Event: NO ONE IS AN ISLAND (May 31, 2015, New York)

UnnamedNo One is an Island - LEVEL UPSunday May 31 20151.30 pm and 4.30 pmTaipei Economic and Cultural Organization1 E 42nd St. New York, New York 10017No One is an Island is the title of a show curated by David Borgonjon as part of the 2015 LEVEL UP Festival in New York. The screening  features video works by Matteo BittantiJoanna LinJames T. HongMAP OfficeAngela Washko and Yu Cheng-Ta

In short, a great archipelago of artists. As Borgonjon explains, the event "brings together three NYC communities that don't overlap often: the Sinophone, game design, and contemporary art communities." The curator adds that:

No One Is an Island expands on the conceptual and formal ideas engaged in by works in LEVEL UP. The game environment, whether that’s the board or the screen, always functions by rules similar to but not quite the same as the larger world. A kind of separate world within a world, the video game is a virtual island, separated from the continent of the real world by different rules. After all, the first commercially produced platform for machinima (cinematic works created entirely in game environments) was also set on an island: the award-winning Stunt Island (1993) centered on recording and editing airplane tricks, which you could even select from a ready-made menu. Just like that seminal game, this screening turns players into viewers. Whether looking away to the horizon on the sea, or down on the problems of a city, each of the works on view has a distance from “the real world,” what’s out there, the rest of the universe. (David Borgonjon)David Borgonjon is Curatorial Fellow at Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in the Bronx, NY. He recently co-founded Screen, a bilingual platform for media art commentary. In his independent curatorial and critical practice, he is currently at work on a series of professional development workshops based on learning board and video games as metaphors, which he will present at Rhode Island School of Design and continue to organize in New York. LINK: No One is an IslandSubmitted by Matteo Bittanti

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