GAMESCENES

GAME ART: WERC’S THE VOYEUR OF UTTER DESTRUCTION (AS BEAUTY) (2025)

Standing before The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty), one is confronted by the chilling absurdity of purchasing the right to obliterate a city. In this interactive installation, Dutch Collective WERC lays bare the uneasy, visually seductive appeal of spectacular violence. The participant, posed as a player and a consumer, trades money for escalating scales of destruction, a grim parody of the transactional logic governing both entertainment and global politics.

In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen writes, “IA 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at the center of the Earth’s sun.”  This is a scenario so harrowing that it resists comprehension. Yet here, reduced to a button press and a digital detonation, mass destruction becomes a (visually compelling, dare I say) game. WERC’s work lays a finger on that ethical nerve, asking: what happens when the unimaginable becomes spectacularly consumable?

The installation’s command console, emblazoned with the phrase BUY AN EXPLOSION, places the audience in a position of ultimate agency, if only virtually. This simulated power to demolish an entire city in seconds resonates with Bakunin’s provocation, embraced by the artists: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” The idea that annihilation satisfies a creative or transformative impulse is especially sinister in a world where nuclear deterrence still relies on the threat of total erasure. The mantra of Silicon Valley broligarchs, creative destruction, acquires yet a new terrifying meaning in the age of nuclear accelerationism.

WERC’s pointed critique lands with uncomfortable force. Modern entertainment has fetishized explosions: film, games, and news cycles alike present destruction in high resolution, from every angle, as a feast for the senses. But when these explosions leave the realm of fiction and cross into possible futures, the moral calculus changes. The digital violence of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) is, in effect, a rehearsal for complicity: a mirror to our own appetite for ruin, disguised as spectacle.

By harnessing the Unreal Game engine to question our participation in this cycle of destructive desire, WERC confronts us with the pleasure we take in omnipotence, whether virtual or real. It is a moment that unravels our moral comfort, exposing a deep ambivalence between condemnation and consumption. In a contingency where, as Jacobsen warns, nuclear guardians may fail catastrophically, the work resonates as a cautionary reflection on how easily we aestheticise mass death, trading ethics for a brief illusion of control.

In The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty), the interval between press start to game over is incredibly short. 

The artist collective WERC creates and develops interactive media art that bridges nature, theatre, science, and technology. At the heart of their practice lies a commitment to humanising technology and exploring the dynamic interplay between people, nature, and machines. Through their installations and performances, WERC probes the threshold between the physical and the digital, asking where one world ends and the other begins—and whether such a division can truly be made. WERC consists of Olav Huizer, Joachim Rümke, and Jelle Valk, who met while studying at the Minerva Academy in Groningen. United by a shared passion for digital art and site-responsive projects, they have since worked collectively to challenge perceptions of how art can inhabit and transform contemporary environments.

Credits
Concept: WERC
Business coordination: Jesse Korte
Sound design: Nicholas Thayer
Photos: Nienke Maat
Co-design: Britt Reijners
Software advice: Timo van Dijk
Additional design: Nia Paleshnikova

Gallery

LINK: WERC COLLECTIVE (Special thanks to Joachim Rümke)

EVENT: AGAINST THE WILL, AGAINST STAYING STILL (MAY 15-18 2025, ATHENS)

 

 

Against the Will, Against Staying Still

Esto Association

24 Zaimi str. 10683

Athens Greece

May 15 - 18 2025

curated by Babak Ahteshamipour 

featuring Erifili Doukeli, Matthew D. Gantt, Berenike Gregoor, Nichole Shinn, Captain Stavros, and Pauvre Terre 

 

Against the Will, Against Staying Still is a group exhibition curated by Babak Ahteshamipour that frames urgency as both a creative method and a survival tactic in response to a world dominated by crises, algorithmic optimisation, and accelerated media environments. The participating artists — Erifili Doukeli, Matthew D. Gantt, Berenike Gregoor, Nichole Shinn, Captain Stavros, and Pauvre Terre — treat artmaking as a form of rapid response, deploying improvisation, upcycling, and fictional tools to navigate systems of control, including the figure of the curator cast here as a kind of authoritarian game master.

