GAMESCENES

GAME ART: ALEX MACKIN DOLAN'S FULLY FUNCTIONAL GAMBLING AMUSEMENT MEDAL MACHINES (2022)

In his 2022 solo exhibition Really New God at Davis Lewis Gallery (November 4, 2022 - December 22, 2022), Alex Mackin Dolan presented custom-built video game machines that illuminate the addictive and extractive techniques of modern media. The show's title refers to the acronym RNG, or Random Number Generator, an algorithm that determines random outcomes in video games and computer programs. RNG is colloquially known in the machine gambling industry as Really New God.

The machines in the show, handcrafted from wood and spare parts, are modeled after "medal games"—a type of amusement machine popular in Japan that involves exchanging money for tokens without the ability to convert tokens back to cash. Though lower stakes than casino games, medal games simulate and normalize machine gambling. As Dolan's work suggests, these types of games share DNA with today's ad-driven apps and websites, which employ addictive design to capture user attention and "bleed" funds over time.

Alex Mackin Dolan, Untitled (Really New God), Computer components, paint, wood, 45x 26 1/2 x 29 in, installation view at David Lewis Gallery 2022

Through his constructed arcade cabinets, Dolan draws connections between gambling mechanics, algorithmic systems, and the extractive attention economy of digital media. Blurring recreation and addiction, his works reveal the underlying programs that fuel obsessive consumption. Ultimately, the exhibition imagines algorithmic code as the new omnipotent force shaping social behaviors and desires.

Additional information about the exhibition is available here.

Dolan (b. 1990, Colorado) is based in New York. His work has been exhibited globally, including at the Serpentine Gallery, Swiss Institute, LUMA Westbau, and the Park Avenue Armory. He was featured in Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Ulrich ObristHann's book Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present.

LINK: Alex Mackin Dolan (All images courtesy of the Artist)

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: 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: 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

CALL FOR ENTRIES: FILE 2023 (DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15 2023)

 

One of the most exciting digital arts festivals in the world, FILE - Electronic Language International Festival has recently launched its 2023. After a three years hiatus, FILE is back in grand style. Applications will be open from December 19th to February 15th.

 

The 22nd Edition of the Electronic Language International Festival will take place at the FIESP Cultural Center, in São Paulo, from July 5th to August 27th 2023. The selected projects will also be able to collaborate in parallel events in different states of Brazil, also taking place in 2023. The submission is free of charge.

FILE 2023 focuses on four  categories: Electronic Sound, Interactive Art, Digital Language (including video games and machinima, VR and AR) and Educational.

Click here for more information about the submission process. (Thank you Clarissa!)

EVENT: I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR: ART AND THE DIGITAL SCREEN (FEBRUARY 12-APRIL 30 2023, FORT WORTH, TEXAS)

Nam June Paik, Video Flag Y, 1985. 84 ten-inch television sets, three Plexiglas cases, fans, LaserDisc players, LaserDiscs, and video tapes. 72 x 144 x 50 inches. JPMorgan Chase Art Collection. © Estate of Nam June Paik.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen
February 12–April 30, 2023

Curated by Alison Hearst 

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
3200 Darnell Street
Fort Worth, Texas 76107 USA

press release

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents the landmark I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, a thematic group exhibition that examines the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. This exhibition surveys more than sixty works by fifty artists over the past five decades. The artists included examine screen culture through a broad range of media such as paintings, sculpture, video games, digital art, augmented reality, and video. Organized by Curator Alison Hearst, I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen will be on view at the Modern February 12 through April 30, 2023.

Screens affect nearly every aspect of life today. Their pervasiveness has bred a 24/7 breaking news cycle, the looming corporate-sponsored virtual-reality “Metaverse,” unlimited accessibility and content, and an ease in how ideas and images are distributed, undoubtably shaping culture in profound ways. This exhibition starts in 1969—the year of the televised Apollo moon landing and the launch of the internet’s prototype, ARPANET—as this was the watershed year where collective connectivity through screens was first mobilized in modern society. This era forged what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan presciently deemed in the 1960s a “global village,” a place where distance is collapsed and people from across the world readily interact. Following this trajectory, contemporary life is hybrid and increasingly mediated through screens. These flat and finite surfaces embody more than what meets the eye—they hold up a mirror to society and contribute to forming meaning in life and mainstream culture.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen is organized into nine key themes:

liminal space: From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, several artists were working alongside the early major technological developments of the screen: Gretchen Bender, Nancy Burson, Harold Cohen, Vuk Ćosić, Peter Halley, Frederick Hammersley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eduardo Kac, Tatsuo Miyajima, Nam June Paik, Lillian F. Schwartz, and Andy Warhol. These artists’ works are highlighted in this section for their innovative processes.

