: Cory Arcangel, Aram Bartholl, Dorothée Elisa Baumann, Justin Berry, Julius Brauckmann, Alan Butler, Claude Cahun, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Dries Depoorter & Max Pinckers, Philipp Dorl, Constant Dullaart, Harun Farocki, Christopher Graves, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Beate Gütschow, Jon Haddock, Emily Hadrich, Florence Henri, Roc Herms, John Hilliard, Yuyi John, Rindon Johnson, Andy Kassier, Sherrie Levine, Gloria López Cleries & Sive Hamilton Helle, René Mächler, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Joan Pamboukes, Steven Pippin, Michael Reisch, Tabor Robak, Ria Patricia Röder, Lorna Ruth Galloway, Ed Ruscha, Emma Agnes Sheffer, Cindy Sherman, Guido Segni, Andrew Stine, Petra Szemán, Akihiko Taniguchi, Danielle Udogaranya, Coralie Vogelaar, Tamás Waliczky and Ai Weiwei.

In collaboration with the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University.

There will be several events planned between now and October, some in situ, some online, so stay tuned for more.

LINK: How to Win at Photography

EVENT: PLAYMODE (SEPTEMBER 11 2019 - FEBRUARY 17 2020, LISBON, PORTUGAL)

PLAYMODE

 

11 September 2019 - 17 February 2020

Curated by Filipe Pais and Patrícia Gouveia

MAAT

Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology

Av. Brasília, Central Tejo

1300-598 Lisboa

Open from 11 AM to 7 PM

Closed on Tuesdays

The artists understood early on the transformative power of play, and began integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of game and play mechanisms themselves. The exhibition Playmode offers a reflection on these aspects and on the era of ludification that contemporary societies are now experiencing, bringing together pieces by several artists, such as Brad Downey, Gabriel Orozco and Ana Vieira, who incorporate the theme while exploring new ways of seeing, participating and transforming the world, using gaming in a critical light.

Participating artists:

The Pixel Hunt, Pippin Barr, Aram Bartholl, /////////fur//// art entertainment interface, Gabriel Orozco, Priscila Fernandes, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Mary Flanagan, Harun Farocki, Molleindustria, Bill Viola and USC Game Innovation Lab, Samuel Bianchini, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lucas Pope, Joseph DeLappe, Brent Watanabe, Filipe Vilas-Boas, Shimabuku, Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales, David Shrigley, André Gonçalves, Isamu Noguchi, Ana Vieira, Miltos Manetas, David OReilly, Brad Downey, Dunne & Raby with Michael Anastassiades, Os Espacialistas, CADA.

LINK: PLAYMODE

GAME ART: HANNAH PIPER BURNS'S INTERIOR STROLL (2016)

Interior Stroll is a mixed-media interactive installation created with Unity "designed to collapse physical space and memory space, body and consciousness. More walking meditation than walking sim, it is set in a symbolic cavespace shaped by the psychic runoff from years of malignant intimacy". The artist has created an innovative interface ​featuring a silicon toy + silicon putty that reminds me of Cronenberg's gamepod in eXistenz.

 

A second controller manages the player's gaze. It's an appropriated trackball, cyberskin toy, and a chalcopyrite clitorissphere:

Hannah Piper Burns is a multidisciplinary time-based artist based in Portland, Oregon, She has spent the better part of a decade actively and collaboratively organizing art events, curating exhibitions and programming experimental media. In 2015 she co-founded Compliance Division, a project space operating out of her home in Portland, OR. Recently, she has exhibited work at Tritriangle in Chicago, IL, Reed College in Portland, OR, Indie Bits in Columbia, SC and online at ACRETV.org.

LINK: Hannah Piper Burns (photos: Courtesy of Hannah Piper Burns)

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2019 (DEADLINE FEB 01, 2019)

Vector Festival 2019's Open Call for Submissions is now up!

Deadline: February 01, 2019

An event organized by

950 Dupont St., Unit 1.
Toronto ON M6H 1Z2
Canada

LINK: Vector Festival 2019

Game Art: Roger Ibars' Device Art (2001-2011)

An Interaction Designer working in Product Innovation, Roger Ibars specializes in Natural User Interfaces, from the social and technical explorations to defining the syntactics and semantics on early prototyping.  With the aim to explore game controllers and gesture interaction, in 2002 he began building "hard-wired devices" to create debate about the influence of gaming culture on the design of user interfaces. The result is a collection of vintage electronic devices -alarm clocks and game controllers- in which two cultures of interface blend between the computer gaming culture and the home appliance culture, which has been exhibited several times around the world. Currently Roger lives in Seattle and works as a Senior Interaction Designer at Microsoft Design Group. 

LINK: Roger Ibars