A hand in the game is a video essay documenting the artist’s experience with SimPark (1996), a simulation published by Californian game company Maxis in which players cultivate and manage a successful park. Developed by Roxana Wolosenko and Claire Curtin, SimPark was explicitly targeted toward children: its objective was to educate the young about ecology and biodiversity. SimPark was accompanied by a 77-page manual which included tips on how to incorporate the game in the curriculum. Twenty years later, the artist intentionally tried to “mismanage the park enough to terminate all living things” in order to bring forth the simulation’s underlying ideology, which is grounded in capitalistic values and neoliberal imperatives. Specifically, Högström played four iterations — titled Termination 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 respectively — by altering the main variables, from the ratio between tropical, desert, and cold regions to the degree of animal agency, not to mention the effects of climate change upon the flora and fauna. The more she played, the more she realized that SimPark is deeply flawed: a supposedly pedagogical aid becomes a tool of disinformation.
Hillevi Cecilia Högström was born in 1994 in Jönköping, Sweden. She is currently completing her M.A. in Fine Arts at Malmö Art Academy. Previously, she received a B.A. in Fine Arts at the Iceland University of the Arts. Her work is concerned with the Anthropocene, which she defines as “the point in time where humans became an actual geological force capable of reforming the surface of the planet”, and its effects on the world. Her recent exhibitions include A Hand in the Game (solo, 2017), Bachelor Exhibition, Kubburin, Reykjavík, Iceland, and Full Vision (2020), Jönköpings länssmuseum, Jönköping, Sweden, Af stað!, Norræna Húsið, Reykjavík, Sweden (2019), and the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018), Main Project, Moscow, Russia. Her video works were featured at several international festivals, including EXiS (2021), Seoul, South Korea, and Impakt Algorithmic Superstructures (2018), Utrecht, Netherlands. Högström works and lives in Malmö, Sweden.
digital video (1280 x 720), sound, color, 10’, 2021 [2016], France
Created by Chloé Desmoineaux
vral.org
Originally created in 2016, Lipstrike is an online performance in Counter-Strike that uses an unusual device as a weapon: a lipstick. Each time the artist applies cosmetics on her lips, her gun unleashes a torrent of bullets. She broadcast her performances on Twitch, receiving thousands of snarky comments by angry gamers, which were subsequently collected and published in a limited edition booklet. Five years later, the artist has updated the original iteration for VRAL. One question remains: has anything changed since #Gamergate?
Interested in tactical media, hacking culture, and cyberfeminism, Chloé Desmoineaux creates media experiments through performances, installations, and hijacked video games. She is particularly concerned about the place given to women as well as dissident and “minority” people in the video game industry and she tries to create spaces of visibility and reflection to discuss these issues. She is a member of the Freesson Collective which focuses on supporting creative practices and electronic music. It also organizes events and workshops on digital art and culture. Co-organizer of the Art Games Demos (2017-2019) initiative with Isabelle Arvers, Desmoineaux has curated several exhibitions about the culture, aesthetics and ideology of gaming in the past decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She led several workshops on alternative controllers, glitch aesthetics, interactive animations, and video games. Desmoineaux lives and works in Marseille.
Mock Jungle, a project included in the institutional program of ART CITY Bologna 2021 promoted by the Municipality of Bologna in the framework of Bologna Estate, continues its broadcasts from the Chapel of Santa Maria dei Carcerati in Palazzo Re Enzo, Piazza del Nettuno 1.