connectivity: Screens connect us with incredible ease to friends, colleagues, a network of other users and players, apps, news, and streaming services. We share—and are shared with—through screens. As culture courses through society via these means, screens are at the axis of most of our interactions, and these connections are a topic interrogated by many artists, including Cory Arcangel, Liss LaFleur, Eva and Franco Mattes, Cassie McQuater, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, and Wickerham & Lomax.

surveillance: While we find community through technology, we simultaneously become linked to broader systems of data extraction through our devices. Our information is captured for national security purposes, geo-mapping, and corporate surveillance capitalism, where targeted ads are deployed based on purchases and browsing history. Hasan Elahi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Jon Rafman investigate the positive, negative, and humorous aspects of surveillance today.

the repository: Today’s constant stream of data has led to round-the-clock ingestion of content. This informational sphere is made even more accessible via handheld devices. Speaking to a vast and complex array of image and information circulation in the screen age are the artists Morehshin Allahyari, Kahlil Robert Irving, Trevor Paglen, Jason Salavon, Skawennati, and Penelope Umbrico.

digital abstraction: While painters of all genres use technology in their work, artists such as Cory Arcangel, Wade Guyton, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, and John Pomara explore the intersections of the digital screen and formal abstraction. Historically compared to windows and mirrors, the often flat, rectangular format of paintings also acts like a screen in today’s world—a passageway that disrupts the viewer’s physical space or mirrors contemporary life.

the posthuman body: In the digital age, technology has become an extension of the body. Posthumanism, a concept arising from science fiction, is the idea that humans will be transformed by technological progress. Depictions of the human body in a media-induced world are far from monolithic, as demonstrated by the artists Caitlin Cherry, Petra Cortright, Huntrezz Janos, Guthrie Lonergan, Carson Lynn, Avery Singer, and Hito Steyerl, who traverse concepts of self and portraiture in the technological era.

automation and the loneliness epidemic: The relationship between man and machine is addressed by Cao Fei and !Mediengruppe Bitnik, specifically the tension of isolation in an increasingly automated world. Set in environments where human labor has been replaced by automation, Cao Fei’s and !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works exemplify the paradoxes of human intimacy in the screen age.

ecology: Electronic debris, such as plastics, batteries, monitors, and phones, fills landfills and off-gasses toxins that contribute to water pollution. Several artists in this exhibition, including American Artist, Alice Bucknell, Simon Denny, Kristin Lucas, Rick Silva, and Elias Sime, demonstrate the complexities of ecology in the digital age.

turning a mirror on ourselves: Holding a mirror to society and ourselves, screens construct reality, molding many of the themes at the forefront of culture today. Through extraordinarily different works, the artists Arthur Jafa and Molly Soda make videos that shine a light on society through the lens of found, vernacular videos already circulating online.

More than 25,000 square feet of gallery space will be devoted to the exhibition, which will include iconic works by prominent national and international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Arthur Jafa, Nam June Paik, Hito Steyerl, and Andy Warhol, as well as several leading artists living in Texas, including Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, and John Pomara. Several new and never-before-seen works by key artists Caitlin Cherry, Simon Denny, Hasan Elahi, and Kahlil Robert Irving will debut in this exhibition. This is the most in-depth show of its kind in the Southwest region and is one of only a few presentations exploring art and digital technology in the past decade at this scale.

Curator Alison Hearst notes, “Artists have long shone a light on the world and the human experience, and the artists in I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen respond to, challenge, and probe new technologies and the cultural conditions these technologies have shaped. Using the screen as a tool and formal device, many of the artists in this exhibition expand the parameters of artmaking through the digital language unique to their generation.”

Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue featuring contributions by Alison Hearst, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Dr. Omar Kholeif, director of collections at Sharjah Art Foundation; Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, Assistant Curator at Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and professor and cyberpsychologist Dr. John Suler. 180 pages, 100+ illustrations; published by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and distributed by DelMonico Books/D.A.P.

