EVENT: MÉLANIE COURTINAT (OCTOBER 30–NOVEMBER 12 2026)
MÉLANIE’S FAVOUR
digital video/machinima, color, sound, 20 min 35 sec, 2026, France
created by Mélanie Courtinat
Recorded inside FromSoftware’s Elden Ring (2022), MÉLANIE’S FAVOUR (2026) follows player Celnadmery3480 through six boss encounters. The avatar carries Courtinat’s custom-modded shield, shaped like a flower and designed to provide almost no protection. The object evokes the medieval courtly custom of a lady giving a knight a token to carry into battle. This gesture enters the game’s culture of no-hit play, whose participants attempt to defeat enemies without being struck. The film preserves the health bars and victory notices that make the performance legible, while the game’s cutscenes punctuate the recorded combat. As the opponents and arenas change, the flower returns to view on the avatar’s back. Its persistent presence ties Courtinat’s symbolic gift to victories achieved through another person’s skill.
Mélanie Courtinat is an artist, art director and educator. Her work spans video games, moving image and digital installations. She explores the historical depth of video games and their place in popular culture, with particular attention to agency and disobedience. Her work also looks at the figures inhabiting these worlds, from playable protagonists to non-player characters, as well as the gameplay rules that govern these worlds and the assumptions those rules encode. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including BOZAR in Brussels, Casino Luxembourg and the Louvre-Lens. She has held solo exhibitions at New Galerie in Paris, Gray Area in San Francisco and Stereolux in Nantes. Her VR work All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost premiered at Venice Immersive in 2022 and won the VR Animation Competition at Animafest Zagreb in 2023. Courtinat co-founded Distraction, a Paris-based collective working with video games and real-time technologies. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as an art director, bringing the language and aesthetics of video games into collaborations with luxury brands, filmmakers and other creatives. She is a faculty member at ECAL, where she teaches video game history, and regularly teaches workshops on worldbuilding and virtual reality at art and design schools.