Event: NEoN Digital Arts (November 9-13 2016, Dundee, Scotland)

NEoN Digital Arts Festival
9 – 13 November 2016
Across the City of Dundee

Now in its seventh year, NEoN Digitals Arts Festival features exhibitions, workshops, talks, conferences, live performances and public discussions and established itself as a platform to showcase national and international digital art forms. Scattered across the city of Dundee are several game-based installations, including:

Exhibition that restages his work Dispose( ); an open world game played on 24 acrylic on canvas paintings, as well as the surrounding wall and floor. It is a Sisyphean survival game, with no imminent danger or challenges. You simply live, wandering and consuming and disposing. Dispose( ); is a collaboration between programmer/artist Brent Watanabe and painter Cable Griffith. This will also include an installation of his work San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam, a modification of GTA V that creates and follows a deer wandering through the fictional state of San Andreas. The deer character is autonomous and will wander and respond to it’s surroundings, interacting with the existing GTA V artificial intelligence.

Read an interview with Brent Watanabe

Aram Bartholl’s new commission for NEoN, an installation titled 8k, includes a large-scale printed screenshot (12 meters long) of a scenic view of ‘Sin City’ from the computer game Grand Theft Auto 5. A car parked in front of the billboard offers visitors to take a seat, enjoy the view of the vast digital city scape while listening to an audio collage of youtubers playing the game.

Grand Theft Auto is an open world action-adventure video game series created by the game developer Rockstar games. The name of the series makes reference to the term used in the USA for motor vehicle theft.  British video game developer DMA Design began the series in 1997 in Dundee. The third chronological title, Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001, was widely acclaimed, as it brought the series to a 3D setting and offered a more immersive experience. The series has gained controversy for its adult nature and violent themes.

The vast open world of GTA 5 offers total free interaction for the player and is like a huge playground with no moral boundaries. As a result, players tend to test the limits of what you can do in the game. YouTube hosts a massive collection of GTA 5 videos in which players often hysterically ‘go nuts’. The ‘City of Sin’ in GTA 5 serves as a metaphorical excess flow valve, a projection plane and a mirror of today’s society which has become increasingly regulated and controlled.

Killbox is an online game and interactive installation that critically explores the nature of drone warfare, its complexities and consequences. It is an experience which explores the use of technology to transform and extend political and military power, and the abstraction of killing through virtualisation.

Killbox involves audiences in a fictionalized interactive experience in virtual environments based on documented drones strikes in Northern Pakistan.

NEoN brings it back to Dundee, after a year of touring the world, as an installation and performance, like never seen before.

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The work is an international collaboration between U.S. based artist/activist, Joseph DeLappe and Scotland-based artists and game developers, Malath Abbas, Tom deMajo and Albert Elwin from Biome Collective.

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