There will be an online platform for the exhibition.

Artists in the exhibition:
Morehshin Allahyari, Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Alice Bucknell, Nancy Burson, Caitlin Cherry, Harold Cohen, Petra Cortright, Vuk Ćosić, Simon Denny, Hasan Elahi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Cao Fei, Wade Guyton, Peter Halley, Frederick Hammersley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jacqueline Humphries, Kahlil Robert Irving, Arthur Jafa, Huntrezz Janos, Eduardo Kac, Liss LaFleur, Guthrie Lonergan, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kristin Lucas, Carson Lynn, Eva and Franco Mattes, Cassie McQuater, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Tatsuo Miyajima, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, John Pomara, Jon Rafman, Jason Salavon, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lillian F. Schwartz, Rick Silva, Elias Sime, Avery Singer, Skawennati, Molly Soda, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Penelope Umbrico, Andy Warhol, Wickerham & Lomax

LINK: I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen

EVENT: VIDEO GAMES? ART AND TECHNOLOGY (OCTOBER 6 - JANUARY 29 2023, GRANDE PRAIRE, CANADA)

Video Games? Art and Technology 

Curated by Manar Abo Touk, Curator, Exhibitions & Collections

Oct 6, 2022 to Jan 29, 2023

Art Gallery of Grande Prairie 103-9839 103 Ave

Grande Prairie, Alberta T8V 6M7

Canada

(780) 532-8111

[email protected]

press release (excerpt)

Video Games? Art and Technology is a group exhibition featuring Pippin Barr, Sandee Moore, and artist collective SpekWork (Cat Bluemke and Jonathan Carroll), that examine video games as an artform for design and self- expression. From computer art to digital art, to animation, web-based art, photography, film, AR and VR, and video games. The Art and Technology movement of the 1960s provided artists the tools to mix technology, art, and science.

As technology advanced and progressed, gaming design grew as an artistic practice. In the 1990s digital artists explored the historical dimension of the computer and its development as a creative medium. Video Game creation allows artists to play with technological tools and game mechanics to question our perception of the physical world. How can Video Games shape and contribute to the way we learn history and understand issues in the contemporary world? such as the representation of female skateboarders, architecture and labour, or philosophical mythology.

Video Games? Art and Technology aims to create a digital artistic experience that reflects on how technology and art are used to examine design structures and societal themes through re-interpreting classic video games and offering a new way of seeing in our digital age.

(Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment game, Pippin Barr, 2011)

(The Mixer: The Ultimate Sk8 Activity Centre, 2001, electronics, sculpture, household paint, modified video game, single-channel video. Photo courtesy of the Dunlop Art Gallery.)

LINK: Video Games? Art and Technology

GAME ART: CHANG TING-TONG × CHENG HSIEN-YU'S SECOND LIFE: HABITAT (2016)

Second Life: Habitat, a collaborative piece by Cheng and Chang Ting-tong (張碩尹), consists of a high-temperature box containing 8,000 mosquitoes that fed on the blood of the artists and a video game that electrocutes the insects when it is played. Think Damien Hirst with a gaming component. Second Life: Habitat, is currently on display in Taipei, as part of the exhibition Transistors at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which showcases 11 contemporary artists challenging the very idea of boundary:

Second Life: Habitat is an art installation that aims to construct controlled ecological life support systems and consists of three large glass tanks, and it is a collaborative work by artists CHANG Ting-Tong and CHENG Hsien-Yu and a laboratory. During the exhibition, the artists will breed over 8000 Asian tiger mosquitoes and provide several hundred grams of their own blood on a daily basis to sustain the mosquitoes. A mosquito trap is placed by the installation, and when the mosquitoes come into contact with the trap, signals indicating their demise will be sent to a computer, which will be converted into avatars shown in the adjacent computer installation. Each of these avatars has a lifespan of 10 hours, and members of the audience can control the avatars in a game, ordering them to eat, drink, sleep, roam around, or even die during their lifespan. However, since the lives of these avatars are supported by real living beings and are connected to human blood or dead mosquitoes, can this game still be considered a form of entertainment? Through the artwork, the audience is caught in a moral dilemma with virtuality and reality entangled.