Set within the deliberately austere space of Esto Association — reminiscent of Foucault’s disciplinary institutions — the exhibition interrogates how aesthetic and procedural constraints mimic broader societal pressures: surveillance, self-optimisation, and commodified identity shifts. Drawing on thinkers such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Geert Lovink, Byung-Chul Han, and Nick Dyer-Witheford, the show critiques the burnout-inducing imperatives of late capitalism, while also exploring how immediacy, play, and glitch can serve as tactics for resistance.

Rather than reject urgency as debilitating, the exhibition proposes it as a weapon, capable of destabilising hyper-curated, algorithmic regimes of truth and meaning. It poses a central question: how might artists turn the logic of the system against itself, transforming gameplay into a form of subversive agency?

As Babak write, "the process of the show has been entirely gamified".

There'll be a game by Matthew D. Gantt as well.

LINK:  Against the Will, Against Staying Still 

LINK: Babak Ahteshamipour

EVENT: SEQUENCEBREAK// (MARCH 20 - JUNE 28 2025, ROCHESTER)

Screenshot from Anthology of the Killer (2024) by Stephen Gillmurphy

 

SEQUENCEBREAK//

March 20 - June 28 2025

Curated by Nilson Carroll

Visual Studies Workshop

36 King Street

Rochester, New York 14608

 

From March 20 to June 28, 2025, the Visual Studies Workshop presents SEQUENCEBREAK//, a wide-ranging, genre-subverting arcade of experimental games and digital artworks. This exhibition challenges commercial video game aesthetics and logic, offering a critical lens on the culture of play through works that collapse boundaries between software and art, interaction and observation, story and glitch.

Curated by VSW Assistant Curator Nilson Carroll, SEQUENCEBREAK// is not a nostalgic throwback to coin-op cabinets, but a radical reconfiguration of what an arcade, and a game, can be. It includes work by Stephen Gillmurphy (known online as thecatamites), Nathalie Lawhead, Philip Mallory Jones, Cassie McQuater, and the artist collective Heart Street (Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, and John Bruneau).

The exhibition title refers to the act of “sequence breaking”, a gaming term for disrupting a game's intended narrative or progression. Here, it becomes metaphor: each artist breaks the expected sequences of design, distribution, and interaction, revealing overlooked dynamics within digital culture.

Among the highlights is Out for Delivery, a first-person “playable documentary” by Heart Street. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work follows a Chinese food delivery worker navigating the surreal, sometimes threatening environments of lockdown-era Beijing. Combining live-action 3D footage and game mechanics, the piece probes global labour politics and surveillance culture. It has already earned critical acclaim, including Indiecade’s Impact Award and a BAFTA for Immersive Art.

Irish game maker Stephen Gillmurphy’s Anthology of the Killer twists the murder mystery genre into something alien and cartoonishly grotesque, using surreal humour and pixelated dream logic to disrupt narrative cohesion. Known for creating dozens of freeware games over the past two decades, Gillmurphy remains a central figure in the DIY games scene.

Nathalie Lawhead, a longtime advocate for open-source tools and experimental storytelling, presents BlueSuburbia, a hallucinatory interactive world that expands upon their legacy of net art and zine-making. Their work is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s game collection and Rhizome’s ArtBase, and often critiques systems of control through absurdity and digital bricolage.

Philip Mallory Jones’ Time Machine: Bronzeville projects a speculative 3D reanimation of 1940s Chicago, chronicling Black life through immersive archives. With a career spanning over 50 years in media arts, Jones blends scholarship, historical preservation, and digital art in ways that make history tactile and haunting.

Cassie McQuater’s Black Room reclaims feminine iconography and retro aesthetics to craft a fragmented, contemplative space. McQuater’s cyberfeminist practice mines internet ephemera, turning visual debris into critique. Her past work has appeared at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Rhizome, and indie gaming festivals globally.

In addition to the exhibition, SEQUENCEBREAK// features an active public programme that includes artist talks, walkthroughs, and outdoor workshops, all of which extend the ethos of collective experimentation. Events include an opening party (March 20), a conversation with Philip Mallory Jones (March 27), a live stream with Nathalie Lawhead (May 8), and a final celebratory gathering (June 26). Workshops like “Coding in the Park” on June 14 invite participants to break and remake code as a shared creative act.

