GAMESCENES

EVENT: GAME SOCIETY (MAY 12 - SEPTEMBER 10 2023, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA)

Game Society
May 12–September 10, 2023

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu
03062 Seoul
South Korea
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday 10am–6pm
Friday–Saturday 10am–9pm

Organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
Curated by Hong Leeji
Curatorial Assistant: Sojung Jang 
Technical support by Lee Giljae and Jiyoung Han

Artists: Cory Arcangel, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Harun Farocki, Jacky Connolly, Kim Heecheon, Lawrence Lek, Lu Yang, Ram Han

press release

Game Society is an exhibition that examines how the grammar and aesthetics of video games have influenced contemporary art and visual culture, and permeated our society and daily lives over the five decades since the launch of the first video game. Video games encompass interface design for visual and auditory stimulation, storytelling that spurs the imagination, immersive experiences and social interactions, which makes them the most relevant media form today. Game Society takes a closer look at the process of powerful synchronization between society and video games that has been accelerated by the pandemic. It explores the context in which society becomes virtual spaces and the reality of those spaces becoming part of everyday life, examining what experiences games can communicate and share with us. The exhibition features 9 video games and more than 30 artworks by contemporary artists who have been influenced by the grammar and aesthetics of video games. The games on display include Korean video games and select loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which have been acquiring games since the early 2010s.

To read is to imagine a world, to watch a movie is to observe that world, and to play a video game is to live in that world; the imagination and realism have become a shared experience and visual grammar in modern society. To play a game is analogous to contemplating and appreciating contemporary art in that it requires active participation in a work of art, during which the audience can attain a moment of art. However, the worlds within games are still imperfect. There is a marked lack of diversity in games, where virtual worlds are populated by hyperbolically perfect physiques, and women, the aged, weak, or disabled are either not represented or appear as non playable characters. As in real life, it can be difficult for them to find ways to access games and their digital environments. In contextualizing digital spaces and games in an exhibition, the MMCA, as a space of inclusion, proposes a reimagining of our society where gamification has become part of everyday life, examining gaps and empty spaces in games. In the end, presenting games in the museum is directly linked to the issue of the museum’s accessibility. Playing a video game is not different from viewing an art exhibition in that a video game’s tutorials resemble an exhibition guide with its set routes, exits, and entrances; the accumulation of experience and skill by playing a game resembles the increasing fluency and appreciation of art by visiting exhibitions and museums.    

All the video games in this exhibition are available for play. Audiences can play them with Gaming Accessibility Controller designed and developed by the Korea National Rehabilitation Center Assistive Technology Open Platform, along with Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller devices. As video game critic C. Thi Nguyen noted, games are “the art form of agency.” As such, the exhibition offers audience ways to gain fresh perspectives on the issues that emerge when they gamify their daily lives by providing universal and expansive controllers. In a similar spirit of inclusiveness and accessibility, the exhibition also provides online projects organized with PACK.

For the MMCA, this exhibition is a celebration of what video games and art museums share in their experiences. The exhibition is also an active endeavor to share the common act of accessing and reflecting on video games and the art museum, observing the roles and spheres of the individual and the public. In both video games and art, it is the application of contemporary knowledge and social experiences, and the speculation that it provokes, that creates an opportunity for us to reevaluate the world we live in. In this sense, the intention of Game Society is to provide the audience with the opportunity to contemplate and question the efforts and attention required to make public places and games more inclusive, reframing where we might wish to redefine our common goals. Through games as an artistic medium with cross-generational appeal, the exhibition hopes to provide the full sensory gamut to each individual in a unique way that serves the artistic experiences and values of each person best.

