GAMESCENES

OPEN CALL: NOW PLAY THIS 2020 (DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 3 2020)

Now Play This 2020 – Open Call

Now Play This is returning to Somerset House in London from April 3rd – 5th as part of London Games Festival. Ahead of this year’s festival we’re once again opening up a call for playful makers and creators to tell us about their work.

The submission deadline for the open call will be midnight, 3rd February.

As a festival of experimental games and playful media we welcome the submission of games, installations, workshops, photography, films, performances or works in other mediums that directly connect to the subject of play. You can view festival line-ups from previous years here which will help provide an insight into the range of works we have showcased previously. 

The theme for the festival this year is ‘breaking point’. We are looking for works which break or subvert rules or systems. 

This might include games or works which… 

– subvert, disassemble or break real world systems
– hack, remake, remix, modify existing games or works
– that foster creation through destruction or subversion 

We are open to other interpretations of the theme, but do ask that you demonstrate clearly how work submitted connects to it. 

To submit works please complete the open call form here.

If you have accessibility concerns regarding the form or the deadline please email [email protected] 

Additional information: 

• We strongly welcome submissions from marginalised and underrepresented creatives within games and playful media. 
• The festival pays a £75 honorarium for exhibited works and provides all hardware required for display (where applicable). We can also cover any additional expenses required to showcase work. 
• Creators are not required to attend the festival for their work to be exhibited. If a work is dependent on your presence to be shown, e.g. a performance, then we will cover travel and accommodation expenses. 
• We will respond to all submissions by late February. Due to the volume of submissions we receive we sadly cannot provide individual feedback. 

If you have any other queries, comments or feedback then please email [email protected] 

LINK: NOW PLAY THIS

EVENT: GAME CHANGERS: VIDEO GAMES & CONTEMPORARY ART (FEBRUARY 22 - APRIL 19 2020, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS)

Juan Obando, Pro Revolution Soccer, 2019

Game Changers: Video Games & Contemporary Art

February 22 to April 19 2020 Free entry

MassArt Museum (MAAM)
Sandra & David Bakalar Gallery
Free and open to the public

621 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115 United States

 

Curated by Darci Hanna, this group exhibition explores artists working at the confluence of contemporary art and video games. Whether highlighting under-explored narratives, pushing technological boundaries, or imagining alternative worlds through game aesthetics, the artists featured in Game Changers are discovering new possibilities for what game-related art can be and do.

 

Nyamakop, Semblance, 2018

Featured artists

Cao Fei, Paloma Dawkins, Tracy Fullerton, Dan Hernandez, Nyamakop, Juan Obando, Momo Pixel, Skawennati, Brent Watanabe

LINK: Game Changers

NEWS: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2020: IT'S WEIRD, EERIE, AND UNREAL

The theme of the 2020 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is The Weird, the Eerie, and the Unreal. Inspired by Mark Fisher’s last book, The Weird and the Eerie (2017), the theme tries to capture the essence of machinima, like the previous two, Aesthetics of game-based cinema (2018) and Uncanny (2019).

The poster and the full program will be revealed in the upcoming weeks.

Click here to read the full description.

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is organized in collaboration with GAMESCENES. Art in the age of video games and the M.A. in Game Design at IULM University. An official event of the Milano Digital Week, the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL takes place between March 09 - 13 2020 at IULM University, in Milan.

Click the image below to read more:

OPEN CALL: EXPLORER AWARD AT A MAZE. THE INTERNATIONAL GAMES & PLAYFUL MEDIA FESTIVAL (JAN 1 - FEB 2 2020)

 

Heads up! A MAZE. just launched a call for submission which may be of interest to you all:

 

Ok. First of all, you probably already know that A MAZE. 9th International Games and Playful Media Festival takes place in Berlin from April 22-25, 2020, in Berlin, Germany.

 

Now, the organizers are looking for creative, playful works, and crazy experiments located at the intersection of gaming, video art, and performance that could to compete in the Explorer Award category. Machinima perfectly fits this description, for instance. But also installations, interactive experiences, VR or in-game photography... You name it.

