GAMESCENES

EVENT: OASIS: THE VIDEOGAME EXHIBITION (JUNE 15 - JUNE 2022, MADRID, SPAIN AND ONLINE)

Oasis. The videogame exhibition 

 

Curated by María Luján Oulton – David Alonso – Sergio Reyes

 

ESNE University in Madrid, Spain

 

97, Avenida de Alfonso XIII, in Distrito de Chamartín

June 15 - June 20 2022

The exhibition showcases 24 international games grouped into 4 nodes. It is accompanied by a program of round tables (Friday the 17th), a Makey Makey workshop (Saturday the 18th), a cicle of documentaries (Sunday the 19th) and a reading space which aims to give an intro to the local scene of gamestudies in Spain.

As curator María Luján Oulton writes:

I also wanted to invite you to listen to the round tables that will be taking place tomorrow Friday 17th and will be live streamed via youtube The sessions will be in English with local and international speakers. The topics will be: Museum & Videogames, Affect & play, Artgames curators and festivals, Videogames, activism and politics, Postmortem clinic. 

Click here to read the curatorial text in Spanish and English

LINK: OASIS

EVENT: HOW TO WIN AT PHOTOGRAPHY (JUNE 23 - SEPTEMBER 25 2022, LONDON)

How to win at Photography

Photographer's Gallery

June 23 - September 25 2022

16-18 Ramillies Street, London

W1F 7LW England

How to Win at Photography will open June 23 2022 at The Photographer's Gallery in London and will remain open until September 25. A "multimedia exhibition" featuring 30+ artists, How to Win at Photography, "questions the very meaning and function of photography today". Expect a plethora of collateral events regarding all things post-photography - including in-game photography - starting with a killer conversation featuring John Hilliard and Justin Berry on June 24 202 about the ever-changing nature of photography.

Featured artists: Cory Arcangel, Aram Bartholl, Justin Berry, Alan Butler, Gloria López Cleries & Sive Hamilton Helle, Joan Pamboukes, Tabor Robak, Constant Dullaart, Yuyi John, Emma Agnes Sheffer, Coralie Vogelaar, Jon Haddock, Roc Herms, Sherrie Levine, Lorna Ruth Galloway, Ed Ruscha, Ai Weiwei, Harun Farocki, Dorothée Elisa Baumann, Dries Depoorter & Max Pinckers, Christopher Graves, John Hilliard, Steven Pippin, Ria Patricia Röder, Akihiko Taniguchi, Claude Cahun, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Andy Kassier, Cindy Sherman, Petra Szemán, Danielle Udogaranya.

Read more

Check out the online supplement

EVENT: GENG DAYOU'S EREWON (ONLINE, ONGOING)

Erewhon is an online exhibited by Geng Dayou. An online art exhibition that’s literally out of this world, Erewhon was built with Unity.

Geng is an artist, curator, writer, and the co-founder of Vrch Studio, an interdisciplinary art, design, and tech collective operating in Shanghai. He was born in Shandong province, south of Beijing along China’s East Coast. Influenced by Eastern and Western philosophies, Erewhon is the climax of the artist’s critical exploration of gaming, theater, and psychoanalysis. As Dayou writes,

As the name suggests, Geng Dayou’s solo exhibition Erewhon presents an upside-down reality. Taking on the history of art and philosophy, the mysticism of the East and the West and mythological metaphors, the artist executes an absurd, nihilistic treatment of digital materials as land art, space and architectural installations in a 250,000 square-metre virtual space of natural and art museum scenes. Geng acts as both curator and game designer, exploring the technical boundaries of the Spatial Web to construct a massive multiplayer online (MMO) theatrical environment for relational aesthetics in which the created simulacrum distorts the viewer’s perception of various clichés. Deploying the digital-readymade, erewhon does not approach reality and the virtual as opposites; rather, it explores and plays with the boundary between them. In this virtual space of the near-infinite means of production, the artist applies creative restrictions according to the material properties in the real world and uses the inversions and limitations of this absurd creative idea to answer the question raised by the context of contemporaneity – that of how to create a new method to show this distorting reality, the erewhon.

Check it out here

LINK: Gen Dayou

EVENT: WORKSHOP: ANIMATION & DIGITAL GAMES. INTERSECTIONS, AESTHETICS, PRACTICES (JUNE 9-11 2022, ONLINE)

The workshop about the intersection of games and animation is a collaboration of the workgroups AG Animation and AG Games within the German Society for Media Studies (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM)) and is organized by

• Julia Eckel  // Ruhr-University Bochum // AG Animation
• Christopher Lukmann // FU Berlin // AG Games
• Andreas Rauscher // University of Freiburg/Institute for Media Culture Studies // AG Games // AG Animation
• Hanns Christian Schmidt // University of Cologne // Macromedia University for Applied Sciences Cologne // AG Games

Registration is open until June 8 20220.

