GAMESCENES

Event: Chicago New Media 1973–1992 (Nov 1 - Dec 15 2018, Chicago)

Montana, Jane Veeder, Video, 1982. Courtesy of Jane Veeder and VGA Gallery

Chicago New Media 1973–1992

Curated by Jon Cates with assistance from Chaz Evans and Jonathan Kinkley

November 01 - December 15 2018

Gallery 400 
University of Illinois at Chicago
Art and Design Hall, First Floor
400 South Peoria Street (at Van Buren Street)
Chicago, IL 60607

Chicago is not often thought of as a center for new media art, technology, or industry, yet the city was home to some of the earliest and most important experiments in new media in the late 20th century. Chicago New Media 1973–1992 explores the rich exchange between industry and academics during this heady time, chronicling the under-recognized story of Chicago's contributions to new media art by artists at the University of Illinois at Chicago's (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and at Midway and Bally games from 1973–92. Generations of now well-known and acclaimed artists, scholars, designers, developers, curators, and organizers have moved through UIC and SAIC, all of whom shaped the development of new media locally as well as on the burgeoning international stage. Chicago New Media 1973–1992 will exhibit a range of ephemera documenting this period of industry incubation and globalization and its connections to new media art.

LINK: Chicago New Media 1973–1992 

EVENT: WHAT IS WITHOUT THE HAND THAT WIELDS IT: X (REDUX) (November 3-4 2018, Sydney, Australia)

WHAT IS WITHOUT THE HAND THAT WIELDS IT: X REDUX

Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney, Australia

Saturday November 3 2018 
Cockatoo Island
11:30 AM - 5:30 PM

Performance times/Saturday (3 Nov):
11:30AM – 12PM
2:30PM – 3PM
5:30PM – 6PM

The performance is repeated on Sunday November 4

A landmark of Game Art returns a decade later.

In 2007/2008 Harmon created What it is Without the Hand That Wields It, an electronic mechanical sculpture that was connected to modified version of the first-person shooter video game Counterstrike. When gamers on the internet killed one another, the sculpture manifested the virtual kills physically by releasing small amounts of blood into a gallery, thereby bridging the two realities. Now 10 years later, Harmon stages WIIWTHTWI: X Redux – a resurrected slipstream version of the work manifesting the gamer commentary in the form of an endurance performance and new electronics. This new version has escalated with time – however what, if anything, has changed?

Riley Harmon is a US artist working in the Netherlands and his creative activity originated growing up in community-oriented theatre. Central to his practice is a process of weaving truth, fiction and magical realism into works and narratives that offer an uncanny distorted mirror to our reality – which take shape in performances, films, objects, live experiences, installations and collaboration with other artists. His current artistic practice traverses the social psychology phenomenon of 'terror management theory'; or how symbolic actions both mediate against, yet also reinforce mortal terror. His projects and collaborations have been internationally written about in such publications as Rolling Stone, Wired, American Theatre Magazine and he has exhibited, performed, and screened works internationally – at such venues as the Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst (Montevideo), FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, de Appel, EYE Film Museum, Schin Kunsthalle, among others – as well as self-made contexts.  

LINK: Riley Harmon

LINK: What it is Without the Hand That Wields It: X Redux

Event: JON RAFMAN: THE MENTAL TRAVELER (September 14 2018 - February 24, 2019, Modena, Italy)

Exhibition: Jon Rafman. The Mental Traveller

Curated by: Diana Baldon

Curatorial Assistance: Chiara Dall’Olio

Institutions: Fondazione Fotografia Modena and Galleria Civica di Modena

Location: Palazzina dei Giardini, Corso Cavour, 2, Modena

Exhibition Dates: 14 September 2018 to 24 February 2019

Opening: 14 September 2018 at 6pm

Press View 12 September 2018 at 11am

Opening Hours:
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: 11am to 1pm; 4pm to 7pm
Saturday, Sunday and Holidays: 11am to 7pm