 

Full description below:

Explorer Award

"Go, where nobody has gone before! This is the award for all forms of experiences beyond the boundaries of contemporary ways to play or develop games. Here, we are exploring alternative controllers, interactive installations, creative coding experiments, robotics and tech performances, as well as interdisciplinary teams, collaborations with science, makers, engineers, researchers, theater and writers."

 

The submission fee is 30€ and even if artists don't get nominated, they will receive a 25% discount on the festival ticket and will be asked first for spots in the Open Screens program of the exhibition, so that everyone has the chance to exhibit. Every entry will be visible on the website too. It is also possible to register as Selection Committee to review the submitted works - Here a 25% discount is given out as well, for everybody who reviews 5 or more entries.

Read more about this category by clicking the link below.

 

LINK: EXPLORER AWARD at A MAZE.

GAME ART: TOTAL REFUSAL'S FEATHERFALL (2019)

Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf), Featherfall, 2019
4 channel video installation (loop) + audio, loudspeaker

Several scholars have compared the logic of video games to dreams (rather than movies or novels) to explain their peculiar nature: Alfie Bown comes to mind (see The PlayStation Dreamworld). Total Refusal explored this analogy by collecting experiences from gamers who share their oneiric visions with each other in online forums. A recurrent trope is the feeling of falling, which becomes the theme of Total Refusal's latest installation, Featherfall. As they write, 

The video installation Featherfall is based on research in online forums in which video players * exchange their dream experiences. It becomes clear how close dream and game worlds can come to each other in the psyche of the users * and what feedback can develop between the two alternative realities. Featherfall ties in with the archetypal nightmare of "falling down", which often occurs during puberty. Falling without ever landing "exists in video games in the form of a recurring programming error - a glitch - through which the avatar falls beneath the surface into the empty, non-programmed space. The glitch as a digital nightmare.

Total Refusal is Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, and Michael Stumpf.  In their practice, they critically analyze and appropriate digital game spaces and put them to new use. Moving within games but ignoring the intended gameplay, Total Refusal allocates these resources to new activities and narratives, in order to create “public” spaces imbued with critical, even subversive potential.

Leonhard Müllner works as an artist in the public and digital space and is currently writing his doctoral thesis at the Linz Art University at the Institute for Art and Cultural Studies.

Robin Klengel works in Graz and Vienna as an interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, cultural anthropologist and vice president of the Forum Stadtpark.

Michael Stumpf studied philosophy at the University of Vienna. He works as an artist, designer and cultural theorist.

LINK: TOTAL REFUSAL (all images and video courtesy of Total Refusal)

EVENT: FEEDBACK LOOPS (DECEMBER 7, 2019 - MARCH 22 2020, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA)

 

Feedback Loops

Curated by Miriam Kelly

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 

111 Sturt Street
Southbank VIC 3006
Melbourne, Australia

ACCA's new exhibition includes work from Lu Wang, a Chinese-born artist whose work incorporates games, VR, animation and live performance. For Feedback Loops, Lu Yang has developed a video game titled The Great Adventure of Material World. Users control a character named Material World Knight through a virtual universe, a digital space influenced by the aesthetics of anime, Buddhist art, consumer culture, arcade games, and science fiction. Can't wait

ACCA’s exhibition Feedback Loops presents six immersive installations that explore the material and digital worlds of our past, present and speculative futures. Populated by characters and conceptualisations that are at once real and fictive, and inherently performative, the works of participating artists are informed by aesthetics of the internet and the ethics of new materialist philosophies, presenting a kaleidoscopic positioning of familiar and unfamiliar references.

Mythology, spirituality and philosophy are mashed together with personal and collective narratives, popular culture and art history, in visual, aural and spatial configurations that simultaneously confront and confound. Belonging to a generation born in the 1980s, the participating artists have an everyday approach to new media and computational thinking, from gaming software and CGI to the ripping and rehashing of internet content, that sits seamlessly alongside live performance and material practices of sculpture, textiles, drawing and painting.

