GAMESCENES

EVENT: A MAZE. / BERLIN 2020: FESTIVAL GOES “TOTAL DIGITAL“ (JULY 22-25 2020)

Press release:

Due to the development of the Corona situation, A MAZE. / Berlin 2020 - 9th International Games and Playful Media Festival has decided to cancel the festival in July 2020 in its physical version. But there will be an alternative – the festival will happen virtually:

A MAZE. / Berlin is going “Total Digital“ on July 22-25, 2020.

The whole festival will be online, virtual and remote and a bit ‘too much of everything’.

It will happen on many different platforms at the same time to embrace the international community and the highly creative power of each individual game maker and world builder from around the globe. Now the festival can be even more international and better connected than ever before. It is an amazing chance to create a better presence for developers and event makers.

“Let’s work closer together. For us it’s important to create a loud and visible platform for all the game authors and developers who would have been at A MAZE. / Berlin or people who never have experienced it before. No borders, no visa requirements this time. This festival edition will be a little bit different from the others, but still amazing and full with surprises. We want you to celebrate with us towards colorful prospects and enjoy your time in our unique A MAZE. Space.“ Thorsten S. Wiedemann, artistic director of A MAZE.

The physical version of A MAZE. / Berlin is not replaceable: It is crucial to meet, talk, exhibit, celebrate and find opportunities for the artists’ works and their studios. Tickets will remain valid either for 2021 or 2022 if visitors are not able to join in the next year.

The modules of A MAZE. / Berlin 2020 - Total Digital - 9th International Games and Playful Media Festival can be explored in regular newsletters and social media posts. The status towards the final festival settings will be published online on a regular basis.

Exhibition

There will be a downloadable open A MAZE. space programmed by Moshe Linke, Gianluca Pandolfo and Stephan Insam. Our new interactive space is built on Linke’s museum experience “Brutalism: Prelude on Stone”. The A MAZE. Space is a multiplayer exhibition and festival space where participants can jump in to interact with this year’s A MAZE. selection and experience the digital soul of A MAZE.. The selection is featuring the nominees, honorable mentions and other digital surprises.

Award

The 9th A MAZE. Awards are planned as a fully digital show on Friday July 24, 2020. It is the highlight of the festival. In this honor A MAZE. would like to send again best wishes to all the nominees and honorable mentions including the selected nominees for the 3rd Humble New Talent Award, the Diversity Award.

Full list of games including our 5 jury members: https://amaze-berlin.de/award

Knowledge

On the knowledge side A MAZE. will have talks, masterclasses and workshops to exchange skills and thoughts which are inspiring and filled with deep insights on the work process of the creators. Every talk will end with a moderated Q+A chat where the speakers will have time to answer questions.

Community

The A MAZE. network of festivals, initiatives, game creators, musicians, playful media artists are invited to become part of the 4 days festival program. A MAZE. wants to bring the artistic games world closer together and mirror the diverse, artistic and playful culture. #positivechaos

Opportunities

The A MAZE. Game Bazaar in cooperation with gamesweekberlin is meant to be a market for arthouse games and playful media productions which gives authors and artists the opportunity to meet with publishers, funding institutions or collaborators. The market will be open on Wednesday July 22nd from 4 p.m. to 8p.m. There will also be a Press Bar where journalists can schedule interviews with the game creators. A MAZE. - Submission will open beginning of June.

Celebration & parties

Music? It is planned to create a mix of streamed concerts and live performances - some from Urban Spree Club - some from the kitchen or the living room of the musician.

Tickets

Already bought 2020 tickets will stay valid: Guests who want to experience the physical edition can choose to use their tickets for either 2021 or 2022.

Meanwhile follow the A MAZE. social media channels with features of the games selected and the #wildhearts interviews.

PARTNERS & SPONSORS: A MAZE. / Berlin 2020 is funded by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and part of gamesweekberlin. Supported by Musicboard. Thanks to our sponsors and partners Humble Original, Geier-tronic, Game - Verband der deutschen Game-Branche, Warsteiner, Fritz Cola, Thunderful, Landfall Games, Free Lives, Grover, Indie Village and Indie Area Booth, SAE, Kickstarter, Support by #amazenotdead Kickstarter campaign.

LINK: A MAZE.