LINK: Game Society

EVENT: NOW WHAT? (APRIL 25 - JULY 9 2023, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA)

Theo Triantafyllidis, BugSim (Pheromone Spa), 2022, Live Simulation

 

NOW WHAT?
April 25–July 9, 2023

 

SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art
1238 Dongil-ro, Nowon-gu
01783 Seoul
South Korea

 

Artists: Riar Rizaldi, Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid Productions, Theo Triantafyllidis, Jaewon Kim, Internet Mountain Club, Yoon Jeewon

press release

2023 marks the tenth anniversary of SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art. With its mission to build sustained connections to the local community, the museum has experimented with a variety of exhibitions and programs. It is in this context that the museum presents NOW WHAT?, an exhibition that requires a deeper level of engagement from the museum, artist, and the audience.

In our contemporary digital media environment, new media is the medium enjoyed by most people. Yet, even such attributes of new media started to stutter and did not work very dramatically as they entered the format of the white cube. It happened since the new media were not inherently unilateral. Historically, attitudes toward art exhibitions have evolved to emphasize the importance of experience and interaction. Yet, there are still some points that leave something to be developed. In particular, the video art that we want to examine in this exhibition has not escaped the limits of receiving the audience on a white wall like an old painting, even in an explosive circulation of the media ecosystem. The experiential layers of video art must be presented in a more complex and autonomous way. Therefore, we materialize the numerous elements that make up their works in a “game-like scenography.”

We invited artists who work with new media in various ways such as film, documentary, interactive video, and live simulation. We then focused on researching their works that resulted in the single-channel video format. First and foremost, Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid Productions is a filmmaker and game developer who created IMMORTALITY (2022), a game that raises questions about the nature of video art by deconstructing the unidirectionality and monolinear structure of traditional cinema. In IMMORTALITY, the player sits in the editing room to unfold and reassemble all the scenes of the three unmerged films to infer the unfilmed events. It is an important and inspirational example that is closely connected to how the exhibition came about. Jaewon Kim talks about the lives of queer people, those infected with HIV/AIDS, and his relationship with his lovers. His works are composed in the form of letters to lovers through the fragmentation of images or reconstruction of memories. We transformed these works into a performative dimension and placed devices for pseudo-emotional experience. Riar Rizaldi focuses on individuals and specific groups in Indonesia and Hong Kong who are marginalized from a socio-economic perspective. In the exhibition, the audience will become marginalized individuals or particular groups in no time through spontaneous performative acts. The mountaineering documentary True of Landscapes (2023) by Internet Mountain Club allows us to take a closer look behind the scenes of the mountain that was not visible to the eyes of mountain hikers. They tell the holistic story of our time—ethnicity, identity, culture, generation, climate—on the actual topographic map of a “mountain”and ask the audience to be witnesses of the times. Taking on the determination of this video work, we concretized our actions and experiences as witnesses. In the meantime, Theo Triantafyllidis creates a live simulation in which an autonomous ecosystem operates. This work in the exhibition space becomes an object of observation and exploration by itself. The intention is to have this work interact with the audience with a sense of observing an ant’s nest as we did as homework when we were young or with an intention to have it as a mirror to reflect on reality. Finally, artist and filmmaker Yoon Jeewon presents a new video work A VERY ABSOLUTE EFFECT ON THE PERCEIVER (2023). It is hoped that the audience will appreciate the exceptional golden ratio and infer the rules that constructed the work. The best way to watch the video works with the most delicious taste might be to learn the rules and connect what is possible within them for an emergent viewing. 

We prepared game-like texts to facilitate the interaction between the interpretive layers of the video works and the fragmented experiences. Among the various formats of games, we focused on “immersive simulation”games. While the player’s actions were limited to essential actions in the early games, it is possible to interact with almost every element of the environment in immersive simulation games. Players can have autonomy and thus practice emergent gameplay in a given environment regardless of their original obligations. In addition, the proficiency accumulated through trial and error creates a deep understanding and immersion in the game’s worldview. 