In the simplest sense, a feedback loop is a process of systems analysis, whereby outputs and their past impacts are taken into consideration in the present to affect the nature of future outputs. Traditionally the feedback loop has a binary structure: where negative feedback maintains an equilibrium; while the positive is characterised by amplification, and the possibility of entropy and collapse. The term ‘feedback loop’ is used in diverse frameworks, from sciences of biology, climate and computing, to the fields of sound engineering, product development and human psychology. As a phrase, it also evokes ideas of the echo, reiteration and re-articulation, as well as an understanding of time, knowledge and cultural production as cyclical and generative.

Curated by Miriam Kelly, Feedback Loops comprises new commissions and presentations of recent works by Madison Bycroft, Tianzhuo Chen, Lu Yang, Sahej Rahal, Justin Shoulder and Zadie Xa. The works of participating artists register these dynamics in circuitous disruptions of linear approaches to narrative, time, space, value and power, along with their considerations of empathy – towards both humans and non-human forms. The works and worlds presented in Feedback Loops are spectacular and theatrical; in equal measure unsettling, absurd, fantastical and joyous, offering high-energy hits, as well as sites of reprieve.

LINK: Feedback Loops (all images courtesy of ACCA)

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2020 (DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 1 2020)

VECTOR FESTIVAL 2020: AFTER GAMIFICATION

TORONTO, ON | JULY 16-19, 2020

OPEN CALL FOR ARTWORKS AND CURATORIAL PROPOSALS 

Vector Festival is an annual media arts event dedicated to showcasing experimental art works that engage critically with digital technologies.
The festival is proudly participatory and community-oriented. Hosted by InterAccess and co-curated by Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger, Vector Festival takes place at arts venues and in public spaces across the City of Toronto.

Since its inception, Vector Festival has been innovative in its inclusion of game-based digital art alongside other new media disciplines. Continuing this focus for the 2020 edition, the festival’s curators pose a deceptively simple question: what comes after gamification?

Now that game culture and game technologies have become so pervasive in popular culture, how do experimental media artists respond critically to the rampant gamifying of everyday life? From online social interaction to digital finance, from education to military conflict, from politics and environmental issues to the ways in which humans (and machines) express themselves creatively, what comes after gamification?

The Festival will take place between July 16-19, 2020, with the flagship exhibition extended until August 22, 2020.

Please note that Vector Festival does not charge submission fees to artists applying to participate.

All artists and curators selected for participation will receive fees in accordance with the up-to-date CARFAC Fee schedule, as well as support to apply for external funding.

We invite art submissions of digital – and post-digital – works for the following festival categories:

Flagship Exhibition
Digital and post-digital art works including interactive installations, experimental game mods, sculptural work, screen-based work, sound art, etc.

Online Projects
Web-based projects and digital artworks that can be presented online, including experimental interactive and time-based digital projects.

Festival Screening
Experimental film/video/machinima works.

Performance
Performance-based proposals including chiptune, sound art, live coding, A/V performances, and telematic performances for virtual and public spaces.

Site-Specific Outdoor Screening
To be presented on two large-scale (4.88 x 8.64 m) outdoor LED screens for a public audience of all ages.

GIFs
Animated GIFs intended for presentation on public screens across Toronto.

Curatorial Submissions
This year, we also invite curators/curatorial collectives to submit proposals for machinima screenings (on a theme of your choosing). If you are considering a curatorial submission, we encourage you to contact the Vector Festival team for additional practical details.

Deadline: February 01, 2020

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Please submit the following details using our online application form:

• Project description (approximately 300 words)
• Documentation (maximum of five images, and/or link to audio/video documentation)
• Description of technical requirements (please outline materials provided by the artist and materials required from the exhibiting venue)
• Artist biography (approximately 100 words)
• Please indicate if your work has a thematic, conceptual, or historical connection to Toronto, or if you have a biographic connection to the Greater Toronto Area
• Current CV

If you have questions about submitting your application please contact [email protected].

