GAMESCENES

CALL FOR ART: FU:BAR (DEADLINE: AUGUST 10 2023)

/’fu:bar/ is an annual program focused on electronic experiments and research in contemporary error-themed digital art theory and practice.

/’fu:bar/ 2023 is focused on the practices and value of DIY – Do it yourself, but for others with&//in art SOFTWARE | METHODS | ARCHIVES | COMMUNITIES | THEORY and other relevant facets of our shared contemporary electronic culture.

This call is open to on-topic or general error-themed glitch work. The work can be submitted into 3 categories:

• MEDIA ART
• MEDIA THEORY
• SOFTWARE CODE

Exhibition applications (extended) deadline: August 10th 2023
Exhibition selection announcement: September 2023
Event program: Oct 7th – 13th 2023 @ MaMa / Zagreb & online

Festival website: https://fubar.space
Inquiries contact: [email protected] 

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Fubar is a project by the Format C Artist Organization. It’s supported by a number of collaborating authors and participating artists, as well as many program and media partners. The event program is financially supported by the Kultura nova Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the City of Zagreb as well as many glitch art supporters over the years.

LINK: /’fu:bar/ 2023

EVENT: NATALIE MAXIMOVA (JUNE 16 - 29 2023, ONLINE)

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
 
machinima/digital video, color, sound, 8’ 50”, Russia, 2021

Created by Natalie Maximova

 

June 16-29 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

A video work that delves into the expansive and boundary-pushing landscapes of the sci-fi video game Cyberpunk 2077, The Edge of the World challenges the conventional perception of endless landscapes, prompting the viewer to question the existence – and perhaps the very meaning – of limits. By exploring the concealed boundaries, documenting the “raw edges” of the game world, and revealing the underlying representational principles, the artist suggests that digital reality is a culturally constructed product. The edges of these virtual realms, with their idiosyncrasies and unexpected functionalities, are not mere endpoints. Instead, they evoke the edges of our familiar world, inviting contemplation and reflection.

Natalie Maximova is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a degree from the ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne and has also studied at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Maximova’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including the 6th and 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Balagan!!! Contemporary Art from Russia and Other Mythical Places in Kühlhaus Berlin and the Tbilisi Night of Photography. Her artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow and the CitizenM Hotel in Geneva. Maximova’s work has been featured in several publications including Il Giornale dell’Arte, Camera Austria, Bird in Flight, Calvert Journal, and Vice among others. She has also contributed to Screen Images In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast, edited by Winfried Gerling, Sebastian Möring and Marco De Mutiis and published by Kulturverlag Kadmos in 2023.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2022 (JULY 14 - 22 2022, TORONTO, CANADA + ONLINE)

VECTOR FESTIVAL 2022: GLITCH
July 14 – 24, 2022
Inter/Access
950 Dupont St., Unit 1.
Toronto ON M6H 1Z2 Canada

InterAccess is pleased to announce the program for Vector Festival 2022: Glitch. This year’s festival centres around the enticing, joyous, infinite possibilities offered by glitch. Drawing inspiration from Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism the festival considers glitch as a necessary, protective force for interrupting the machinic workings of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. Counterintuitively, through its multitudinal ruptures and refusals, glitch becomes a generative site for envisioning new ways of existing beyond current sociopolitical operating systems. 

Through a hybrid online and in-person program of exhibitions, performances, screenings, workshops, talks, and community events, this 10-day festival invites artists and audiences to come together in celebration of failure and all its potentials.

All Vector Festival events will be offered for free or pay-what-you-can. Registration for all festival events will be released on July 4, 2022.

Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice.

The festival was founded in 2013 as the “Vector Game Art & New Media Festival” by an independent group of artists and curators: Skot Deeming, Clint Enns, kris kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger.

Among the highlights are VECTOR's first-ever hybrid game and hardware jam, presented in partnership with Hand Eye Society and TRANZAC, an evening showcase of experimental musical performances by Erin Corbett, Myriam Bleau, and Hex-A-Decimal centred around gaming, identity, and future feminisms curated by Sofie Mikhaylova. Also not to be missed is Keep it Strange, a beginner’s workshop will delve into a buffet of tiny experimental programs that require little to no coding experience, such as Flickgame, Sok Worlds, and Bitsy. 