Taking this into account, the scenography of the exhibition is set in the gray area of the city, which also happens to be the psychological background of the uncertainty of our time and the participating artists. In particular, the exhibition houses an “underpath of an imaginary bridge.” The underpath is a limbo-like space where the audience’s failures return not as defection but as experiences and skills. Here, artists and curators talked about what it would take for an individual’s media experiences and subjective memories to move beyond mere appreciation and become part of a collective experience, memory, and language. The process devised in the underpath has become an activity sheet and is given to all players. While the placeness of this exhibition primarily gives a sense of déjà vu, the activity sheet works as a tutorial and a list of tasks that help the artists to master the experiences and languages they want to deliver through the live action. Now, with the list of missions in hand, the audience (player) will be able to recall our question. 

“NOW WHAT?”
The exhibition expects that the audience to become the player, and determine their own path at will and absorb the rules or languages of artworks through their explorative interaction at the experiential level. We hope the audience to get deeper into the pleasure of watching video art and the essence of what the artists tell in their works. 

LINK: Now What?

EVENT: LARRY ACHIAMPONG'S AND I SAW A NEW HEAVEN (MAY 4 - JUNE 17 2023, LONDON

Larry Achiampong, And I saw a new heaven. Photo credit: Reece Straw, Copperfield Gallery, 2023

 

Larry Achiampong

And I saw a new heaven

4 May - 17 June 2023

Copperfield Gallery

6 Copperfield Street
London SE1 0EP
info (at) copperfieldlondon . com
+44 (0) 7455 029002
+44 (0) 7845 594549​

Press release:

Referencing the unlikely trinity of HBO TV, video games and Christianity, the title drawn from dialogues from the game-turned-series The Last of Us and ultimately from the Bible encapsulates the references for Larry Achiampong’s second solo show at Copperfield. From computer games to church the cast of faces represented there has almost always been white. The already problematic status quo that church is high culture and gaming is low or pop culture breaks down here when one references the other, but the exhibition brings real game play for visitors into direct dialogue with Achiampong’s collaged paintings. 
 
“video games have had huge influence on my art work and the reality of their sophistication and cultural referencing is ignored by the rest of the creative sphere. It’s time for video games to take their place as context in the gallery while I work on my ultimate goal; a playable artwork. At its core gaming is storytelling, world building, fantasy, exploration and human culture in one”
 
What is missing still, trailing behind even film and TV, is minority representation in games. What scant references there have been to people of colour or the queer community for example have almost always been negative or derogatory with just one or two recent exceptions like Beyonetta. Why though when nearly half of game players in the US alone are people of colour? While the mechanics differ, this cause and effect of this uncomfortable fact can ultimately be connected to a similar peculiarity in religion.
 
Almost anywhere in the world touched by white missionary work, from the Philippines to Ghana, you can find congregations of colour surrounded by posters and imagery with an entirely white cast of God, Mary, Jesus, disciples and crew. The incongruity of a chalk white Jesus with his apparently middle eastern origins is hugely questionable, but in the context of countries that have been repressed by white western imperialism, the apparent perpetuation of these images by these congregations becomes even more unsettling. As a starting point for the works in the exhibition, Achiampong has selected a series of typical religious posters from Ghana to paint over. Their plethora of graphic and immediate imagery draws on a pastiche of dated advertising styles and, in turn, so does Achiampong’s response. While the Golliwog or minstrel show character is an uncomfortably recognisable icon of Britain and America's colonial past, the immediacy of this image when reduced here to an internet style avatar, belies its complex and often obscured history. Other more subtle painted edits and editions amplify the way in which these works question, disrupt and take ownership of these problematic legacies by obscuring parts of the posters. The frame on the face of each panel is custom made by hand by Larry in a nod to the idealised story of Christ as carpenter vs the realities faced by many undervalued manual work forces today. The framing style is comparable with the kind found in the humble places of worship Achiampong experienced as a child — grand in form but with no pretence of gilding or hiding the knots — in other words, strangely honest. 
 