About Vector Festival
Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing experimental media art practice. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector Festival acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice. Vector 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, Christine Kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger. In 2015 Vector Festival announced that longtime presenting partner, InterAccess, would be taking over responsibility for the festival as part of its regular programming.

About InterAccess
Founded in 1983, InterAccess is a non-profit gallery, educational facility, production studio, and festival dedicated to emerging practices in art and technology. Our programs support art forms that integrate technology, fostering and supporting the full cycle of art and artistic practice through education, production, and exhibition. InterAccess is regarded as a preeminent Canadian arts and technology centre.

For more information contact:
Festival Curators, Katie Micak and Martin Zeilinger
[email protected]

Follow us for updates!
facebook.com/VectorFestivalTO
twitter.com/VectorFestival
instagram.com/interaccessto

LINK: VECTOR FESTIVAL

GAME ART: HUGO ARCIER'S INLAND (2019)

Hugo Arcier, Inland, Audiovisual performance: live music, video in audio reactive 3D computer images, 2019 - Music: Annabelle Playe & Marc Siffert, music - video in 3D computer graphics with audio reactivity: Hugo Arcier

Passages, crossings and metamorphoses weave the odyssey of « inLAND | come back in broad day ».These universes are explored live as a 3D video game in which we wander. This exploration is carried out on site or remotely with Discord gamer tool. In these multiple spaces, perception is disturbed between reality, matter and appearance. Abstraction gives way to landscapes, echoes of the inner worlds that a narrator seems to unfold. The visions crumble, the image turns out to be an illusion. We then experience what can't be said or represented. (Hugo Arcier)

Hugo Arcier is a French digital artist - or, rather, “an artist in a digital world” - who uses 3D computer graphics in various ways: videos, prints and sculptures. Initially interested in producing special effects for feature films, he worked on several projects with such directors as Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. This practice has allowed him to gain a deep understanding of digital tools, in particular 3D graphic images. His artistic works have been exhibited at international festivals (Elektra, Videoformes, Némo), galleries (Magda Danysz, Plateforme Paris, etc.), art venues (New Museum, New Media Art Center of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Le Cube, Okayama Art Center, Palais de Tokyo, etc.), and contemporary art fairs (Slick, Variation)

LINK: Hugo Arcier

EVENT: INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS: EXPLORATIONS IN ART AND PLAY (OCTOBER 2 2019 - JANUARY 31, 2020, DAVIS, CALIFORNIA)

Steven Paul Judd, Invaders, 2018

Indigenous Futurisms: Explorations in Art and Play

Gorman Museum at University of California, Davis

Oct 2, 2019 - Jan 31, 2020

One Shields Ave., Davis, California

Open Mon-Fri, noon-5 p.m., and Sun 2-5 p.m.

Admission is free.

Website: gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu.

Indigenous Futurisms brings together graphics, comics, SF, and video games  to create a provocative space of engagement and thought about Indigenous futures and possibilities. The gaming section was curated by Ashlee Bird, a graduate student of Native American Studies at UC Davis, who writes:

The content and graphics involved with Native American and Indigenous representation in these genres are fraught with embedded stereotypes and in some cases, these depictions are viewed as deeply offensive and racist. Native American artists and game designers actively engage with these concerns by creating new spaces, environments and platforms for the expression of visual sovereignty. Games and artwork are created, mediated and informed from rich cultural foundations alongside technical media expertise.

Video game inspired art on display includes an enormous vinyl inkjet print created by interdisciplinary artist Sonny Assu which reimagines the original Nintendo Entertainment System controller and replaces the original directional pad with a copper, an indigenous shield shape that for Northwest coast tribes indicates status and wealth. The piece is exhibited as large inkjet on paper. 