Backed by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the William & Sheila Konar Foundation, SEQUENCEBREAK// asserts itself not only as an exhibition but as a platform, a call to rethink the conditions under which games are made, played, and valued.

In a moment when game culture feels increasingly corporatised and censored, SEQUENCEBREAK// reminds us that play remains political, porous, and profoundly strange.

LINK: SEQUENCEBREAK// (thank you, Nilson!)

GAME ART: MAK2’S HOME SWEET HOME BACKYARD: GOLDEN HOUSE (2025)

Mak2, Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House 1, 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas, triptych, and video game, 55 1/2 × 98 2/5 in | 141 × 250 cm

In Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House, Mak2 takes the commodification of art to its logical, if absurd, extreme. This latest series, debuting at Art Basel Hong Kong, comprises seven unique triptychs on canvas, each tethered to a custom-built video game. The mechanics are deceptively simple: players navigate a virtual world to mine gold, and the in-game yield translates into real-time price adjustments of the corresponding physical artwork. For every tranche of virtual gold unearthed, the value of the associated painting increases by 5%, with a maximum cap of 20% over the course of the fair.

The more you play, the more it costs.

Mak2’s integration of game mechanics into the art market is neither gimmick nor satire: it’s a lucid, disarming demonstration of how value is constructed, manipulated, and performed in contemporary art. By converting player engagement into monetary inflation, the artist literalizes speculation and exposes its artifice. The game, in this case, is the market, looped back into itself with the elegance of a recursive script.

Born in Hong Kong in 1989, Mak2 has long been preoccupied with the interplay between control and chaos, authorship and delegation, reality and simulation. Her Home Sweet Home series, ongoing since 2019, exemplifies this tension. Built within The Sims, a ubiquitous American life simulation game, these digital dioramas, often populated by surveillance equipment, rooftop flower pools, or the ghostly residue of millennial malaise, are screen-captured and divided into thirds. Each segment is then outsourced to a different painter found via Taobao, China's sprawling e-commerce platform. By relinquishing authorial control and diffusing artistic labor, Mak2 creates intentional dissonance, emphasizing the structural fractures between image and intention, labor and capital, original and copy.

With Golden House, she pushes this strategy further, making economic feedback not just a subtext but a formal mechanism of the work itself. The audience is no longer merely a passive viewer but an active co-producer of market value. The artwork performs itself through transaction.

Mak2’s practice extends far beyond painting and simulation. Her 2017 work You Better Watch Out—a chaotic assemblage of snow globes, QR codes, bouncing balls, and CCTV cameras was included in the exhibition .com/.cn, co-presented by MoMA PS1 and the K11 Art Foundation. It drew a sharp line between entertainment and surveillance, between participation and control. That duality - now commonplace in the infrastructures of the internet - suffuses much of her work.

Mak2’s exhibitions include The Principle of Hope (Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, 2021), We Didn't Mean To Break It (But It’s OK, We Can Fix It) (Pedro Cera, Lisbon, 2019), Invisible Cities (Crow Collection, Dallas, 2017–18), and Reversal Ritual (de Sarthe, Hong Kong, 2017), among others. Across formats - installations, social media interventions, stand-up comedy, and even Instagram filters - her practice refuses the distinction between the serious and the ludic. She inhabits the contradictions of late capitalism with an artist’s eye and a troll’s timing.

With Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House, Mak2 doesn’t just comment on the art market. She builds it into the work. Or rather, she turns the work into a market, one that players can influence, but never quite control. Just like everything else.

Mak2 lives and works in Hong Kong.

LINK: Mak2

GAME ART: JUAN JOSÉ MARÍA TIRIGALL’S DRIFT ALONG THE EDGES OF THE FRAGMENTS (2024)

Juan José María Tirigall, Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, 2024

A plumber attempts to patch an irreparable system, wandering endlessly through the fractured terrain of a world built upon its own contradictions. The system is both tangible and conceptual, a sculptural landscape of ruptured surfaces and shifting forms. The leaks he strives to seal are unrelenting, his task Sisyphean. This is the premise of Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, the latest work by Argentine multimedia artist and researcher Juan José María Tirigall, an interactive piece that fuses video game aesthetics, mechatronic sculpture, and projection mapping.