Nearby, games like Bayonetta 2, The Binding of Isaac, and Blasphemous give context to the works for visitors through play. The Binding of Isaac was made in darkly humorous response to the game developers Catholic and Baptist upbringing which Achiampong’s childhood shares, and is loosely based on the Bible story of the same name, but has as much to say about childhood as organised religion. In their aesthetics and sounds, and references to literature and history, Blasphemous and Bayonetta 2 relate to Christianity – specifically, the Catholicism with which the artist grew up – and explore the problematic aspects of religion and blind Faith. An uncanny dialogue thus arises between these games and the artworks, from their use of racialised imagery, to that of language: Biblical commands, lifted from Latin; teachings from Psalms demanding control of the self under the guise of support. It is a question of independently analysing the instruction given to us by a ‘higher power’, of considering the self in the broader context of accepted traditions and behaviours.
 
It is the intro sequence from 2014 blockbuster game Bioshock Infinite that welcomes visitors to the exhibition. While part fantasy, the game draws on some of humanities darkest moments, and gives context to the kind of processes that have led to historic whitewashing across culture. The game is set in the fictional city of Columbia, founded by self-proclaimed prophet Zachary Comstock, and funded by the American government as a floating world's fair within the ideology of American exceptionalism. Worshipped as a prophet, Comstock has transformed the city into a theocratic police state, with the Founding Fathers of the United States venerated as religious icons. Play makes it clear that institutional racism and elitism are widespread in the city, with minorities serving as a labour underclass on the verge of rebellion.
Sound familiar?

 

LINK: And I Saw A New Heaven

LINK: Larry Achiampong

EVENT: ART AND/OR GAME: SYMBIOSIS OR DISSONANCE? (MAY 16 - 20 2023, PARIS)

Post Growth Toolkit (The Game), Disnovation.org, 2020, game table of the installation, photo : iMAL, Bruxelles/Brussels

Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance?

Centre Culturel Canadien

130 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris, France

16 May 2023 -> 20 May 2023

Curated by Lynn Hughes
Artist, independent curator and Emeritus Professor at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Assistant Curators
Nathalie Bachand
Independent curator and artistic co-director at Sporobole, Contemporary Art Centre (Ndakina/Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada)

Catherine Bédard
Curator and Deputy Director, Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris, France)

press release

Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance? is an exhibition that looks at some current practices in the very vibrant area where experimental games meet related art practices. Experimental games seek to resist the hegemony of the huge international digital games industry by presenting a profusion of local, personal and community-based alternatives that stretch the game form expressively and critically. 

The exhibition brings together a selection of artists and game designers from Canada and France with very different approaches to this interstitial space. The works range from the explicitly political and activist to those with more implicit and poetic integration of social critique, from the very figurative to the abstract, and from more traditional screen game formats to ones with physical interfaces of different types.

The game-work by the collective Disnovation.org is part of ISEA’s official programming. This project is funded by the European MASC-RISE programme under grant agreement n°101007915.

Visitors are invited to play on site with all the games presented in the exhibition.

Featured artists
Disnovation.org (France), ISEA2023 laureate artists collective
Ahreum Lee (Canada), Enric Llagostera (Canada), Raphaëll Maïwen (Canada), Santiago Tamayo Soler (Canada), Tatiana Vilela Dos Santos (France)

 

LINK: Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance

EVENT: SILICON VALLEY TALKS: ATARI DESIGN (MAY 2 2023, STANFORD, USA)

Silicon Valley Talks: Atari Design

Sponsored by Stanford Universities Library

Tuesday, May 2, 2023
12pm to 1pm PT

Free and open  to the public

Hohbach Hall, 123
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford, CA 94305
View map

press release

Join the Silicon Valley Archives in welcoming author Raiford Guins as he and the Harold C. Hohbach Curator for the History of Science and Technology Collections, Henry Lowood, discuss his latest book, Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines.