LINK: VECTOR Festival

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

GAME ART: THE RUSSIANS PWNED THE 17TH BIENNALE OF ARCHITECTURE (MAY 22 - NOVEMBER 21 2021, VENICE, ITALY AND ONLINE)

 

 

In case you are wondering - I know you are - the answer is yes, Open—Russian Federation Pavilion is, by far, the greatest thing that ever graced the Venice Biennial of Architecture (May 22 - November 21 2021), which will end its majestic run in just a few weeks - game over is expected in less than a month from today, so you still have some time. A penetrating examination of the artistic, cultural and social role played by video games and digital environments in our society, the Russian Pavillion features not one, not two, but three outstanding artworks, specifically:

 

Sanatorium Anthropocene Retreat, a post-apocalyptic rendering of the Pavilion building itself, by artist Mikhail Maximov (don't miss the related Let's Play).

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic scenario: awaking to a deserted Russian Pavilion in Giardini, the game stages a fantasy-like performance in which the main character (the player) mutates between human and non-human entities – a robot, a virus, and a humanoid – navigating a derelict digital environment and trying to recollect what has happened.

Its Winter, 2019, a hauntological, first-player simulation of a post-Soviet suburban residential tower block during winter. This amazing sandbox game was developed by Moscow-based poet and musician Ilia Mazo and developer Alexandr Ignatov (aka sad3d).

 

 

Yuha’s Nightmares from Yuliya Kozhemyako (aka Supr). A simulation game about the nightmares that are tormenting the main character, Yuha, the virtual doppelganger of the game designer. This interactive dream disguised as a video game is set in a surreal world  full of strange things and unexpected events. The deeper part of Yua's consciousness is depicted through the "flip side" of the 3D world. The player is frequently stuck in textures, sees through mesh and wanders around at every level in «inappropriate» places. The glitches in the game are accordingly integrated to make for an intense and inusual experience.

 

For the past several months, the Russians also delivered an overwhelming amount of juicy video content, which is freely available on a variety of video streaming platforms including Vimeo, featuring, among other: Federico Campagna with Ilia Mazo, Paolo Pedercini aka Molleindustria, Keiken, and many more as part of their digital takes (DTO) program. There's enough material for three PhD dissertations, seriously.

 

Another highlight is Into the Sandbox, a three-part film program curated by Vladimir Nadein for Open exploring the interconnections between cinema, digital gaming worlds, virtual landscapes, and gamification, featuring modern masterpieces likeSwatted (2018) by Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, How to Disappear (2020) by Total Refusal, Hotel (2014) by Benjamin Nuel, My Own Landscapes (2020) by Antoine Chapon, The Letters About the End of the World (2021) by Dina Karaman, FeatherFall (2020) by Total Refusal, Swamp City (2021) by Alice Bucknell, AIDOL (2019) by Lawrence Lek, Feel My Metaverse (2019) by Keiken + George Jasper Stone.

The 2021 Russian Pavilion is commissioned by Teresa Iarocci Mavica, director of the V-A-C Foundation; curated by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli in collaboration with curator’s team (Erica Petrillo, Giacomo Ardesio, Vladimir Nadein, Liza Dorrer, and Dasha Nasonova) and managed by Anastasia Karneeva of Smart Art.

Final score: A sheer display of Game Art super-power. A new benchmark. Actually, no: a brand new paradigm.

 

LINK: Open_Russian Pavillion at the 17th Biennale of Architecture in Venice

 

All images courtesy of The Russian Pavillion, photos by Marco Cappelletti

PROJECT: HUGO MONTEMBEAULT'S THE BUG HUNTER (2021-)

Hugo Montembeault has just started a new postdoctoral game design research-creation project at the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) laboratory of Concordia University, Canada, funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FRQSC). Montembeault's project is entitled Bug Hunter. Mapping Glitches Trajectories in Game Design Space: From the Poetical to the Political (2020-2022). His goal is to study the aesthetic and rhetorical potential of video game glitches. Montembeault has recently launched a dedicated website to document, share, and discuss his research-creation activities. There, you’ll find his art manifesto, the game design document, a design journal in the form of a blog, and an archive of glitches captured in the wild, which is accompanied by several social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and GitHub. Here's an excerpt from the manifesto:

Bug Hunter qualifies itself as a media-archaeological videoludic experimentation devoted to gaming glitches. The object of study is understood as neglected and repressed ontological parts of the video game art form. The goal is to proceed to the gamification of a materialist and historiographical investigation of the poetic and politic of glitches. In that context, glitchy aesthetic, mechanics, and gameplay become the engines that drive players to playfully engage with this research-creation through their senses, body, and intellect.