Full program:

LINK: ANIMATION & DIGITAL GAMES (Thanks to Prof. Dr. Hanns Christian Schmidt)

EVENT: GAME UP (JUNE 1-26 2022, BERLIN, GERMANY)

Elaine Hoey, A Blind Eye, 2021

GAME UP

Open: June 1 - 26 (Preview: 18:00 - 21:00, Thursday June 2)

Wednesdays – Fridays 13:00 - 19:0

Saturdays & Sundays June 11:00 - 19:00 

Free entrance

transmediale studio

Gerichtstrasse 35

13347 Berlin

Germany

 

This is a killer exhibition. Highly recommended. (MB)

 

press release

GAME UP seeks to get under the skin of our increasingly digital planet as a springboard to new thinking and new action through the work of  artists, Alan Butler, Elaine Hoey, Conor McGarrigle, Rosa Menkman,  David OReilly and Paper Rad/Cory Arcangel. GAME UP is a reckoning, a rear mirror view and a look at the future of our hyper-connected world.  

What are the rules of engagement in this electronic superhighway and who is policing them?  What of our digital shadow and its instantaneous monetisation? How are race and gender played out in the digital space? By turning the technology on itself, the artists in GAME UP create ways to consider and expose this hidden world. The viewer is brought deep into virtuality by means of narratives and experiences that question and confront the digital contract.

Conor McGarrigle, practicing artist and lecturer in Fine Art in the Technological University, Dublin, reminds us in his Electronic Superhighway (2022) of the richness of historical material, even in the short decades since the internet was founded and early ‘70s telemental art.

Artist and  lecturer in Fine Art at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Elaine Hoey’s walk-in VR installation/performance brings the viewer awkwardly face to face with an Oracle far removed from its Delphic forebearer who might predict a different kind of future.

Alan Butler represented Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021, as a founding member of the collective of artists and architects, Annex. GAME UP presents Alan Butler’s 20 minute video Mondo Cane (2018), a journey through a sumptuous John Berger-like sequence of images and sounds mined from Grand Theft Auto.

Rosa Menkman is an artist, lecturer and pioneer of glitch art. Her work Glitch Studies Manifesto promises hope for what glitch might offer by suggesting disintegration might democratize society.

LA-based David OReilly works with animation, Augmented Reality and gaming. For GAME UP, the artist presents 4004 (2021), a free-standing resin monolith in which an Intel microchip - The Intel 4004 originally released by Intel Corporation in 1971 – has been preserved, resembling a factice out-of-place. The sculpture also exists as an NFT.

Chiptuner Paper Rad and video and game artist Cory Arcangel’s work, Super Mario Movie (2005), is a 15-minute movie programmed onto a Mario Brothers cartridge, in which we see the plumber evolving in a chaotic, corrupt and glitchy world.

 This exhibition is supported by Culture Ireland and curated by Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, with assistance from transmediale Festival of Art and Digital Culture, Berlin.

LINK: GAME UP

EVENT: CONTROL ALT PLAY: LUDIC ALTERNATIVES ON CONTROL (MAY 12 - NOVEMBER 12 2022, ZARAGOZA, SPAIN)

CONTROL ALT PLAY: LUDIC ALTERNATIVES ON CONTROL

May 12 - November 12 2022

Curated by Luca Carruba and Eurídice Cabañes

Produced by Zaragoza City Council and the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, through Etopia Art and Technology Centre,

Vernissage: May 12 2022, 7:30 pm

eTopia

Avda. Ciudad de Soria, 8 50003 – Zaragoza, Spain

 

Control Alt Play proposes a journey through 24 works by national and international artists. From the interactive or playable pieces, visitors can extend their visit to the exhibition up to four hours and enjoy a multisensory experience through sight, hearing, smell and touch.The exhibition that is the result of a collaboration between Zaragoza City Council and the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, will be presented next Thursday at 9.30am by the Director of the Foundation, Daniel Sarasa, and its curators Eurídice Cabañes and Luca Carrubba, members of the ArsGames association. ArsGames is an international non-profit organisation that promotes and manages cultural projects related to video games and technology based on art, pedagogy, scientific research, inclusion and participation.