Drawing from deep archival research and extensive interviews, Atari Design is a rich, historical study of how Atari's industrial and graphic designers contributed to the development of the video game machine. You may purchase a copy of the book here.

Raiford Guins is Chair and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (MIT Press, 2014) and Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury, 2020). Guins is currently writing a book on the popularity of the English Premier League in the US. He co-edits MIT Press's Game Histories Book Series with Henry Lowood.

 

Read more: Atari Design @ Stanford

EVENT: WORLDBUILDING: VIDEO GAMES AND ART IN THE DIGITAL ERA (JUNE 10 2023 - JAN 15 2024, METZ, FRANCE)

Theo Triantafyllidis, Pastoral, 2019

 

Worldbuilding: Video Games And Art In The Digital Era

Centre Pompidou-Metz
1 Parvis des Droits de l'Homme
57020 Metz
France

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London

press release

Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”. Around a hundred years ago, in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the source of culture.

More recently, in his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that games, particularly video games, are a distinct type of art which “let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own”. As such, gaming has the potential to unleash powerful psychic forces. Video games have proven to be an effective tool for the development of training and strategy. Indeed, scientists have made good use of video games simulating biological systems to speculate on the possible origins and destination of life. Accordingly, video games as a digital art form offer a means for an existential quest beyond the embodied physical world and into the multiverse. By their very nature, they open the potential to imagine and build new worlds.

Several of the featured artists in the exhibit began making work that refers to video games as early as the 1980s while most of the others were just born around that time. For the works in this show, artists have addressed video games in various ways. Some have adapted their themes and visual style to make videos. Others have modified, hacked, and subverted existing video games. Finally, some have created their own video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist writes, “traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people…producing games with a very limited perspective. This is now changing rapidly… Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to create [their own] virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion”. Through these means, the artists are taking this format beyond pure entertainment value to probe social, political, and aesthetic questions. While video games have been the topic of numerous exhibitions in recent years, most of these highlighted their legitimacy as an artistic medium or focused on aspects of “game art”.

Worldbuilding is the first transgenerational, multinational show of this scope to examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their chosen form of expression. In so doing, this exhibit presents a plurality of voices and a multitude of perspectives.

With works by Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, Meriem Benanni, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Kim Heecheon, Institute of Queer Ecology, Rindon Johnson, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, Sturtevant, Theo Triantafyllidis, Suzanne Treister, Angela Washko, Lu Yang, among others.

LINK: Worldbuilding

See also

GAME ART: DIMITRIS GKIKAS's GAME: ENDLING II: MNEMOSYNE UNIT-01 (2023)

Endling II is a walking simulator game that explores the aftermath of a mass extinction. The player controls Mnemosyne Unit-01, a hyper-creature containing the DNA of all known eukaryotic species, as they navigate a deserted, post-apocalyptic Earth. In the course of the game, the DNA strands struggle to coexist harmoniously, leading to humorous beatbox battles between them. During these battles, the player temporarily loses control of the creature, which starts behaving as a non-playable character (NPC).

 

Endling II can be downloaded from the game's homepageor Itch.io.

 

 

Dimitris Gkikas (b. Athens, Greece) is a Berlin-based new media artist and designer. He uses found materials to tell science fiction narratives through multiple media including video, net art, video games, performances, and installations. His work has been displayed internationally at institutions such as the UZWEI in Dortmunder U (DE), Akademie Schloss Solitude (online/shortlisted), 19th Media Art Biennale WRO (PL), Ars Electronica X.ART Global Gallery (online), Kunstverein Tiergarten (DE), ADAF (GR), Vector Festival (CA), FILE Festival (BR), Transmediale Vorspiel (DE) and The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale (online)

 

LINK: Dimitris Gkikas

EVENT: TO ANCESTRAL FUTURES (JANUARY 25- MARCH 12, GUYANCOURT, FRANCE)

To ancestral futures
From ancestral knowledge to digital
26th of January – 12 of March 2023
Exhibit space of Guyancourt
Opening on the 25th of January