LINK: The Bug Hunter 

GAME ART: NILSON CARROLL'S UNTITLED (DRAGON WARRIOR GLITCHES) (2020)

The latest project by Rochester-based artist and curator Nilson Carroll is titled Untitled (Dragon Warrior glitches),

an evolving HTML hypertext collection of captured handmade hex glitches from the NES titles Dragon Warrior II, III, and IV paired with prose poems that explore game mechanics, narratives, and genre legacies, queering each through the glitch process. Themes questioned include heteronormativity, binary thinking, colonization, and the neoliberal values inherent in these and all games’ mechanics and goals. Not only are the games’ digital/physical boundaries broken and expanded, but the implied ones, too. The myth of the hero is shattered, the protagonist finally made vulnerable

The artwork was created as part of Carroll's digital art residence with Welcome to my Homepage, and it is the result of a month long exploration of Dragon Warrior's glitches.

LINK: Nilson Carroll

GAME ART: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S SCROLLING LANDSCAPES IN 34 NES GAMES #3 (2020)

Eddie Lohmeyer, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #3, digital video/machinima, color, 4' 04", 2020

Eddie Lohmeyer's archeological approach to gaming and machinima is exemplified by his third installment on the congoing Scrolling Landscape series. 

A the artist writes: 

Scrolling Landscapes (2020) is a three-channel video installation that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. Each film in the series was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into produce unfolding Rorschach patterns of gameworlds. These landscapes have then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. With each film in the series, the same landscape is multiplied and arranged so that the scrolling patterns become increasingly complex

Eddie Lohmeyer is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to traditions of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, assemblage, etc., his installations, sculpture, and video stage bizarre encounters with media as a means to unveil our normal attitudes and perceptions toward technologies.

LINK: Eddie Lohmeyer

See Episode 1 and Episode 2

GAME ART: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S SCROLLING LANDSCAPE IN 34 NES GAMES #2 (2020)

Eddie Lohmeyer, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #2, digital video/machinima, color, 8' 15", 2020

Eddie Lohmeyer's archeological approach to machinima is exemplified by his second installment on the congoing Scrolling Landscape series. 

A the artist writes: 

Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #2 (2020) is a work of experimental glitch video that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. It is a different version of Scrolling Landscapes #1 in which four seperate video channels have been arranged to create a psychedelic Rorschach pattern. The film was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into a continuously unfolding vista of gameworlds. This landscape has then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. Here, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games envisions childhood nostalgia for video gameplay as an imaginary environment separated from the mundane in which certain desires and sensory pleasures are taken up within spaces of play. Through the viewer’s interfacing with these sublime visions of technology, the film serves to challenge our embodied reception of the video game medium and the knowledge frameworks that underlie our perception of scrolling motion.

Eddie Lohmeyer is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to traditions of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, assemblage, etc., his installations, sculpture, and video stage bizarre encounters with media as a means to unveil our normal attitudes and perceptions toward technologies.

LINK: Eddie Lohmeyer

See Episode 1 and Episode 3

GAME ART: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S SCROLLING LANDSCAPES IN 34 NES GAMES (2019)

Eddie Lohmeyer, Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games, digital video/machinima, color, 1' 58", 2019

Eddie Lohmeyer's Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games (2019) is an experimental glitch video exploring the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes, created by "appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into a continuously unfolding vista of gameworlds". As Lohmeyer writes:

Scrolling Landscapes is a three-channel video installation that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. Each film in the series was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into produce unfolding Rorschach patterns of gameworlds. These landscapes have then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. With each film in the series, the same landscape is multiplied and arranged so that the scrolling patterns become increasingly complex. Within the gallery,

Eddie Lohmeyer is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to traditions of the avant-garde. Additionally, his art considers embodied experience through processes of play and defamiliarization. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, assemblage, etc., his installations, sculpture, and video stage bizarre encounters with media as a means to unveil our normal attitudes and perceptions toward technologies.

LINK: Eddie Lohmeyer 

See Episode 2 and Episode 3