Playlist video, 24/7, curated by ISIT (Alessandra Cecchini, Federica Di Pietrantonio, Andrea Frosolini)
Luca Miranda, Sex worker, 2021, 54’43’’ The work is both an autonomous part and an integral part of a larger project focused on investigating and documenting the routines of NPCs that began in 2020. Here, the term routine is not only understood in the sense of "technical programming", but also as a dimension that lies parallel to and beyond our approaching, conceptualising and relating to virtual prostheses and simulacral identities. I have used - and I still use - three triple-A open world video games as a field of testing and investigation: Grand Theft Auto V (2013), Fallout 4 (2015), Rage 2 (2019). In this type of games, NPCs are interesting for a twofold reason: they represent a virtually real sociality and externalize different types of interstitial fractures with their pre-purposed function. They function - and conceptualise - not simply as a mere virtual counterpart of a simulated population, thus making explicit a real anthropological potential. What do NPCs do in their lives (expressed in seconds, minutes, hours)? Where do they go? In what way and why are their behaviours triggered that are opposed or complementary to the system that governs them? Are they subject to secret reactions and actions, or do they refer solely to their daily lives? And how is this supposed daily routine configured? In a way, their daily routines and our relationship with their existence are often no different from the 'ordinary' relationship between human beings. Take, for instance, the great subways: interfaces, screens and extras of flesh, bone, blood and synapses spurt - more or less quickly, more or less swirling - past each other without questioning each other's wandering. Instead, from an exquisitely technical perspective, NPCs often demonstrate that they do not respond (or counter-respond, as the case may be) to the roles imposed on them by the system, while others seem instead to be seduced and subjugated in an essentially infinite loop-cycle. Sex Worker is the prolonged 'pursuit' of a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto V, a documentation of the behaviour of this type of virtualised identity subject. As such, it is (and is) invested with a series of rhetorics and idealisations. The work is inspired by both artistic theory and practice. On the one hand, the researcher W. J. T. Mitchell's questioning of the will of images, their organicity and their being alive and vital. On the other hand, the performance-routine of the artist Vito Acconci in his Following Piece (1969). A final source of inspiration probably concerns the unspeakable: fractures, fragments, archives and cognitive and mnemonic collections that have guided my practice up to this point, and of which, perhaps, I remember nothing. Luca Miranda is an artist, writer, curator and independent researcher that works and lives in Italy. His artist practice looks at the relationship between reality and simulation and at the historic and politic rhetoric that lies beneath. He is interested in investigating video game as text and critic tool to highlight its inner contradictions as well as the contemporary media culture’s paradoxes. Part of Miranda practice concerns about the analysis of the avatar figure, its functions, and purposes within culture and the videoludic. Some of his areas of work are machinima and game photography, together with experimentation with filmic and photographic traditional languages. In 2018 he co-founded Eremo, an artistic collective based in Milan that operates among the intersections of video game, sound art, performance and contemporary art. He actively collaborates with writer and researcher Riccardo Retez, with several projects underway. Since 2020 he is part of the Milan Machinima Festival curatorial Committee, a festival dedicated to machinima, Game art and cinematographic experimentation.
Eddie Lohmeyer, video installation, found footage, 2021,installation shot at Post/Meta, Arts Warehouse, Delray Beach, FL., August-September 2021. All images and videos courtesy of the Artist
Altar of the Bargain Bin is a projection mapped sculpture that serves as an occult altar constructed from a forgotten cultural trope: cheap, mass-produced PC box games that might have once been found in a typical department store bargain bin. These precariously stacked boxes serve as a kind of physical, tangible glitch; rather, fragmented pop culture forms that mirror the frenetic video patterns overlayed onto their surfaces. Drawing from data moshed anime, retro videogames, horror film trailers, and occult imagery, these projected sequences, and the physical forms they correspond to, simultaneously elicit an intensive hysteria as well as ennui for the mass commodification of cheaply made, bargain PC titles. (text by Eddie Lohmeyer)
Eddie Lohmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to the avant-garde. His book Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding is now available through Bloomsbury Press. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, and assemblage, his installations, sculpture, and video have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently at 1308 Gallery at the University of Wisconsin, Ground Level Platform (Chicago, IL), the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, Russia and the 2021 Milan Machinima Festival.
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:
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.
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.
Playing Democracy is an interactive installation designed by Singaporean artist Ling Tan. A colossal multiplayer game of Pong, Playing Democracy explores in a playful way the meaning of collaboration and participation within political contexts. Structured as a competitive game of Pong, the audience controls the game paddles using their body movement tracked by a camera. Players have the option of cooperating with each other, modify the rules or violate them, which can cause the game to implode. The project, which was commissioned by Barbican and Lumen Arts Projects, uses game-like mechanics to rethink the values of politics. In this case, democracy is described as a system based on such values as fairness, freedom, and equality.
Ling Tan is a UK based Singaporean multidisciplinary designer and artist working within the field of social engagement, technology, citizen participation and politics. Originally trained as an architect, her work explores citizens’ interaction with the built environment and our collective agency and responsibility in tackling complex issues surrounding our cities. She works with diverse communities across the UK and internationally in helping them make sense of their environment, express opinions in a playful and performative way, and collectively address issues such as public safety, air quality, climate change, gender, demographics and race. She designs, fabricates and create the software for her work, ranging from wearable technology, interactive installations.
HeK House of Electronic Arts Basel Freilager-Platz 9 CH–4142 Münchenstein/Basel
The international group exhibition Radical Gaming presents a selection of artists who investigate the structures, technologies and aesthetics of a global gaming industry. Their works are characterised by a particularly unconventional approach to employing the immersion and interaction inherent to video games, whose common narratives and stereotypes they subversively undermine.
