GAMESCENES

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

Elaine Hoey, A Blind Eye, 2021

GAME UP

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

Wednesdays – Fridays 13:00 - 19:0

Saturdays & Sundays June 11:00 - 19:00 

Free entrance

transmediale studio

Gerichtstrasse 35

13347 Berlin

Germany

 

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

 

press release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINK: GAME UP

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

CONTROL ALT PLAY: LUDIC ALTERNATIVES ON CONTROL

May 12 - November 12 2022

Curated by Luca Carruba and Eurídice Cabañes

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

Vernissage: May 12 2022, 7:30 pm

eTopia

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

 

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

 

Patrick Lemiueux, Octopad, 2018

Antonin Fourneau, GhostPad, installation, 2009

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

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

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

LINK: Control Alt Play

EVENT: BRICK GAMES (MARCH 18 - MAY 25 2022, PALMA, SPAIN)

BRICK GAMES

18 March - 25 May, 2022

L21 S’Escorxador
Hermanos García Peñaranda 1A
07010 Palma
Islas Baleares, España

Curated by Francesco Giaveri 

Featured artists: Richard Woods, Dasha Shishkin, Gao Hang, Richie Culver, Eva Fàbregas, Álvaro Gil, Gabriele de Santis, Felix Treadwell, Ryan Browning, Jordi Ribes, Pixy Liao, Rachel Hobkirk, Matthew Feyld, Charline Tyberghein, Sepand Danesh, Grip Face

As Francesco Giaveri explains;

Games are always plural. A game has to be very disappointing to not want to start a new round and then another. The Brick Game video game console that flooded the market in the 90s promised to contain 9999 games. It was probably much less, but it doesn’t matter, without a doubt Tetris was the one that got me hooked, the one I liked the most. Many years later, I still play for long periods of time on airplane trips where they still offer this idle option. I love the paradox of how it works. To advance without advancing. To move up a level, the brick wall has to remain as low as possible, as other bricks progressively fall. If there are gaps in the wall and its height grows too high, until it passes the upper limit of the screen, the game ends. On the contrary, it is a matter of forming one or more lines, from one side to the other, compact and seamless, so that the bricks disappear, thus leaving more space for the others that, in the meantime, continue to fall, each time at a faster and faster speed. At the formal and chromatic level, it is a question of creating unions of independent fragments. Discontinuous unions awaiting the decisive fragment that will appear to resolve and complete the compact and seamless lines.

My favorite piece is Gao Hang's Boy gaze, 2021

GAO HANG, Boy gaze, 2021, Acrylic on canvas. 182.88 x 60.96 cm

L21 Gallery is a project that has continued to evolve over the years since it was founded by Óscar Florit in Palma de Mallorca (Spain) in 2012. At that time, the gallery was committed to the representation of emerging national artists and the experimentation with new exhibition formats. Examples of this were the projects The Envelope, The Window, at the gallery’s venue in Madrid, and the project The Apartment, which was awarded at ARCO 2015. L21 Gallery is currently an international and hybrid project located in two venues in Mallorca: a 450 m2 industrial building in Son Castelló industrial estate that has been hosting the gallery’s exhibition programme since 2016, and a second venue with five exhibition rooms in the city of Palma. These two large spaces allow us to freely develop the different aspects of the project: contemporary art gallery, artists’ residence and production centre (L21 LAB)

LINK: Brick Games

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

 

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

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

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

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

LINK: Lars Preisser 

EVENT: SARA SADIK ULTIMATE VATOS: FORCE & HONNEUR (MARCH 26 - JUNE 6 2022)

Sara Sadik. Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur

Curated by Oriane Durand and Kristina Scepanski

Westfälischer Kunstverein

Rothenburg 30, 48143 Münster, Germany

26 March – 6 June 2022

Opening: Saturday, 26 March 2022, 6pm

Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–7pm

The exhibition rooms will be open from 11 am on this day. 

Press release

The videos, performances, installations and photographs by Sara Sadik (b. 1994 in Bordeaux, lives and works in Marseille, France) range from manga, video games, docufictions to CGI-animated films. In the course of these works, the artist—who has Moroccan/Algerian roots—explores manifestations of what she calls “Beurcore”—a form of youth culture that emerged among the working classes in the North African diaspora. “Beurcore” defines both a hybrid identity and a collective movement constituted through music, such as rap and hip-hop, language, fashion, specific symbols and social media. With references to these specific markers of belonging, the artist succeeds in providing an incisive yet empathetic analysis of the social pressures and expectations placed on young adults in a post-migrant society. Ultimately, she is concerned with the valorisation of certain social classes that inspire a white majority society through their codes and music, but enjoy little social prestige overall.

A 2-channel video installation forms the centre of Sara Sadik's exhibition Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur, conceived especially for the Westfälischer Kunstverein. Arranged back-to-back, the LED screens are surrounded by two elongated seats made of PVC. The exhibition display is thus reminiscent of an ancient arena or the layout of a modern football stadium. The centrepiece is the LED wall presenting a show featuring a young man, a “Vatos” (a colloquial term for a Latin American man, comparable to the English “guy” or “dude”). As a participant in a military programme called Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur, which is geared towards physical and mental training, he embodies the trope of the perfect fighter. The aim of this programme is to give young men the opportunity to become the “ultimate man” with the help of “zehef”—an Arabic word meaning “angry” and also used in French. As in her previous film Khobtogone (2021), Sadik’s continued interest focuses on the conditioning of identity through the prism of masculinity.