ART GAME: OLIVER MAUCO AND ABDEL BOUNANE'S PRISME7 (2020)

A new game from Oliver Mauco and his team is about experiencing art in an immersive, engaging way, navigating through the enormous online collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, and interact with the artworks in a playful way. Developed for the Centre Pompidou on contemporary and modern art by Olivier Mauco of Game in Society and Abdel Bounane, Prism7 is free and supported by the French Ministry of Education. Researchers from the Ircam worked on the sound design. Prisme7 is available for both smartphone/tablets running iOS and Android) and computers (PC/Mac).

 

Here's a description of the gameplay:

As they make their way between colour and light, players explore an organism that is constructed gradually as they discover the physical and sensory properties of the works of art. As they interact with Le Rhinocéros by Xavier Veilhan, New York City by Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair or the famous “pipes” of the Centre Pompidou building imagined by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, players progress on their way through the game. After an initial introductory level (to familiarise themselves with the gameplay), there are six game worlds where they can explore a selection of 40 iconic works from the Centre Pompidou collection, through the relationships between colour and function, colour and emotion or light and immersion.  

 

LINK: PRISME7

PROJECT: PAOLO PEDERCINI'S ONLINE MUSEUM OF MULTIPLAYER ART (ONLINE)

As always, Paolo Pedercini is ahead of the curve. oMOMA is a playful lo-fi multiplayer online gallery of art installations. Unmissable. 

LINK: oMOMA (screenshots by Paolo Pedercini)

ART GAME: AAA COLLECTIVE'S UTOPIAS: NAVIGATING WITHOUT COORDINATES" (2020)

Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates is a videogame network comprising nine different worlds, each one developed by a member of Berlin-based AAA collective.

 

As they explain on their website,

Each world in Utopias is a site of crystallization where our ideas and how we work as a group have gathered and grown. The process of creating Utopias was a collective deep dive into things like group decision-making, the economics of care (for oneself and others), the sharing of resources and information, generating and maintaining sustainable momentum and examining personal wounds left from living in a hyper-individualized economy of scarcity. A major motivation for our collaboration is to find alternative methods for making video games while avoiding the exploitative and creatively stultifying software industry. We think CGI should be taken out of the hands of the industry - culture should be made by people, not just companies. By pooling individual skills, we enable collective members with differing levels of technical ability to make video games collaboratively. We work without designated roles or tasks and no-one's technical or creative vision is considered more important than another's. Although we created a series of individual utopian visions, each of us worked on each other’s world, helping one another to realize them. This is our attempt to roleplay our way to utopia.

 

Active in Berlin, the AAA Collective comprises an eclectic cohort of artists, designers, and creators from all over the world. Its founding members are Merle Leufgen, a software artist, curator and independent researcher, Gabriel Helfenstein, a French transmedia artist, curator, and writer, Troy Duguid, and Australian artist working with game engines, and Jessica Palmer, a Canadian multimedia artist interested in neuroscience. Other members are Chloê Langford, Fedya Balashov, Jack Perkins, Matias Brunacci, Nick Morrison, and Tristan Neu.

LINK: AAA Collective

EVENTS: NOW PLAY THIS: A FESTIVAL OF EXPERIMENTAL GAME DESIGN (2020, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM)

The 2020 edition of NOW PLAY THIS: A festival of experimental game design at Somerset House in London curated by Marie Foulston features all kinds of artworks looking at games that relate to a theme of ‘Breaking Point’. “Games are the aesthetic forms of systems, and we were looking at works that break or subvert them in interesting and creative ways.” The IRL festival could not go ahead because of the pandemic and it has been postponed. The amazing lineup features, among others, Paolo Pedercini, A.M Darke, IP Yuk-Yiu, Ian MacLarty, Studio Oleomingus, Alistair Aitcheson, Danielle Udogaranya, Patrick LeMieux, Stephanie Bouk, and Matteo Bittanti whose How to get rid of homeless is featured in the selection.

LINK: NOW PLAY THIS 

ART GAME: ALAN KWAN'S SCENT (ONGOING)

Eight years ago we shared on GameScenes Alan Kwan's groundbreaking project Bad Trip in which the artist connected a small camera to his glasses in order to develop a videogame about my virtual memories. It remains one of the most inventive project at the crossroads of technology, gaming, and digital art. At the time, Kwan was a student. Now he is a full time artist. For the past few years, Kwan has been making experimental games and VR games while researching at MIT, in Boston. His latest project, Scent, is a video game that takes place near the border of a city undergoing a massacre. A stray dog follows scent trails of human fear and carries out its job to help human souls reincarnate. The game uses stealth mechanics and a contemplative, meditative gameplay. 