Artist: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Leo Castañeda, Sara Culmann, Debbie Ding, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Mikhail Maksimov, Cassie McQuater, Sahej Rahal, Nicole Ruggiero, Jacolby Satterwhite, Eddo Stern, Theo Triantafyllidis, Miyö Van Stenis, Lu Yang
The best review so far is, unsurprisingly, from We Make Money Not Art. Here's an excerpt:
The interactive experiences of this avant-garde sub-genre also differ from mainstream contemporary gaming: instead of being purely adrenaline-fuelled, the rules of engagement involve meditative states, involvement of multiple senses, modified controllers, etc. They deviate from what the industry normally offers/sells. But that doesn’t mean that they are not fun, in their own, strange ways.
i.Mirror by China Tracy (AKA: Cao Fei), Second Life Documentary Film, 2007
Cao Fei. My Future is not a Dream Selected Works from the Collection
September 10, 2021–January 9, 2022
Espace Louis Vuitton München
Maximilianstraße 2a
80539 Munich Germany
Hours: Monday–Friday 12–7pm,
Saturday 10am–7pm
press release
On the occasion of its new exhibition within the framework of the Fondation Louis Vuitton “Hors-les-murs” programme, the Espace Louis Vuitton München presents My Future is not a Dream, a selection of Cao Fei’s works from the Collection. This exhibition carries out the Foundation’s mission to showcase holdings of the Collection to an international audience at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka.
Born in 1978 in Guangzhou by the Pearl River Delta in China, Cao Fei has made a name for herself with her multimedia installations and videos. She takes inspiration from popular and traditional sources (the cinema, advertisements, manga, and theatre) to explore the relationship between real life, the collective utopia, and the personal aspirations of a younger generation immersed in a new urban culture marked by an industrial and commercial boom and Internet exposure. The economic dynamics of her native region, and its proximity to Hong Kong and Taiwan, gave rise to a generation with a decidedly modern lifestyle. A recurrent theme of her work since Imbalance 257 (1999), Cao Fei captures a world inhabited by her friends, subjugated by entertainment, consumption and television, where adolescents disguise themselves as manga or video game characters to play out a fictional life. Presented here, Whose Utopia (2006), which mixes documentary elements with fiction, explores the contrast between the real life of the workers at a factory and their dreams and aspirations.
Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (2006), video, projection, colour and sound (stereo), 19' 58"
Fascinated by the internet’s endless possibilities, Cao Fei began in 2007 to experiment with the virtual world of Second Life, the 3D-based user-generated content platform created in 2003. There she designed a virtual city (RMB CITY: A Second Life City Planning, 2007) where she settled her own avatar, China Tracy (Live in RMB City, 2009). The spaces she developed mingle some typical symbols of the Chinese culture (bicycles, pandas, a Mao bust etc.) with an unbridled proliferation of international characteristic everyday objects and architecture in an unrelenting flow of traffic, portraying the past, present and future of a community undergoing major change, in a country at the mercy of uncompromising modernization. Isolation, the division of the classes, and the projected decline of international capitalism are key subjects of Cao Fei’s work, which continuously draws on a wide variety of sources from both Western and Eastern worlds.
Cao Fei, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by China Tracy (aka: Cao Fei), Color video, with sound, 6 min.
The three works presented here, which belong to the Collection, were displayed at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2016 for the exhibition Bentu. Chinese Artists in a time of turbulence and transformation.
About the Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20th-century works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organises seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognized as an emblematic example of the 21st-century architecture, constitutes the Foundation’s seminal artistic statement. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than six million visitors from France and around the world. The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, including other foundations and museums such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), and the Courtauld Gallery in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism) among others. The artistic direction also developed a specific “Hors-les-murs” programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, which are exclusively devoted to exhibitions of works from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge and promoted through specific cultural communication.
Curated by Luigi Alberto Cippini (Armature Globale), Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen (gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture)
September 9, 2021–January 23, 2022
Fondazione Prada Osservatorio
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
20121 Milan Italy
press release
The exhibition project Sturm&Drang, a collaboration between Fondazione Prada and gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich, will take place at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada from September 9, 2021 to January 23, 2022 (press preview on September 8, 2021, from 10am–2pm).
Curated by Luigi Alberto Cippini (Armature Globale), Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen (gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture), Sturm&Drang explores computer-generated imagery (CGI) practices, experiences, and environments. CGI is the creation of still or animated visual content with imaging software.
This exhibition does not focus on the final product–the advanced digital image–or artworks adopting these techniques, it rather investigates the production methods behind this powerful image economy. Sturm&Drang is a conglomeration of four environments–quotes of both existing or imaginary spaces–that usually host the ‘making of’ or the fruition of the CGI programming in contexts such as video games, science fiction, and hi-tech engineering.
On the first floor of Osservatorio, the visitor is confronted with two autonomous spatial conditions. The first one is a prototype of a First Person Shooter (FPS) setting. Military First Person Shooter (MFPS) is weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, widely used in video games design and in military training. The second environment pays homage to the science fiction novel Neuromancer written in 1984 by American-Canadian author William Gibson, and considered a milestone of the cyberpunk genre. In particular, drawing inspiration from the first chapters of Gibson’s novel, visitors will encounter a series of coffins/rooms of the Cheap Hotel in Chiba, from where the cyber-hacker Case, the main character of the novel, connects to cyberspace.