Sara Sadik, Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur, 2022, Ausstellungsansicht, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, courtesy the artist and Galerie Crèvecœur, commissioned by Westfälischer Kunstverein, © Photo: Thorsten Arendt


Situated somewhere between The Hunger Games—a series of films based on novels—and a type of fictional survival training in reality TV format, the video follows the protagonist as he completes various tasks. On the one hand, he is confined in solitary inside, isolated from the other candidates and under observation, whereas on the other, outside, he has to search, on his own and unsupported, for a flag in an inhospitable area. The video was produced with the help of various image recording techniques, such as point-of-view shots, top down perspective and with a 360° panorama camera that offers a variety of viewing angles. In the course of the sequences, the atmosphere changes from a video games, such as GTA, and videos on social networks, such as TikTok to a strict surveillance system. This last perspective in particular palpably visualises the pressure the candidate is under. In the form of a voiceover, we hear him speak of his feelings, of loneliness, stress and anxieties. This procedure enables a change of perspective and, through his personal narration, offers the possibility of identification with the candidate. In this way, Sadik opens up an intimate moment, which we share with the protagonist, and which reveals him in all his humanity. Characteristics deemed masculine, such as success, toughness and strength, which the Ultimate Vatos organisation aims to bolster, are suddenly levelled—in what amounts to be a an almost painful contrast—by vulnerability, insecurity and melancholy.

If, at the beginning of the video, the protagonist admits his desire to make a fresh start, in the end the true victory for him lies in the recognition of his own identity and not in becoming the “ultimate human being”. Beyond the clichés and stereotypes that the artist plays with, love for oneself and for one's nearest and dearest proves to be a source of energy and a form of resistance that enables one to surmount social oppression and exclusion.

LINK: Sara Sadik. Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur

CALL FOR ARTWORKS: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2023 (DEADLINE: DECEMBER 30 2022)

The sixth edition of the MACHINIMA FILM FESTIVAL will take place in hybrid form, both online and in situ (Milan, Italy) between March 19 - 26 2023

Filmmakers and video artists engaged in the practice of appropriating, repurposing, and remixing video games are encouraged to send us their work for consideration. All submissions will be judged by an international panel of jurors comprising scholars, curators, and critics. A Critics' Award will be awarded to the most groundbreaking work.

Screenings of selected machinima will be curated around different themes and presented in different sections. The most interesting submissions are those which seek to capture or highlight a specific facet of contemporary life, from politics to art, from violence to creativity, from technology to ideology, through the aesthetic lenses of digital gaming.

The deadline for submissions is December 30, 2022

The full program will be announced in early March 2023

The guidelines and submission rules are available here

click here to begin the submission process

LINK: Milan Machinima Festival

EVENT: SERIOUS FUN. ARCHITECTURE & GAMES (MARCH 17 - MAY 9 2022, WIEN, AUSTRIA)

Serious Fun: Architecture & Games
Architekturzentrum Wien - Exhibition hall 2
Museumsplatz 1 1070 Vienna
Thu 17.03.2022 – Mon 05.09.2022
daily 10:00-19:00
Official website

Opening of the exhibition
Wed 16.03.2022
19:00-21:00

Curator: Mélanie van der Hoorn
Project coordination Az W: Katharina Ritter
Exhibition design: DWARS ontwerp (Mark Schulte & Miriam de Lange)

In cooperation with FOTO WIEN

The exhibition features a terrific series of talks and workshop, including "Simulation and Reality — How do we play Architecture?" Wednesday April 27 at 7 pm.

press release

We are all familiar with the classic architecture games, from building blocks that become daring structures to board games where the players compete for spatial-strategic advantages. What are, though, the architecture narratives invested in doll's houses, along which guidelines do cities grow in computer games, and what kind of buildings shield ego-shooters from their assailants? The exhibition 'Serious Fun' shows and examines architecture games and toys, inviting you to be astonished, to play and to reflect.

Architecture games and toys are a part of our cultural and technical heritage. They come made of wood, metal or cardboard, others are played on computers or consoles. Hybrid variations turn the city itself into a gameboard, creating an interface to parallel worlds. These games and toys are a part of social history, too. As a deeply expressive form of popular culture, they convey how we perceive our built environment and different ways of imagining it. Unlike representations with images, which we view from a distance, games can develop a strongly immersive character: Whoever participates in a game becomes part of it himself. This captivating power is not without ambivalence. On the one hand, the miniature scale is inviting, so people can actively participate in the development of buildings, towns or situations that they would never otherwise have had any access to in reality — which has made games popular as a tool in participatory processes. On the other hand, it is the developers who influence or manipulate the course and outcome of the games. Their decisions not only build whole worlds, they also shape world views.