A research professor and director of the Graduate Program in Media and Technology at the National University of the Arts (UNA), Tirigall has long explored the confluence of contemporary art, science, and technology. His artistic and pedagogical commitments extend to promoting free software and the GNU/Linux operating system, reinforcing his interest in open, decentralized forms of digital production. His works interrogate the ideological underpinnings of digital culture while actively engaging with the material conditions of artistic production in the age of automation, interactivity, and machinic agency.

In Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, Tirigall literalizes the historical and conceptual tension between contemporary art and mass cultural spectacle through an unmistakable referent: a kitsch Latin American plumber, borrowed from the lexicon of pop culture and the entertainment industry, who traverses an unstable, modular sculpture. This structure is no arbitrary construction: it is a 3D-printed reproduction of the infamous urinal Marcel Duchamp submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition under the pseudonym R. Mutt. Unlike the institutionalized readymade, however, Tirigall’s urinal is in a perpetual state of disrepair, its surfaces cracked, its integrity compromised. The plumber’s ceaseless labor reflects an exercise in futility: fixing what is inherently broken, sustaining a system that resists permanence.

At the heart of the piece lies a dynamic interplay between digital simulation and mechanical instability. The fragmented urinal, set in motion by a network of motors and gears, continuously reconfigures itself, altering both the composition of the sculptural form and the terrain upon which the game character moves. This mechanical choreography transforms the work into an evolving, unstable platformer, a literal enactment of the precarious balancing act performed by cultural laborers, artists, and institutions. By embedding game mechanics within a shifting sculptural environment, Tirigall subverts the illusion of mastery often associated with interactive media, confronting players with a task that is neither winnable nor resolvable.

The artist’s decision to deploy a pop-cultural avatar adds yet another layer of irony to the work. If Duchamp’s urinal once destabilized artistic conventions, revealing the arbitrariness of aesthetic hierarchies, then Tirigall’s urinal exposes the absurdity of contemporary artistic production under digital capitalism. Here, the plumber, a character ostensibly designed to navigate and fix digital spaces, is trapped in an unwinnable game, his own agency curtailed by the very system he is tasked with maintaining.

Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments extends beyond mere critique; it operates as a living, breathing system of decay and renewal, exposing the fragility of both material and digital infrastructures. It questions the labor conditions that sustain artistic practice, the mythology of repair as progress, and the role of the digital artifact in an age where art is as much an object of preservation as it is an act of endurance. Tirigall’s work reminds us that art history, like any system, is not a static monument but a perpetually shifting construct, which demands not just interpretation, but some special kind of navigation.

Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments is currently being exhibited at the Centro de Arte el Obrador, within the framework of the exhibition Gravitating the ground.

LINK: Juan José María Tirigall

EVENT: WEIRD HOPE ENGINES (MARCH 21 - MAY 10 2025, NOTTINGHAM, UK)

Image: Andrew Walter Boggins

Weird Hope Engines

Curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe

Exhibition: Sat 22 Mar 2025 - Sat 10 May 2025

Opening Friday 21st March  6-8pm

Bonington Gallery

Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, Nottingham, NG1 4GG

United Kingdom

 
press release

Weird Hope Engines embraces the culture of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) to explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility. The first exhibition of its kind, it foregrounds the practices of innovative designers, artists, and writers in the field of independent game design, and brings their work into dialogue with fellow-travellers in the field of critical art practice.

Weird Hope Engines, curated by Dying Earth Catalogue, is an experimental exhibition that reimagines Bonington Gallery as a hybrid lab—at once a testing site for the development of new worlding experiences, an active gaming hub, and an archive of maps, concept artworks, rulebooks, and gaming curiosities. Visitors will be invited to participate in both solo and collaborative gaming experiences that foreground questions of collective responsibility, personal testimony, and colonial legacy, reframing our expectations of gaming imaginaries as potent sites for rethinking social organisation, cross-cultural understanding, and personal reverie.

