GAMESCENES

EVENT: 30 LIVES (JANUARY 31 - MARCH 31 2024, MANILA, PHILIPPINES)

30 LIVES

31 January to 31 March 2024

Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design, GF De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde Design + Arts Campus, Dominga Street, Malate, Manila, 1004

Free to the public, the museum is open Tuesdays–Saturdays, 10 AM–6 PM; and Sundays, 10 AM–2 PM, except holidays.

An art world "extra life" arrives as the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila opens 30 Lives—the famed trove of bonus chances that unfold in video games upon keying the fabled "Konami code." Metaphorically, the exhibition explores society's myriad approaches toward play and gaming, those immersive escapes governed either loosely (play) or firmly (games) by boundaries and social contracts. Such temporary spheres divert attention from daily tedium, constructing pockets—be they physical spaces like courts or conceptual ones like board and video games—where critique and subversion germinate.

LuYang, Wrathful King Kong Core, 14' 48", 2013.

From 31 January through 31 March 2024, 30 Lives beckons audiences into this fertile terrain to traverse temporalities: from antique pastimes to video art harnessing gaming's storytelling power for philosophical ends. Long derided for frivolity, these mediums emerge as vital crucibles. Featured works by Harun Farocki (Parallel I-IV, 2012-2014), Lu Yang (Wrathful King Kong Core, 2013), Heecheon Kim (Cutter III, 2023), Ikoy Ricio (Drop Dead or Die) and Miguel Inumerable are complemented by original games developed by De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde's Interactive Entertainment and Multimedia Computing program.

Ultimately, the exhibition dares viewers to locate themselves across spectra from delight to challenge, skill to memory, strategy to knowledge, simulation to dystopia, roleplay to narrative indulgence, and all liminal spaces between.

LINK: 30 LIVES

EVENT: GAME ENGINE CULTURES (DECEMBER 1 2023, LIVERPOOL, UK)

Joseph DeLappe, Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides, Self-Playing Game Mod/Data Visualization and 1-year Live Stream, 2018-19

 

Game Engine Cultures
December 1st 13:30-17:00
School of the Arts Library
19 Abercromby Square
University of Liverpool
Liverpool L7 7BD, England

Free and open to the public

press release

Co-curated by Paolo Ruffino (Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool) and Valentino Catricalà (School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University), the workshop is organised as part of the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life (CCEL) in Liverpool.

Game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine are now ubiquitous tools in the digital arts and are widely used beyond videogame development in fields such as film post-production, architecture, and fashion. The workshop will explore how game engines shape our contemporary visual culture, and how media studies and media arts can analyse and critique their pervasiveness.

The workshop will include talks by:

Joseph DeLappe - games and media artist and Professor of Games and Tactical Media at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland;

Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson - founders of architecture studio You+Pea and curators of the Videogame Urbanism project at the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL;

Aleena Chia - Lecturer in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and researcher investigating automation and platformisation in videogame development;

Vid Simoniti - Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool, and researcher in the field of contemporary art, social change, and new technologies.

LINK: Paolo Ruffino, Valentino Catricalà

EVENT: LARS PREISSER (NOVEMBER 10 - NOVEMBER 23 2023, ONLINE)

HOME/NOME

Video installation, SNES game consoles, animation, video, Hi8, miniDV, Bang & Olufsen 90s TV sets, hereby presented as digital video, color, sound, 4’ 16, 2021-2022, Germany

Created by Lars Preisser

 

NOME/HOME is an immersive video installation exploring the relationship between memory, interior design, and video games. Specifically, NOME/HOME recreates Preisser’s former Berlin apartment through the pixelated rendering of Mario Paint, breathing renewed life into the spaces he once inhabited. Participants traverse disorienting rooms as Preisser’s own voice echoes hauntingly around them. This audible tableau juxtaposed with the visual fragmentation of the gaming software creates a palpable sense of nostalgia and loss. Visitors are transported into uncanny reimaginings of real spaces that over time have been distorted by the urban forces of gentrification. By reviving the past through both analog and digital artifacts, Preisser contemplates the ephemerality of memory and the erasure of history in the built environment. NOME/HOME provides an entry point to meditate on the entwined nature of place, recollection, and selfhood within the ever-changing terrain of the city.