The exhibition presents games and reflections on games. The exhibits, many of which are interactive, were created by architects, artists and game developers. The visitor’s gaze is frequently drawn to specific, sometimes strange but frequently innovative aspects of architecture games. What are the utopias and dystopias that they evoke, what are the values and ideas they convey, criticise or endorse? What kind of places, themes and ways of life are frequently left out, and which games fill these gaps? Visitors can take an alternative city tour through a videogame environment, they can dabble on the virtual London property market, experience doll’s houses as lurid minidramas or emancipatory narratives, stimulate the spatial experience of a blind person in a purely acoustic videogame, or develop eco-friendly city districts in collaboration with others.

The exhibition ‘Serious Fun’ invites visitors to play and to ponder. It provides an opportunity to become immersed in both familiar and in less familiar games, while it also encourages people to take a step back and to take a critical look at the world of games and the constructed worlds that they create. Games can both celebrate and trivialise architecture, they can delimit and they can de-limit whole worlds. They do not only integrate architectural practice, they also hold a mirror up to it.

© Critical Blocks, Maykel Roovers, 2012

@Microsoft, Minecraft, 2011

© MaerchenHaft, Sabine Bloch, photoartist, 2005–2006

© Excerpt from The Continuous City, Gareth Damian Martin, 2018

© Down and Out in Los Santos, Alan Butler, 2015–today

© Dust, Aram Bartholl, 2011

LINK: Serious Fun

EVENT: VIRTUAL LANDSCAPES (APRIL 27 - MAY 8 2022, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM)

© Michael Bell-Smith, Continue2000, 2005

Virtual Landscapes

27.04.2022 – 08.05.2022

Open 1.30 pm – 6.00 pm from Wednesday to Sunday

Cocktail presentation/Vernissage : 27 April 2022 (6 pm  -9 pm)

Curated by Thierry Tilquin

Senne

Rue de la Senne 19

1000 Brussels, Belgium

Virtual Landscapes is an exhibition on game-inspired contemporary art curated by Thierry Tilquin in the OFF circuit of Art Brussels 2022. It will take place at [Senne], an independent, non-commercial space that intends to present, once or twice a year projects of design and art characterized by their innovative aspects.

Landscapes have always been an important theme in art history. The digital world offers new horizons, based on limitless possibilities and the quest for a new reality. The works in the exhibition illustrate various forms of investigations into these virtual landscapes.

The exhibition features the work of Cory Arcangel, Adonis Archontides, Myfanwy Ashmore, Michael Bell-Smith, Petra Cortright, Pascal Greco, JODI, Brenna Murphy, Robert William Overweg, Luke Kaspar Pearson, Petra Szemán.

LINK: Virtual Landscapes (Thank you, Thierry!)

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

Ian Cheng: Worlding
March 2–July 3, 2022

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

Curated by Gina Lee, Curator, Leeum Museum of Art

press release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINK: Leum Museum of Art

LINK: Ian Cheng

EVENT: GTOPIA: GAME SITE (DECEMBER 30 2021 - MARCH 13 2022, SHANGHAI)

GTOPIA: GAME SITE

December 30 2021 - March 13 2022

TANK ART CENTER, Shanghai

2380 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai

Producer: Yang Jing, Consultant: Li Zhenhua, Curators: Liu Xiaoyi, Li Ruixuan, Li Zhen

Yang Jing is the curator of Gtopia: Game Site, an ambitious exhibition about art and games at TANK Shangai, which is still running at time of writing. The show features almost twenty indie and alternative video games  installaed in the futuristic gallery space of the TANK Art Center. As Jing writes, so far more than ten thousand people visited the exhibition, which will close in mid-March. Here's the full description:

Before discussing games in the abstract and broad sense, Gtopia: Game Site tries to scrutinize the games in the concrete, real historical context, dismantling them one by one as information processors and cultural entertainment bodies. At the same time, the exhibition also extends the field of research and exhibition, pulling the lens back farther to include the people, organizations and systems that make games: the R&D company (Coconut Island), the independent media (indienova) that silently cultivate the ecology, and the social platform (TapTap) that directly links games and people through arithmetic. Today everyone is talking about games and all the buzzwords related to games, but we are not talking about the same thing. We start with a certain game, a certain type of game, a certain era of game, and we soon find out that they are separated from each other by mountains and seas. (You can read more here)

Below are a few images from the exhibition:

Yang Jing is a curator and researcher of game art, PhD from School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She curated "Game Symbiosis" at Shenzhen Animation Biennale, which is the first time in China to present independent games in a contemporary art style, and "Forgotten Engineer", created in collaboration with French contemporary art collection institution DSL, which is the first experimental work combining art collection and video game in the world, has won many awards in the game industry and contemporary art field, and has been exhibited in art academies and art museums at home and abroad. Her academic works have been presented at DIGRA World Video Games Annual Conference, ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art, Linz Electronic Art Festival in Austria, Christie's Global Art Education Forum, Documenta seminar in Kassel, etc.

LINK: Gtopia: Game Site (all photos courtesy of Yang Jing)