Migrating between the dreamworlds of science fiction, fantasy, folkloric myth, and pressing social realities, a series of newly commissioned play experiences by David Blandy, Chris Bisette, Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko utilise a range of mechanics, from dice rolls and diary keeping to tumble towers and the recording  of personal anecdotes, to encourage new approaches to immersive play. 

Original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang (Melsonia Arts Council) showcase the unique function of visual art within gaming imaginaries, in which image making moves beyond functional illustration into complex relationships with collaborative storytelling.

An essay-film devised by the curators and based upon Jamie Sutcliffe’s essay ‘Playing Games’ (Art Monthly, Issue 484, March 2025) has been produced in collaboration with Adam Sinclair and Lotti Closs, exploring the shared experience of game space as a conflicted site of simulation and hallucinatory possibility.

LINK: Weird Hope Engines

CALL FOR PAPERS: GAME ENGINE CULTURE(S) (DiGRA 2025, MALTA)

 

GAME ENGINE CULTURE(S), DiGRA 2025

June 30th at DiGRA2025 (University of Malta)

The workshop intends to explore the implications of the widespread use of videogame engines in visual culture and the creative industries. Game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine have transcended their initial confines in videogame development, evolving into versatile platforms that now influence a wide array of creative and scientific fields. These powerful tools are not just limited to gaming; they have reshaped Hollywood visual effects, virtual production, and even pre-visualisation of movie sets, as well as contemporary art and architecture. Game engines are also utilised to create training simulations for various industries, including the military.

As these engines standardise aesthetic and functional practices, they simultaneously raise critical questions about artistic authorship, expressive diversity, accessibility, environmental sustainability, and the impact of increased digital consumption. The workshop aims to critically examine the contemporary use of game engines within the visual arts. It seeks to explore the convergence of media studies, game studies, platform studies, curatorial practice, and art history.

The workshop draws on the ongoing work of the curators in this field. They have organised an art exhibition (School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2022), a workshop (University of Liverpool, 2023) and are now curating an edited collection on the subject (Mimesis International, to be published in 2025).

The workshop will take place on June 30th at the University of Malta, in the framework of DiGRA2025. Participants will deliver 20-minute presentations of their work, followed by Q&A. Presentations will be divided into sub-thematic sessions, and presenters within the same session will be expected to read each other’s paper. Both in-real-life and online presentations will be possible. In selecting the final list of speakers we will be mindful of issues of representation in relation to gender, race, geographical background and career level.

Please submit a 300-word abstract by Friday 4th April to the organisers:

Paolo Ruffino [email protected]
Matteo Bittanti [email protected]
Valentino Catricalà [email protected]

Notification of acceptance: Monday 21st April

Workshop date: June 30th (University of Malta)

Essential bibliography

Atkinson, Paul, and Parsayi, Farnaz, ‘Institutionalized Aesthetics: Video Games and the Contemporary Art Gallery’, Games and Culture, 0.0 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241246839.

Charrieras, Damien, and Ivanova, Nadejda, ‘Emergence in Video Game Production: Video Game Engines as Technical Individuals’, Social Science Information, 55.3 (2016), pp. 337-356, https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018416642056.

Chia, Aleena, Malazita, James, Young, Chris J., Nieborg, David B., Joseph, Daniel J., and Gantt, Matthew D., ‘The Engine Is the Message: Videogame Infrastructure and the Future of Digital Platforms’, paper presented at AoIR2022: The 23rd Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Dublin, Ireland, 2-5 November 2022.

Chia, Aleena, ‘The Artist and the Automaton in Digital Game Production’, Convergence, 28.2 (2022), pp. 389–412, https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221076434.

Chia, Aleena, ‘The Metaverse, but Not the Way You Think: Game Engines and Automation Beyond Game Development’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 39.3 (2022), pp. 191–200, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2080850.

Chia, Aleena, Keogh, Brendan, Leorke, Dale, and Nicoll, Benjamin, ‘Platformisation in Game Development’, Internet Policy Review, 9.4 (2020), https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platformisation-game-development.

Freedman, Eric, The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture (London: Routledge, 2019).

Foxman, Maxwell, ‘United We Stand: Platforms, Tools and Innovation With the Unity Game Engine’, Social Media + Society, 5.4 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880177.