Ting Tong Chang (b.1982, Taipei, Taiwan) is an artist who lives and works in Taipei and London. Chang is known for his collaborative projects through a variety of media including installation, video, and theatre. After receiving his MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2011, Chang has exhibited internationally. He held solo exhibitions at the Cube Project Space, the Museum of NTUE and Taipei Fine Arts Museum and has participated in group shows and commissioned projects in Guangzhou Triennial, Taipei Biennial, Saatchi Gallery, Compton Verney Art Gallery and Wellcome Trust. Chang’s major awards include the 19th Taishin Arts Award, Taipei Art Award 2020, Hong Kong Art Central RISE Award 2016, VIA Arts Prize 2016, and Royal Society of Sculptors Bursary Award 2015. His works can be found in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Art Bank, Hong Foundation, Embassy of Brazil London, JM SR Collection Mexico and private collections in Europe and Asia. Second Life: Habitat was created in collaboration with the National Taiwan University’s Department of Entomology.

LINK: Chang Ting-tong × Cheng Hsien-yu

LINK: Transistors

EVENT: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2022 (JULY 14 - 22 2022, TORONTO, CANADA + ONLINE)

VECTOR FESTIVAL 2022: GLITCH
July 14 – 24, 2022
Inter/Access
950 Dupont St., Unit 1.
Toronto ON M6H 1Z2 Canada

InterAccess is pleased to announce the program for Vector Festival 2022: Glitch. This year’s festival centres around the enticing, joyous, infinite possibilities offered by glitch. Drawing inspiration from Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism the festival considers glitch as a necessary, protective force for interrupting the machinic workings of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. Counterintuitively, through its multitudinal ruptures and refusals, glitch becomes a generative site for envisioning new ways of existing beyond current sociopolitical operating systems. 

Through a hybrid online and in-person program of exhibitions, performances, screenings, workshops, talks, and community events, this 10-day festival invites artists and audiences to come together in celebration of failure and all its potentials.

All Vector Festival events will be offered for free or pay-what-you-can. Registration for all festival events will be released on July 4, 2022.

Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice.

The festival was founded in 2013 as the “Vector Game Art & New Media Festival” by an independent group of artists and curators: Skot Deeming, Clint Enns, kris kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger.

Among the highlights are VECTOR's first-ever hybrid game and hardware jam, presented in partnership with Hand Eye Society and TRANZAC, an evening showcase of experimental musical performances by Erin Corbett, Myriam Bleau, and Hex-A-Decimal centred around gaming, identity, and future feminisms curated by Sofie Mikhaylova. Also not to be missed is Keep it Strange, a beginner’s workshop will delve into a buffet of tiny experimental programs that require little to no coding experience, such as Flickgame, Sok Worlds, and Bitsy. 

LINK: VECTOR Festival

EVENT: HOW TO WIN AT PHOTOGRAPHY (JUNE 23 - SEPTEMBER 25 2022, LONDON)

How to win at Photography

Photographer's Gallery

June 23 - September 25 2022

16-18 Ramillies Street, London

W1F 7LW England

How to Win at Photography will open June 23 2022 at The Photographer's Gallery in London and will remain open until September 25. A "multimedia exhibition" featuring 30+ artists, How to Win at Photography, "questions the very meaning and function of photography today". Expect a plethora of collateral events regarding all things post-photography - including in-game photography - starting with a killer conversation featuring John Hilliard and Justin Berry on June 24 202 about the ever-changing nature of photography.

Featured artists: Cory Arcangel, Aram Bartholl, Justin Berry, Alan Butler, Gloria López Cleries & Sive Hamilton Helle, Joan Pamboukes, Tabor Robak, Constant Dullaart, Yuyi John, Emma Agnes Sheffer, Coralie Vogelaar, Jon Haddock, Roc Herms, Sherrie Levine, Lorna Ruth Galloway, Ed Ruscha, Ai Weiwei, Harun Farocki, Dorothée Elisa Baumann, Dries Depoorter & Max Pinckers, Christopher Graves, John Hilliard, Steven Pippin, Ria Patricia Röder, Akihiko Taniguchi, Claude Cahun, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Andy Kassier, Cindy Sherman, Petra Szemán, Danielle Udogaranya.

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