 

Patrick Lemiueux, Octopad, 2018

Antonin Fourneau, GhostPad, installation, 2009

About the notion of control in videogames by Luca Carruba and Eurídice Cabañes

Playing video games feeds the pleasure of learning to control complex systems in order to achieve certain predefined ends. We want the visitor to understand the different ways in which video games relate to control and how video games place players in an ambiguous tension between discipline and rebellion against the strict logic of the game algorithm. The practice of gaming, played by more than 2.7 billion players worldwide, demonstrates that there are multiple ways to coexist within this tension. With digital games it is possible to imagine new worlds and different ways of relating to each other: we can realise utopias of liberation but also stage fantasies of domination. Or we can break with all of them. The act of playing in virtual environments offers the possibility of being, at the same time, subjects and objects of control.

Credits of the exhibition
Curated by: Luca Carrubba and Eurídice Cabañes - Arsgames
Artists: Patrick Lemieux, Aida Navarro, Alejandro Cura, Mathias Klenner, Javier Laspiur, Robin Baumgarten, Foone Turing, Sofía Balbontín, Joan Lavandeira, Keiichi Matsuda, Mónica Riḱic, Román Torre, Antonin Fourneau, Galamot, Fictiorama, Luca Carrubba, Eurídice Cabañes, Maria Ibarra, Gianluca Saporito, AAA Collective, Guim Camps - Sindicado Virtual de Mods, Rabia Williams, Nidal Nijm Games, Jose Sanchez, David O'Really, Xavi Manzanares, Draw me a píxel, Arsgames.
Production Coordination: Blanca Perez Ferrer - FZC
Executive production and editing: Trazacultura
Editing: Municipal Brigades and Etopia maintenance officers.
Production assistants: Julieta Averbuj and Marga Avendaño
Exhibit Design: Kaori Project, Raquel Clemente Muñoz
Graphic Design: Buenu, Col-lectiva Gràfica
Communication: Laura Montañés- FZC
Technical coordination: Guillermo Malón-FZC
Education: Pilar Martín- FZC
Responsible for content: Elena Giner Smart City Service
Mediation: Noray Collective
Exhibition produced by Etopia Art and Technology Centre through the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation.

LINK: Control Alt Play

GAME ART: ALEX M LEE'S THE FOLD (2018-ONGOING)

The Fold: episode I & II is a non-linear interactive film and virtual reality-based art game involving rooms with doors containing a concept folding into other rooms with doors. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' short story 'The Garden of Forking Paths', this VR-based 'escape the room' project highlights the similarities and differences of technics as it relates to Western (episode I) and Eastern (episode II) philosophy including structuralist & surrealist literature, sentient bodies, metaphysics, mathematics, the virtual object, Buddhism, Zen principles, Qi (氣), and problematizes the affirmation of technics, its outputs and technologies as anthropologically universal within the frame of VR, AI, 3D animation, and video games.

Alex M Lee is an artist who utilizes 3D animation, video game engines, virtual/augmented/immersive reality platforms, machine learning and the potential of simulation technologies in order to investigate contemporary modes of representation, artifice and technical images - culling from concepts within science, science fiction, physics, philosophy, and modernity. He received his BFA (2005) and MFA (2009) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the USA.He is an associate professor at Clarkson University.

LINK: Alex M Lee

GAME ART: LARS PREISSER'S "HOME/NOME" (2019-2021)

 

Home/Nome is a fascinating project by Lars Preisser comprising Hi8 home videos, hand drawn SNES Mario Paint animation, drawings, HD video which deals with the notion of domesticity, gentrification, space, and memory. As the artist writes,

The video installation HOME NOME by Lars Preisser consists of a film that shows the making of an exhibition as well as the exhibition pieces that can be seen in this video. Lars Preisser deals thematically with the apartment in which he grew up in Berlin in the '90s and which became a gallery for contemporary art in the course of gentrification. In minimalist animations painstakingly created on old Super Nintendo consoles from that time, the artist recalls various incidents from that period. Old home videos serve him as a template for the interiors of that time, which he now traces on the antiquated 16-bit game console and the game Mario Paint. [...]

Lars Preisser, Home/Nome, installation shot, 2019-2021.

Lars Preisser (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist working with textiles, film and drawing. Preisser lives and works in Berlin.