Lohmeyer, Eddie, Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

Malazita, Jim, Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024).

Nicoll, B., and Keogh, B., The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2019)

Nideffer, Robert F., ‘Game Engines as Embedded Systems’, in Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, ed. by Victoria Vesna (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 211–232.

Curators bio

Paolo Ruffino is Senior Lecturer in Digital Curation and Computational Creativity at the department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK. Ruffino has been investigating the independent production of videogames, labour unions in the videogame industry, and nonhuman and posthuman play in the digital age. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2018), editor of Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics (Routledge, 2021) and author of articles for Games and Cultures; Television and New Media; Critical Studies in Media Communication; and GAME The Italian Journal of Game Studies. He is currently working on a new monograph for MIT Press, titled Videogames for the Post-Anthropocene (to be published in Fall 2026).

Matteo Bittanti is Associate Professor in Media Studies at IULM University in Milan, Italy and a Lecturer in the Faculty of the Master of Arts in Algorithmic and Networked Photography at ELISAVA, in Barcelona, Spain. Bittanti is the artistic director of the Milan Machinima Festival and director of the online platform VRAL. His latest publications include Game-driven Video Art. Cinema, videogames, machinima (Mimesis Edizioni, 2025), Fotoludica. Photography, video games 3 between art and documentation (with Marco De Mutiis, Mimesis Edizioni, 2025), The Photographer’s Guide to Los Santos (with Marco De Mutiis, Mimesis International, 2024). Bittanti lives in Los Angeles.

Valentino Catricalà is the curator of the SODA Gallery, Modal, in Manchester (UK) and a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research and curatorial practice focus on the relationship between artists and new technologies. Valentino holds a PhD from Roma Tre University and has been a visiting lecturer in at ZKM (Karlsruhe), Tate Modern (London), University of Dundee (Dundee), and LIMA (Amsterdam). As a curator, he has worked for many international art institutions such as the Hermitage (San Petersburg), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco), New York Media Center (New York), Fondazione Stelline (Milan), MAXXI Museum (Rome), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), Ca' Foscari (Venice), Indian Art Faire - New Dheli Italian Cultural Institute (India), and Spatiu Intact (Romania).

EVENT: MÉLANIE COURTINAT’S THE SIREN (FEBRUARY 12 - MARCH 23 2025, SAN FRANCISCO)

Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren, 2023, video game.

 

Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren

February 12–March 23, 2025

Gray Area

2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110

press release

Gray Area is pleased to present Mélanie Courtinat: The Siren, a solo exhibition and the US premiere of a new video game work by French artist Mélanie Courtinat. Join us in the Gray Area Gallery on February 12 for an opening reception and guided playthrough with curator Wade Wallerstein.

The Siren (2024) is an interactive experience built with Unreal Engine that questions the traditional conventions of video games.

In the game, players embody a heroine wearing a shining suit of armor who wanders aimlessly along a beach at dusk. Once in control, players explore this beautiful and austere world under the watchful eye of an omniscient narrator. The narrator prompts players to undertake the seemingly arbitrary task—or side quest—of collecting bioluminescent seashells scattered across the sand. Only by collecting all of the shells can the player advance to the main quest: rescuing a damsel in distress.

Though rendered in ultra-high definition fidelity, resembling the hyperrealistic outputs of mass market AAA game studio productions, The Siren’s unique mechanics make it a distinctly different experience. The work elides a blockbuster main storyline and instead hones in on the droll imperatives and mundane taskings present in most video games. In this way, The Siren probes the meanings we assign to actions within gamespace, our relationships to the worlds we inhabit, and the motivations behind our playful engagements.

This experience is designed to be accessible to all visitors, including gaming newcomers, while also providing an additional meta-level of understanding for seasoned players.

The Siren is presented in San Francisco with support from Villa Albertine, in partnership with the Albertine Foundation, the Institut Français, and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs. Gray Area is proud to be a 2025 French Immersion Laureate institution.

The Siren was originally commissioned by the Pully Art Museum as part of their exhibition Vivre l’œuvre/Voyage aux frontières de l’art immersif contemporain.