Curated by Isabelle Arvers

press release

The global games market is still dominated by Europe, the United States and Japan.The exhibition “Aux futurs ancestraux” adopts a decolonial perspective on art and games in order to echo works conceived on the periphery of this global and globalizing culture. “Aux futurs ancestraux” immerses us in other types of representations, cities, landscapes, narratives and cosmogonies, conceived and expressed in other languages, and seeks to decolonize our imaginary through the co-construction of narratives born of the encounter between oral tradition, endogenous knowledge and the virtual universes of video games.

This necessary dialogue between these different modes of knowledge requires a paradigm shift. Science and human thought are no longer the only sources of knowledge; it is now possible to think of knowledge “beyond the human” (Eduardo Kohn). “This implies that nature thinks, that animals think, and that non-humans can teach us techniques and knowledge, by changing our perspective. (Viveiro de Castro).

Between photo installations, drawing, performance, video installations, immersive, interactive and video game, an exhibition that invites us to reconnect with what connects us to our ancestral futures: the living.

Artists line up

High in the Sky and Beneath the Stars, Laura Palavecino, (AR), interactive installation

Laidaxai, Daniela Fernandez, (AR) video game

Paramo, Eulalia De Valdenebro Cajiao, (CO), Installation drawings video

Water Divinity, Henri Tauliaut (Martinique), Video game

Atuel, Matajuegos, (ARG), Video game

Coca para comer, Aniara Rodado, (CO), Installation, Performance

Epiculus Garden, Tania Fraga, (BR), Video Installation

Infinitree, Mbaye Camara (SN) & Isabelle Arvers (FR), Machinima

Isabelle Arvers is a French artist and curator whose research focuses on the interaction between art and video games. She studies the artistic, ethical and critical implications of digital gaming, and explores the creative potential of video game piracy. As a curator, she focuses on video games as a medium for artists. In 2019, she is touring the world of art and games in non-Western countries to promote notions of gender and sexuality diversity, as well as geographic origin, focusing on queer, feminist and decolonial practices.

LINK: To Ancestral Futures

EVENT: ROCK BOTTOM: ABE SUGARMAN (MARCH 16-APRIL 25 2023, LONDON)

Abe Sugarman, still from Rock Bottom game, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

ROCK BOTTOM: ABE SUGARMAN

Curated by Rebecca Edwards

Part of arebyte 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi
Opening Event: Thurday 16 March 2023 6:30-9pm
Exhibition runs until 15 April 2023

arebyte Gallery London
Java House, 7 Botanic Square
London City Island, E14 0LG

press release

arebyte’s new exhibition Rock Bottom, by Abe Sugarman, transforms the gallery into an immersive game experience where the physical and the virtual collide. Set deep inside a cryptic ocean trench, a bottomless abyss that no light can penetrate, visitors embark on a choose-your-own-adenture journey composed of games, video works and sculpture.

The show represents the culmination of arebyte’s annual hotel generation programme, which is designed to mentor the next generation of UK digital artists during the critical early stages of their careers and whose 2022 edition was awarded to Abe Sugarman.

The exhibition explores concepts of queer and jellyfish temporalities, where restarting and rejuvenation become the metaphorical pointers to introduce the narrative of survival.

The installation expands the gameplay into the physical space through life-size characters and theatrical props, encouraging players to become entangled in game worlds both virtual and physical. The gallery is divided into zones dedicated to different areas of investigation within the exhibition: Northern values and patriotism, the transitory Jellyfish life cycle, and reconciliation of the dual fear and temptation of the unknown.

The exhibition explores how ecological disasters can form new bodily relationships with futures and survival. Familiar and otherworldly locations, from the depths of the River Calder Valley to the Jellyfish Fields, reflect a time of instability, with unfolding crises of the environment, gender stereotyping and the silencing of cast-aside voices. Encouraging us to understand worlds we don’t yet know, Rock Bottom verges into science fiction in its imagining of major environmental change and exploration of the meaning of time at the bottom of the ocean.