LINK: Lars Preisser 

EVENT: MICHAEl LUO - YOU MAY THINK THEY LOVE YOU FOR YOUR GAMES, BUT ALL THEY ACTUALLY WANT ARE SPECTACULARLY WEIRD TOYS FOR THEIR SHINY, BRAND NEW 8K QLED SMART SCREENS (APRIL 12 - 14 2022, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA)

Michael Luo, Dark Days, interactive game

Michael Luo, Addiction Center, interactive game

MICHAEL LUO - YOU MAY THINK THEY LOVE YOU FOR YOUR GAMES, BUT ALL THEY ACTUALLY WANT ARE SPECTACULARLY WEIRD TOYS FOR THEIR SHINY, BRAND NEW 8K QLED SMART SCREENS.

DMA SOLO EXHIBITION

UCLA DMA Graduate Gallery
Broad Art Center 1st Floor, 240 Charles E. Young Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90095

April 12, 2022, 5:00 pm

This is a show featuring three new computer games/interactive media made by Michael Luo about art, game, game art, game design, warped pasts, lost futures, and digital ghosts. 

Duration: April 12 (Tuesday) 5 PM ~ April 14 (Thursday) 5 PM, 2022
Daily hours: Tuesday 5 PM - 9 PM, Wednesday 12 PM - 5 PM, Thursday 9AM - 2 PM, 5 PM - 8 PM
Opening: April 12, 2022, 5 - 9 PM

Michael Luo is a game maker & artist. Born as an anchor baby in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Southwestern China, he spends most of his time making weird computer games about Chinese/American identity conflicts, hallucinations, contemporary history, and anything that doesn't fit with the industry standards. He promises that his games will offer something alternative to the usual gaming experience and that there will be no knights in his works. He's a member of UCLA GAME LAB and a current MFA candidate of Media Arts at UCLA. He received a BA from the same program in 2020.

LINK: Michael Luo; itch.io

EVENT: IAN CHENG: WORLDING (MARCH 2–JULY 3, 2022, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA)

Ian Cheng: Worlding
March 2–July 3, 2022

Leeum Museum of Art
60-16, Itaewon-ro, 55-gil, Yongsan-gu
140-893 Seoul
South Korea

Curated by Gina Lee, Curator, Leeum Museum of Art

press release

Leeum Museum of Art presents Ian Cheng: Worlding, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Through his pioneering works comprising virtual ecosystems created with artificial intelligence and game engine, Ian Cheng (b. 1984) creatively explores and philosophically contemplates the nature of human consciousness. Ian Cheng: Worlding is the first exhibition to bring together all of the virtual worlds that Cheng has created. The artist’s boundless imagination and futuristic vision are on full display in all five of the featured works, the latest of which was produced with support from Leeum.

Ian Cheng, Emissary in the Squat of Gods, 2015, still from simulation

Included in the exhibition is the Emissaries trilogy (2015–2017), the unique series that brought Cheng to the attention of the international art world. In this live simulation, which the artist describes as a “video game that plays itself,” AI-based characters and environment are contained in a virtual ecosystem in which new and unforeseen events continuously arise.

Ian Cheng, BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–2019)

In BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–2019), an artificial creature that resembles a snake explores the inner workings of human consciousness. Just as every person has different faces and traits that can appear in a given situation, BOB consists of multiple artificial intelligences with various motives. Using the customized app, audience members are invited and encouraged to help form BOB’s personality and beliefs.

Cheng’s latest work in the show is Life After BOB: The Chalice Study (2021), a feature-length animation created with support from Leeum, The Shed (New York), the LUMA Foundation, and Light Art Space (LAS, Berlin). Telling the story of Chalice Wong, a ten-year old girl with an AI “BOB” brain implant, this work reveals the artist’s imagining of a future in which humans and artificial intelligence coexist. After viewing the work, the audience can use a link to gain access to the interactive “World Watching” mode to explore Cheng’s animated world in even greater depth.

About Leeum Museum of Art: Leeum Museum of Art was established in 2004 by the Samsung Foundation of Culture to preserve the cultural assets of Korea and to share with the public its expansive collection ranging from traditional Korean art to modern and contemporary art of the world. The museum is dedicated to enhancing appreciation and understanding of art through exhibitions, artist support programs, education, research, and publications. Three of the world's most renowned architects designed the three buildings of the museum. Mario Botta designed the terracotta building (M1) for the museum's traditional Korean art collection, Jean Nouvel designed the rusted stainless steel building (M2) for the museum's modern and contemporary art collection, and Rem Koolhaas designed the futuristic black concrete and glass edifice for the museum's special exhibitions and Child Education & Culture Center.

LINK: Leum Museum of Art

LINK: Ian Cheng