Sonny Assu, Nuła̱mał Entertainment System, 2017, exhibition Copy: Inkjet on paper, 36 x 26 inches

Assu has previously made modified cabinet arcades such as Wreck-Consiliation! (2017) and Broken Treaties (2017) which both display a video of  Clayfighter (made by Brendan Tang) as a 81 second loop. The coin-op machines were exhibited in the context of the Ready Player Two exhibition at the Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, British Columbia between 25.05.17 - 03.09.17.

Sonny Assu, Wreck-Consiliation!, 2017 a, Maple, copper leaf, paint and video, 24w x 33.5d x 66.25 inches

Sonny Assu, Broken Treaties, 2017, Maple, copper leaf, paint, 73.75x25x28.25 inches

Nathan Powless-Lynes, Hold My Mand!, interactive game, 2019

Indigenous Futurisms also features interactive games playable with Xbox One controllers within the gallery space, including Nathan Powless Lynes's Hold My Hand!, a dual character puzzle platformer where the characters hold hands to help each other overcome obstacles.

Maize Longboat, Ray Caplin, Mehrdad Dehdashti, Beatrix Moersch, Terra Nova, interactive game, 2019

Created by Maize Longboat, Ray Caplin, Mehrdad Dehdashti, Beatrix Moersch, Terra/Nova is a split-screen side-scroller starring an elder land-keep and a youthful inventor. The characters must perform actions in their respective worlds in order to accomplish the game's ultimate goal. Lastly, visitors can experience Full of Birds, an interactive art gallery which immerses the viewer in a colorful, vibrant "natural" world.

LINK: Indigenous Futurism (All images and videos courtesy of the Artists)

GAME ART: JACKY CONNOLLY'S ARIADNE (2019)

Jacky Connolly, Ariadne, 2019, HD video, color, sound, 50m13s.

Last Summer, one of the most prominent video artists working with the video game aesthetics, Jacky Connolly, released her new monumental work, Ariadne. Like her previous projects, Ariadne was shot with/in The Sims. It was exhibited at Down and Ross Gallery in New York. However, this time around Connolly emphasizes the porous boundaries between the tangible and the virtual by mixing video game footage with live footage. As curator Emily Watlington writes:

The fifty-minute piece is set amidst a lightning storm that splices together two realities: a virtual, seaside Italian villa created in Sims, and New York City, shot with a camera. The rupture forms a third suburban, autumnal realm. Ariadne1, of New York and played by the artist, decides she wants to disappear, allowing lightning to transport her into a virtual realm. The simulated Ariadne2 is seen with a red lightning scar upon her chest—a trace of the act, which she carries with her back into the live-action scene that concludes the film. [...] There’s a haunting soundtrack, scored by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix; a Lynchian, empty, eerily-lit diner among other suburban interiors; the ‘camera’s’ fascination with solo, silent women à la Todd Haynes’ Safe; and implied family disfunction frequently found in melodrama (weepies, ‘women’s pictures). Connolly leaves clues toward her referents: Doug Richmond’s 1985 book How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, for instance, is stationed throughout. Due largely to the nature of the game, there are no close-ups, their absence serving to emphasize the characters’ solitude, their displacement in empty sets.

Jacky Connolly was born in 1990 in Lower Hudson Valley, New York. She gained her BFA in Photography, Art History, and Critical Studies from Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2011; she gained an MFA in Digital Arts and MSc in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute in 2016. Selected solo & two-person exhibitions and screenings: Downs & Ross, New York; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn; Peach, Rotterdam; Daata Editions at NADA New York; Kimberly-Klark, Queens; Bus Projects, Melbourne; and Et al., San Francisco. Selected group exhibitions and screening programs: Museum Brandhorst, Munich; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; D21, Leipzig; IULM, Milan; PAF Animation Festival, Olomouc, CZ; Ellis King, Dublin; Kimberly-Klark at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Et al., San Francisco; and Hester, New York. She lives and works in Bearsville, NY.

LINK: Jacky Connolly (All images and videos courtesy of the Artist)