Our protagonist’s descent into the darkest ocean trench reveals the inherent struggle towards escape when we truly hit rock bottom. When we interact with the characters that we find there, they reveal death drive behaviours and sentiments through strange conversations, actions, and emotes. It becomes apparent that within the struggle and darkness of localised and planetary pain, light and optimism will emerge through the rethinking and recontextualising of spacetime.

The judging panel for the 2022 edition of hotel generation consisted of artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Head of Digital Arts Computing BSc at Goldsmiths Rachel Falconer, cultural producer Yinka Danmole and curator of Digital at the V&A Melanie Lenz. This exhibition concludes arebyte's 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi which looks at fictioning and alternative futures through a series of exhibitions, live performances, online experiences and educational activities.

Rock Bottom is accompanied by a booklet featuring texts by arebyte’s curator Rebecca Edwards, academic Jack Halberstam and artist Abe Sugarman.

A programme of talks, online gameplay events and workshops accompanying the exhibition can be viewed here.

Abe Sugarman is a multimedia artist based in West Yorkshire, who operates as an agent within a game. Abe uses their political proposal ‘Jellyfish temporality’: as a non-linear model of queer time and survival against geological stratification. Abe combines the circular and entwined web of bodies and systems that exist in the bio-membrane, where a diagrammatic tissue of lies and life cycles emerges through reverberation, compulsion, and restarting. In this newly formed ‘Anthrobussy’, the rehearsal assembles. Abe enjoys SpongeBob SquarePants, cuttlefish, and Gordon Riggs Garden Centre. Abe graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Previous solo and group exhibitions include: Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London; Ruskin Project Space, Oxford; Five Folds, London.

Abe Sugarman, still from River Calder Roblox game, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

Abe Sugarman, still from Rock Bottom game, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

Abe Sugarman, still from Jellyfish Fields film, 2023. Commissioned by arebyte.

All images courtesy of arebyte

LINK: Abe Sugarman

LINK: ROCK BOTTOM: ABE SUGARMAN

EVENT: THOMAS HAWRANKE AND LASSE SCHERFFIG (JANUARY 6-19 2023, ONLINE)

COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE – THE MOVIE

Digital video (1024 x 1024), sound, color, 55’ 33”, 2022, Germany  

Created by Thomas Hawranke and Lasse Scherffig

January 6 - 19 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

An adaptation sui generis of an early text-based adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure - The Movie remediates the program developed by Will Crowther in 1976 based on the architecture of the Mammoth Cave complex in Kentucky. The original game used text to describe the environment whereas the animated film uses AI-generated visuals. Every eight seconds, the AI system receives a new textual description, taken from Colossal Cave Adventure’s source code, comprising 379 inputs ranging from narrative descriptions of nature to jargon from the vocabulary of speleologists to single words meaning an object, a compass direction, or an exclamation. The camera constantly moves downwards, digging through geological layers and exposing new cave spaces again and again.

Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human-animal-machine relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern of his is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and received a PhD from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the zkm_gameplay in Karlsruhe and the RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS/BERLIN. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Lasse Scherffig is an artist and scientist with a background in cognitive science/machine learning and computer science. Scherffig is interested in the relationship of humans, machines, and society; cybernetics and the technological infrastructures of communication and control; and the cultures and aesthetics of computation and interaction. His work oscillates between computer science and experimental artistic practices, engineering and amateur/DIY methods, science and humanities. A professor of Interaction Design at Köln International School of Design, he previously served as the Department Chair of Art and Technology at San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught as assistant professor. Scherffig co-founded the artist group Paidia Institute and off topic, magazine for media art. His art projects have been shown at numerous exhibitions. Lasse holds a doctoral degree in Experimental Computer Science from KHM, Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

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