Lars Preisser is a multidisciplinary German artist whose work spans various media including weaving, drawing, and moving images. Born in 1984 in Lindau, Preisser holds degrees in textile art and media art from Otago Polytechnic and HGB Leipzig. His research-intensive projects result in intricate formations that address issues like gentrification, technology, climate change, and post-colonialism through a personal lens. Preisser’s family heritage and background in industrial machinery inform his practice. The artist has exhibited internationally at venues like Bauhaus Dessau, nGbK Berlin, and the contemporary textile art biennial Contextile among others. Preisser spent formative years in New Zealand before returning to Berlin where he currently lives and maintains an active studio practice.

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EVENT: NO QUARTER 2023 (NOVEMBER 17 2023, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK)

NO QUARTER 2023

November 17 2023, 7 PM

New York University

370 Jay Street

2nd floor bvallroom

Brooklyn, New York

press release

On Friday 17th of November No Quarter returns once more to Brooklyn, New York. With just a month to go before the big day we are thrilled to announce the details of the 2023 creative cohort which includes… Arcade Artist – Ben Blatt, Game Designer – Blake Andrews, Artist and Game Designer Everest Pipkin and Architecture Studio – You+Pea.

Every year No Quarter commissions new work from leading artists working in games and related fields. These works premiere for one night only as part of the iconic No Quarter exhibition.

The No Quarter 2023 exhibition will take place at 370 Jay Street in Brooklyn on Friday November 17th and will be open from 7pm to 11pm. It is free to attend, but RSVPs are essential.

No Quarter 2023 is curated by Marie Foulston with artwork and visual identity by Will Anderson.

LINK: No Quarter 2023

EVENT: AUX FUTURS ANCESTRAUX (OCTOBER 14 2023 - JANUARY 21 2024, BOUROGNE, FRANCE)

Aux futurs ancestraux

Curated by Isabelle Arvers

Rye de la Varonne

90140 Bourogne, France

 

Curated by Isabelle Arvers, Aux futurs ancestraux adopts a decolonial perspective, showcasing art and games from outside the Western canon to expand representations, narratives and cosmologies. Specifically, the exhibition seeks to decolonize imaginations and co-create narratives drawing from oral traditions, indigenous knowledge and video game worlds.

press release

“When we say that the future is ancestral, it has more to do with DNA than genealogy. It’s worldview: it’s the ability to go back to an event that created the world and is alive in you. We want a constant creation of everything and ourselves. This is what happens in DNA, the code handed down by our ancestors. This can reintroduce us to the constellation of life within the planet, where we stop being specialists and realize that we have a common origin”. Ailton Krenak, philosopher and leader of the Brazilian indigenous Krenak movement and author of the book Futuro Ancestral en 2021

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.

Featured artists and artworks

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

Liquid Forest, Isabelle Arvers (FR) Machinima Gaël Manangou, Sound creation (RDC)

Spectographie, VR film & installation : Carole Chausset Myriam Mihindou &Annie-Flore Batchiellilys, Daniely Francisque, Florence boyer / cie Artmayage

eFa, interactive installation by Technorisha Collective: Livia Diniz, Benjamin Abras, Bruno Creuzet, Michel Petris, Henri Tauliaut, M’vwâma Diop, Annabel Gueredrat, Isabelle Arvers.

La Puissance des arbres, vidéo portaits directed by Isabelle Arvers, Livia Diniz, Bruno Qual

LINK: Aux Futurs Ancestraux

ARTICLE: BITSY, THE SMALL GAME REVOLUTION (ARTNEWS)

An exhibition and online jam celebrate the game engine tool’s ambitiously modest aesthetics

Imagine a video game. Think of what that game might look like, how it might play, how long it might take to fully play through, how dense its content might be, how rich its world might be rendered. And now, strip away all of that. Remove any hi-fi graphics, pare down the game play to the most basic 2D movement and single-button interaction, scale it way back. Does it still feel like a video game? (Nicholas O'Brien)

LINK: ARTNEWS

GAME ART: RINDON JOHNSON AND JACQUELINE KIYOMI GORK'S THE BELLS PURSUING ONE ANOTHER (2022)

Rindon Johnson with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, The Bells Pursuing One Another, 2022. Video game, controllers, monitors, gaming chairs. Dimensions variable