The second floor of Osservatorio is occupied with walls full of monitors and samples of technical apparatus proposing a method to exhibit CGI material in the context of a museum space. The first part of the display is devoted to online tutorials realized to educate users of CGI production software. The tutorial files on view have been all edited and post-produced, in order to visually deconstruct the informative use they were originally meant for. Another environment focuses on the simulation of architectural spaces employing CGI systems and specifically on rendering production and manufacturing of 3D environments. This space is a combination of technological optical tables and easily mountable sleep space, conceived in reference to those limbo hours in which the graphic employer is resting while his computer-machine is rendering. Other screens show works by students of “Strum&Drang Studio,” a university course addressed to students at ETH Zurich Department of Architecture and held from February to June 2021.
The exhibition Sturm&Drang is part of a one-year program with the same title that consists of several phases. The “Sturm&Drang Studio” course produced a series of digital conversations available on Fondazione Prada website. The exhibition “Sturm&Drang Preview Services,” presented by Prada with the support of Fondazione Prada at Prada Aoyama Tokyo until November 26, 2021, is a second development of the project that anticipated some of the themes of the Milan exhibition.
"The Bonnier Gallery is pleased to announce Yucef Merhi's upcoming solo exhibition "OPEN" will be on view from September 2nd - November 20th, 2021. Throughout his 30+ year journey, Merhi's work has remained front and center in the current thinking about art and technology. Opening up a panoramic view of Merhi’s inner worlds, the upcoming exhibition consists of works from five different series that capture the far-reaching consequence of Merhi's orbit around contemporary culture and map out his creative diaspora.
In 1985, when pioneer digital artist Yucef Merhi was only eight years old and growing up in Caracas, he reverse-engineered his ATARI 2600 and turned it into a programmable computer. He used the Atari Video Computer System to produce generative videos based in language instructions. A leading art critic at the time saw this and proclaimed: “What you have created here, Yucef, will be considered a work of art in years to come.” Decades later, Merhi’s seminal creations would be exhibited at the New Museum in New York and would travel all over the world in international exhibitions, celebrated as the first works of art crafted from a videogame console. Watch a video that demonstrates one of these original 1985 works. One year later, at the age of nine, Merhi figured out how to calibrate the atomic clock of Venezuela, and the National Ministry of Defense commended him for achieving this breakthrough.
From data hacking as protest art against totalitarianism and police brutality, to his new vision called Retrocycling that rescues obsolete tech devices from landfills . . . from perfecting a universal language as new source code for planetary awakening, to digital interventions that make poems come alive . . . throughout his 30+ year journey, the artist’s work has remained front and center in the current thinking about art, and especially digital art. Opening up a panoramic view of Merhi’s inner worlds, the new show Yucef Merhi: Open at The Bonnier Gallery captures the far-reaching consequence of his orbit around contemporary culture. For the viewer experiencing Merhi’s art, this often results in mind-expanding encounters with language.
The gallery show presents 15 works, from five different series that map out his creative diaspora. The show ushers in the eagerly anticipated return of Miami’s Art Basel season, and opens on September 2 at the Bonnier Gallery in Allapattah, Miami’s burgeoning art district. “This new show will allow people to experience digital art that is of substance, as opposed to the speculative NFTs that seem to dominate that conversation,” says Grant Bonnier, the curator of this show and owner of the Gallery. “Yucef Merhi has packed the equivalent of several lifetimes leading up to this critical mid-career point of his trajectory,” adds Bonnier. “Merhi is poised at the leading edge of the technology and art.” Yucef Merhi has produced bodies of work that engage a wide spectrum including poetry, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, sound, virtual reality, hacking, and retro video games. By ensuring that his works always connect with the warmth of human engagement through language, Merhi’s momentum continues ahead of the curve."
Atari Ex Machina, 2007
Atari 2600, cartridge, keyboard, TV
72 x 24 x 24 in. / 182.9 x 61 x 61 cm
Copyright The Artist
Photo: The Artist
Atari Poetry VI, 2006
Atari 2600, Atari cartridge, TV
39 x 16 x 16 in. / 99.1 x 40.6 x 40.6 cm
Copyright The Artist
Photo: The Artist
Compassion, 2020
5 CRT TVs, 5 Atari 2600 game consoles, custom Atari cartridges, directional sound system
80 x 60 x 70 in.
Copyright Yucef Merhi
Photo: Zachary Balber
Among Yucef Merhi's most powerful works is Mission Taliban 2.0 (2002), a 20 year old VR computer game which, for some reasons, feels so incredibly fresh.