This game focuses on delivering an interactive cinematic experience with simple control. While using the mouse to look around, players control the dog to walk/sprint/hide/stop and the steering is automated. A bit similar to the control of a 2D platform game like Mario but the players can also look around in a 3D environment. For most of the gameplay, players are walking, hiding, or witnessing.

As Kwan wrote in an email, "In this chaotic world right now, I wanted to create this game to invite players to contemplate on fear, deaths, and the collapse of a city. " Indeed, Scent is a timely project. 

 

Kwan is developing Scent for Windows-based platforms. 

Alan Kwan is an artist, game designer, and technologist. After completing his master's degree at MIT, he has been developing video games and virtual reality environments to build worlds, stories, and immersive experiences that lie outside of the traditional gaming paradigm. He is also deeply interested in how 3D virtual world, as a spatial medium, can help people organize or learn complex information by leveraging their spatial cognition. He started experimenting with the idea of building virtual memory palace in 2011, and then in 2016 he collaborated with architect and designer Meng Sun to make an interactive 3D educational tool. These projects were presented at venues including Ars Electronica Center (Austria), International Bauhaus Colloquium (Germany), ZKM Centre for Art and Media (Germany), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Shanghai), and were featured in media including Discovery Channel, Popular Science, and The Boston Globe. Alan was awarded the first prize of the MIT Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Award for Young Artist (Media Art). Recently, Alan completed two permanent installations for the museum Historic New Orleans Collection and one permanent installation for Taylor Education Center in collaboration with interaction designer and artist Xiao Xiao.  

LINK: Alan Kwan 

ART GAME: AKIHIKO TANIGUCHI'S ARTSPEED (IN DEVELOPMENT)

Here's an update on ARTSPEED, Akihiko Taniguchi's racing game featuring conceptual artworks competing on the art circuit (no, really). The game is looking increasingly polished and avantgarde. Alas, R.T: Mutt aka Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is not doing great and Umberto Boccioni's L'homme en mouvement is currently last, but I have so much faith in the Futurists, I mean, the whole spiel about speed etc. Where's F.T. Marinetti when you need him? Jeff Koons has invested lots of (his own) money to win the race and it shows but Orozco's Citroen still has a chance. I'm waiting for Maurizio Cattelan's Audi-cum-tree (Untitled, 2000).

Akihiko Taniguchi is and artist and full-time lecturer of Tama Art University and part-time lecturer of Musashino Art University. His practice includes installations, performances and video works using self-built devices and software.

LINK: Akihiko Taniguchi

EVENT: SYSTEM LINK: VIDEO GAME AS MEMOIR (JANUARY 24 - APRIL 25 2020, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS)

Jenny Jiao Hsia, Consume Me, 2018

System Link: Video Game as Memoir

Curated by Brice Puls
January 24 - April 25, 2020

Opening Reception Friday, January 24 2020, 6-9pm

VGA Gallery
2418 W Bloomingdale #101
Chicago, IL 60647

Video games have historically been a product catered to the player. A focus on engagement, replayability, and general entertainment value has guided design strategies that create impersonal pieces, appealing to the widest range of players possible. While film, music, writing, and other media have historically been vehicles of memoir and personal storytelling, games often maintain a trajectory as products of their audience and not their creator. The voices of the individual artists have recently begun to break through the standards of generalization in the medium, creating stories where players are able to experience the emotional perspectives of the creator. In doing so memoir games reveal that assumptions about the general audience skew toward specific perspectives, and exclude others. This exhibition seeks to highlight those works, exploring how a range of game makers and artists have translated their personal experiences into the interactive context. Each work is designed to allow the player to understand, empathize with, and connect to other lived realities, using the participatory advantages of video games to express a story as no other medium can. The different projects showcased in this exhibition offer different answers to the question “What happens when you let the player of games into your story?”

LINK: System Link: Video Game as Memoir

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2020 (DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 1 2020)

VECTOR FESTIVAL 2020: AFTER GAMIFICATION

TORONTO, ON | JULY 16-19, 2020

OPEN CALL FOR ARTWORKS AND CURATORIAL PROPOSALS 

Vector Festival is an annual media arts event dedicated to showcasing experimental art works that engage critically with digital technologies.
The festival is proudly participatory and community-oriented. Hosted by InterAccess and co-curated by Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger, Vector Festival takes place at arts venues and in public spaces across the City of Toronto.

Since its inception, Vector Festival has been innovative in its inclusion of game-based digital art alongside other new media disciplines. Continuing this focus for the 2020 edition, the festival’s curators pose a deceptively simple question: what comes after gamification?