Mélanie Courtinat (1993) is an award-winning artist and art director based in Paris. Considering video games as a major medium, she focuses on their extraordinary immersive properties and seeks to push their boundaries. Her work, crafted through the use of digital tools, encompasses CGI images and films, interactive experiences, as well as virtual and augmented reality projects. As an artist, her personal creations are consistently showcased worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries, and museums, from Tokyo to New York. As an art director, she collaborates on commissioned projects for clients in the luxury, fashion, culture, and music industries. Mélanie also teaches video game history at ÉCAL in Lausanne and virtual reality at Beaux-Arts de Paris, while regularly conducting lectures and workshops in academic settings.

Don't miss the workshop on March 17 2025.

LINK: Mélanie Courtinat

LINK: Gray Area

GAME ART: LOVE HULTÉN'S STUNNING DEVICE ART

Love Hultén, R - K A I D - R, Portable arcade console in solid wood

Love Hultén,  O R I G I N X, arcade cabinet in solid wood, Dimensions: 61x51x31cm, Raspberry Pi 4, 19" 4:3 LCD (incl custom barrel distortion to mimic CRT monitors)

​Love Hultén,, P Y U A, Conceptual tribute to Nintendo

 

​Love Hultén, E V O B O X X, synthesizer based on the cellular automaton Game of Life (1970)

 

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Love Hultén, P O C K E T   S P I N, Portable game console for arcade spinner titles​

 

 

Love Hultén, , C A B I N E T  o f   A L G O R I T H M I C   C U R I O S I T I E S, conceptual arcade cabinet based on a collection of three mathematical exploration games created by Happybits

Love Hultén, born in 1984 in Gothenburg, Sweden, is an audiovisual artist and woodworker renowned for his unique fusion of traditional craftsmanship and modern technology. He earned his bachelor's degree from HDK Steneby in 2014 and has since been creating bespoke synthesizers, sound sculptures, and custom game consoles. Working from his studio at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg, Hultén handcrafts each piece, blending form and function to challenge conventional perceptions of art and design. His work has attracted a diverse clientele, including notable figures such as Eminem, A$AP Rocky, and Michael B. Jordan. Hultén's creations are celebrated for their playful yet understated aesthetic, drawing inspiration from retro-futurism and mid-20th-century design principles. By integrating tactile elements into his designs, he fosters a deeper connection between users and technology, offering a personalized alternative to mass-produced digital interfaces. ​

LINK: Love Hultén (all images (c) Love Hultén)

EVENT: TORONTO GAMES WEEK 2025 (JUNE 11- 17 2025, TORONTO, CANADA)

press release

Come to Our Celebration of Playful Arts and Culture!

What makes Toronto Games Week special is that it’s a coalition of the most active and varied game orgs and groups active playing cooperatively, timing our autonomously-run events for the June week so that we can signal boost and support each other.

Last year we had 25 events and 3000 attendees going to workshops, conference talks, showcases, socials, parties, nighttime adventures and more! We flew in special guests like Xalavier Nelson Jr. and Trey Smith. Check out our photo recap from 2024 and 2023.

This year our poster art by Cuphead artist Caitlin Russell reflects our theme “beyond the frame” with an expansion of playful culture events past the digital like a Little Free Library-based RPG, a board game jam, and more. And as always we’ll take advantage of the summer weather to have outdoor events like tea parties, a beach screening of DOA: Dead or Alive and the trip into the forest for Night Parkcade.

Beyond Toronto’s awesome game community and events is the city itself. With so many ravines and green spaces (plus an island!) it’s called the City Within a Park. Our motto of Diversity our Strength is reflected in our rich multicultural arts landscape, producing constant bursts of creativity and collaboration. June also hosts Pride Month, NXNE, and a multi-arts festival, Luminato. Plus: right before TGW is the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which attracts 25,000+ indie and alt comic fans and hundreds international creators to town for an amazing weekend of comic appreciation. 

“Going to Toronto Games Week confirmed something that’s already deeply apparent if you look at the host of game releases coming out these days – Canada features one of the most vibrant and innovative scenes around. It’s a deeply special time, and it left me excited for the future of gaming!” Xalavier Nelson Jr., 2024 Featured Guest.

LINK: Toronto Games Week 2025 (Thank you Jim!)