Rindon Johnson, with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, The Bells Pursuing One Another, 2022. Video game, controllers, monitors, gaming chairs. Dimensions variable

from press release

In their new (and first) video game, Johnson and artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork draw on fragmentary data to speculate a firsthand visual and acoustic account of the beaked whale’s hunting habits. Not unlike modern first-person shooters, gameplay is situated from the whale’s point of view; players use the joysticks of an Xbox controller to harmonize their sonic movements in attempts to catch their squid prey gliding between egresses of the deep submarine Great Bahama Canyon. Like other cetaceans, Cuviers use highly developed aural sensory organs to navigate their underwater environment. The whale’s sight, though poorly understood by scientists, is thought to be nearly vestigial. They see as an afterthought. The resulting visual design is stark and monochromatic, forcing players to rely overwhelmingly on the game’s immersive soundscape.

Rindon Johnson (b. 1990, unceded Ohlone and Coast Miwok territories, San Francisco, California) currently lives and works in Berlin where he is an Associate Fellow at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Johnson is the author of four books of essays and poetry, The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss (SculptureCenter/Chisenhale Gallery, 2021), Shade the King (Capricious Press, 2017), No One Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient Press, 2016), and the virtual reality book Meet in the Corner (Publishing- House.Me, 2017). Recent solo exhibitions include The Law of Large Numbers at SculptureCenter, New York and Chisenhale Gallery, London; and The Valley of the Moon at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. His work has been featured at the New Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the 2022 Whitney Biennial, New York.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has been working with the intersection of sound, sculpture and performance since 2002. She studied sound art, photography and new genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and researched the history of communication technologies, acoustics and computer music at Stanford University where she received an MFA. Kiyomi Gork has exhibited at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong, GES-VAC in Moscow, SFMOMA, The Lab and Queens Nails Projects in San Francisco, 356 Mission Rd, Machine Project and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has participated residencies at Skowhegan, EMPAC, Mills Collage and Schloss Solitude in addition to receiving multiple grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Center for Cultural Innovation and Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Read more

LINK: Rindon Johnson

LINK: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

EVENT: THE SEASHORE OF ENDLESS WORLDS (NOVEMBER 1 - 19 2023, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND)

 

The Seashore of Endless Worlds – Art & jeux de société

 

Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland

exhibition: from 1st to 19 novembre 2023

online symposium: 20, 21 November

 

featured artists: 0x Salon, Ahmed Isam Aldin, David Blandy, Joshua Citarella, Crude Futures, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Simon Denny, Andreas Dobler, Giulia Essyad, Axelle Grégoire, Half Earth Socialism, Olivia Hernaïz, Rok Kranjc, Paul Loubet, Finn Massie, Constanza Mendoza, Cullen Miller, Moving Castle, Nicolas Nova, OMSK Social Club, Sara Rutz, Kirill Savchenkov, Sammy Stein, Trickster-p, Ilaria Vinci, Elsa Werth, Paulo Wirz

 

press release

 

The Seashore of Endless Worlds considers games as a decisive global and current phenomenon, and calls for societal issues to be put into play by exploring the current conditions, arising from game theory and gamification, of widespread and planetary crises. Beyond mere entertainment and distraction, we see games as a process capable of probing and understanding the world. Not only do games make up a major part of the cultural industry and generate popular aesthetics, they are also now recognised for their powers of simulation, training and generating physical, social, economic and political realities. Between movement and constraint, participation and subjection, identity and avatar, the deployment and mutual redefinition of these terms is open to research by artists, collectives and researchers. The participants are working on different ways of using games to make present-day situations and issues tangible: diversity, the economy, the environment, geopolitics, digitisation, etc. Their games are a dynamic way of exposing and rethinking the rules and shared goals that shape society.

 

As the title suggests, in reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s poem about children playing on the shore, play conjures up potential spaces where the imaginary and the real inform each other as creativity, solidarity and care. Games accompany the fundamentally trans-human process of hominisation, reinscribing the existing in extension with its outsides through which it invents itself - materials, technical objects, more than human… Rather than constituting a category of defined objects or fixed, universal and timeless features specific to all cultures, games enable them to evolve through realities that they both describe and shape.

 

While games support the construction of worlds as sets of relationships and systems of rules - more or less arbitrary, contingent and changing - they are also set in motion by processes that open them up (room for maneuver) or even go beyond them (off-games, hidden rules) and put in tension as world-engine and meta-games. What games are being played? Who produces the rules? Are the players being played? At the intersection of materialism and speculation, instruments of power but also engines of emancipation, they allow us to expose and question logics and rationalities that have become increasingly polemical and deterministic, and proceed from eminently aesthetic questions and resolutions.