Now that game culture and game technologies have become so pervasive in popular culture, how do experimental media artists respond critically to the rampant gamifying of everyday life? From online social interaction to digital finance, from education to military conflict, from politics and environmental issues to the ways in which humans (and machines) express themselves creatively, what comes after gamification?

The Festival will take place between July 16-19, 2020, with the flagship exhibition extended until August 22, 2020.

Please note that Vector Festival does not charge submission fees to artists applying to participate.

All artists and curators selected for participation will receive fees in accordance with the up-to-date CARFAC Fee schedule, as well as support to apply for external funding.

We invite art submissions of digital – and post-digital – works for the following festival categories:

Flagship Exhibition
Digital and post-digital art works including interactive installations, experimental game mods, sculptural work, screen-based work, sound art, etc.

Online Projects
Web-based projects and digital artworks that can be presented online, including experimental interactive and time-based digital projects.

Festival Screening
Experimental film/video/machinima works.

Performance
Performance-based proposals including chiptune, sound art, live coding, A/V performances, and telematic performances for virtual and public spaces.

Site-Specific Outdoor Screening
To be presented on two large-scale (4.88 x 8.64 m) outdoor LED screens for a public audience of all ages.

GIFs
Animated GIFs intended for presentation on public screens across Toronto.

Curatorial Submissions
This year, we also invite curators/curatorial collectives to submit proposals for machinima screenings (on a theme of your choosing). If you are considering a curatorial submission, we encourage you to contact the Vector Festival team for additional practical details.

Deadline: February 01, 2020

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Please submit the following details using our online application form:

• Project description (approximately 300 words)
• Documentation (maximum of five images, and/or link to audio/video documentation)
• Description of technical requirements (please outline materials provided by the artist and materials required from the exhibiting venue)
• Artist biography (approximately 100 words)
• Please indicate if your work has a thematic, conceptual, or historical connection to Toronto, or if you have a biographic connection to the Greater Toronto Area
• Current CV

If you have questions about submitting your application please contact [email protected].

About Vector Festival
Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing experimental media art practice. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector Festival acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice. Vector 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, Christine Kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger. In 2015 Vector Festival announced that longtime presenting partner, InterAccess, would be taking over responsibility for the festival as part of its regular programming.

About InterAccess
Founded in 1983, InterAccess is a non-profit gallery, educational facility, production studio, and festival dedicated to emerging practices in art and technology. Our programs support art forms that integrate technology, fostering and supporting the full cycle of art and artistic practice through education, production, and exhibition. InterAccess is regarded as a preeminent Canadian arts and technology centre.

For more information contact:
Festival Curators, Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger
[email protected]

Follow us for updates!
facebook.com/VectorFestivalTO
twitter.com/VectorFestival
instagram.com/interaccessto

LINK: VECTOR FESTIVAL

EVENT: GAMEPLAY. VIDEO GAME CULTURE (DECEMBER 19 2019 - MAY 3 2020, BARCELONA, SPAIN)

GAMEPLAY. Video Game Culture

19 December 2019 - 3 May 2020

Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona

Inauguration
18 December 2019 - 19.00

7.00 pm Audiovisual performance by Alba G. Corral & Tutu

 

Dates and hours
19 December 2019 - 3 May 2020
From Tuesday to Sunday, 11.00 - 20.00

Curated by Óliver Pérez Latorre, Jérôme Nguyen

Gameplay journeys to the origins of video games, analyses their language and highlights the impact they have had on popular digital culture and on art and society. The exhibition is designed as a space for recreation and reflection where visitors can play and (re)discover video game culture. Since their popularisation in the seventies and eighties, video games have developed as an expressive and entertainment medium and now occupy a central space in our imaginary to the point that, today, it is impossible to understand contemporary society and culture without relating them with video gaming.

Gameplay takes a look at the history of the medium, video game language, experimentation and artistic innovation, and critical and political video games.vThe exhibition also raises the issue of the increasing gamification of society: from mobile games to YouTubers and electronic sports (esports) to so-called serious games, educational video games with applications that go beyond entertainment. With 28 game points, from the first arcade and historic computer games to the new immersive options, Gameplay is devised as an exhibition where visitors can play and, at the same time, understand and enjoy video game culture from a critical viewpoint. The show pays particular attention to Catalan production, especially pioneering works, recent indie creations and local artists, and university projects.

Gameplay. Video Game Culture is an extended adaptation of Gameplay. The Next Level, designed by and first presented at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

LINK: GAMEPLAY