 

FTW, Christian Bili & Samuel Wagen-Magnon, 2 October 2023

 

Click the image below to access a set of resources related to the exhibition

 

 

LINK: The Seashore of Endless Worlds (special thanks to Christian Bili)

UPDATE: SARA SADIK'S LA POTION (EH) (2023)

Sara Sadik, LA POTION (EH), video still, 2023

Sara Sadik, LA POTION (EH), video still, 2023

BMW has released a short promotional interview with Sara Sadik who is collaborating with the German auto manufacturer (see previous posts for context):

According to the BMW press release, Sara Sadik's latest work, titled LA POTION (EH), suggests "an emotional shift". Collaborating closely with the BMW gaming (Air Console) and My Modes teams, she envisioned the BMW i5 as a character, specifically the Avatar Neregy, exploring various imaginary realms in both the video game and video format. Such work aligns with Sadik's  ongoing exploration of computer-generated scenarios and her investigation into the evolving emotional states of young male figures, the press releases continues. LA POTION (EH) takes the form of an interactive video game, designed exclusively for the new, fully electric BMW i5 and is simultaneously presented as a video installation, available both on the public-facing terrace of KOKO and inside the BMW Lounge during Frieze London, which runs October 11-15, 2023. The narrative follows the Avatar Neregy, a character experiencing alienation, as he embarks on a journey through different worlds, tasks, and challenges in pursuit of psychological healing and transformation. I guess the idea takeaway is that you are not required to buy a BMW to watch Sadik's artwork. 

Ironically, in her masterwork Khtobtogone (2021), the main dream car is an Audi.

Ah, the perils of branding.

LINK: Sara Sadik - All images of LA POTION (EH) courtesy of the Artist and BMW)

EVENT: YEAR OF THE ROBOT: THREE MACHINIMA SHORTS (OCTOBER 3 2023, MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA)

Still from How to Disappear (2021), Total Refusal. Courtesy of the artist

Year of the Robot: Three machinima shorts

A machinima retrospective curated by Jini Maxwell

Part of The Melbourne International Games Week Film Series

October 3 2023

ACMI Museum

Federation Square (Level 2 cinemas), Melbourne, Australia

 

Never previously shown in Australian cinemas, these three short films use screen-captured footage from Grand Theft Auto V and Battlefield to consider how videogames reflect (or reinforce) the sociopolitical reality.

Full program

Why Don't the Cops Fight Each Other? (2021)

Grayson Earle, 9 mins 4 sec, English, DCP

Still from 'Why don't the cops fight each other?' (2021), Grayson Earle. Courtesy of the artist

Grayson Earl’s Why Don't the Cops Fight Each Other? (2021) is desktop performance that considers how the ‘blue wall of silence’ manifests in Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto V (2013). Over the course of ten minutes, the artist records his repeated attempts to modify the game, revealing how social structures are embedded in the way police officers behave in the game's code itself.

It's Just Math (2021)

Mathias Wolff, 29 mins 52 sec, English, DCP

Screen capture from Mathias Wolfe's It's Just Math (2021). Courtesy of the artist.

Mathias Wolff’s It's Just Math (2021) uses Grand Theft Auto V's fictional city of Los Santos as the setting for an experimental documentary on predictive policing, and its impact on everyday life of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour in Los Angeles. By appropriating and repurposing Grand Theft Auto V, the film shows how so-called Dirty Data — inaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent data, especially in a computer system or database — are created through discriminatory policing practices and how the usage of such data within predictive policing software directly affects BIPoC.

How to Disappear (2021)

Source: Refreshing Films, Courtesy: Total Refusal, 21 mins 6 sec, English DCP

Still from How To Disappear (2021), Total Refusal

In How to Disappear (2021), pseudo-marxist media guerilla Total Refusal considers the political function of combat desertion in both the real and digital world (2021). An anti-war film, this short considers the possibilities for peace in the unlikely setting of the multiplayer war game Battlefield (2002).

LINK: Year of the Robot: Three Machinima Shorts (Thanks to Jini Maxwell)

LINK: Melbourne International Games Week Film Series