Opening Hours for festivalfilosofia 2018:
Friday 14 September: 9am to 11pm
Saturday 15 September: 9am to 12am
Sunday 16 September: 9am to 9pm 

Jon Rafman, Dream Journal 2016-2017, 2017, Colour HD video with stereo sound. Music by James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never, Runtime: 49’17”, Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers

FONDAZIONE MODENA ARTI VISIVE is delighted to present The Mental Traveller, the first large-scale exhibition of works by Jon Rafman to be shown in an Italian contemporary art institution. Curated by Diana Baldon and presented by Fondazione Fotografia Modena and the Galleria Civica di Modena, the exhibition will open at the Palazzina dei Giardini on Friday 14 September 2018, to coincide with this year’s festivalfilosofia, the theme of which is truth.

The exhibition brings together a selection of multimedia installations, presented for the first time in Italy, tracing the arc of the Canadian artist’s practice from 2011 to the present. Employing a variety of media – including photography, video, sculpture and installation – Rafman explores how reality and simulation have become increasingly homogenized in contemporary society in artworks that blur the boundaries between the virtual and the tangible, between physical bodies and technological replicas.

Born in 1981 in Montreal, where he lives and works, Rafman studied literature and philosophy at McGill University before graduating in film, video and new media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since his earliest career, Rafman has investigated the ramifications of our reliance on technology on our perceptions of reality.To create Kool-Aid Man (2008–11), Rafman spent three years exploringthe virtual-reality platform Second Life, in the guise of the titular avatar, to discover the myriad incarnationsof its digital ‘inhabitants’. Rafman neither judges nor criticises his Second Life cohabitants: rather, his intention is to document how technology enables people to create entirely new versions of themselves in fantastical environments, giving them the freedom to invent new identities and iconographies.

Rafman also drew from the Internet and its multiple online communities as archival resources for the three videos comprising his Betamale Trilogy (2013–15) – Still Life (Betamale), Mainsqueezeand Erysichthon – which are among the installations included in this exhibition. As in the novels of Georges Bataille, where the narrative arc implodes in the claustrophobic and catastrophic arena of the writing, this leads to a proliferation of narrative strands and interpretations. Watching the Betamale Trilogy, the viewer feels trapped in a vortex of scenarios that are traumatic yet seductive. Rafman skilfully conveys the ambiguous lure of the Internet, which seemingly promises freedom and the discovery of new worlds, yet, in reality, imprisons you in a space tracked by algorithms and monitored by agencies that process, then sell, your navigational data.

Rafman’s extensive research on both the Internet and the deep web has enabled him to assume the mantle of amateur anthropologist and digital flâneur. He investigates the epistemic collapse in recent years of the distinction between digital and authentic worlds, between reality and its virtual representation. In his videos, a poetic and hypnotic off-screen voice invariably accompanies a sequence of images taken from the Internet, videogames or online chat forums.

Memory figures as a major theme in many works. In A Man Digging (2013), which comprises footage from videogames including Max Payne 3, the main character speaks of the intrinsic mutability of memory and how it allows for the rewriting of individual and collective history. While the narrator nostalgically drifts along in search of his fragmented past, Rafman transports us, via the glinting surfaces of memory, to the furthest reaches of reality. The video Remember Carthage (2013)tells the story of a man who sets sail on a ship bound for Tunisia in search of a mythical city in the Sahara Desert that existed at the same time as Carthage. Despite its legendary status as the ‘Las Vegas of Maghreb’, however, no trace of the city remains. Composed of footage from Second Life and the videogame Uncharted 3, the film again features an off-camera voice detailing the sublime architectural beauty of ancient civilisations. Remember Carthage explores not only memory but the contemporaneity of history, since – thanks to technological developments such as videogames and Second Life– even history can now find a different form and influence.

The video Dream Journal (2016–17) comes from Rafman’s habit of animating his dreams using amateur 3D software, and has a soundtrack composed by James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never, with whom the artist has previously collaborated. Two young female protagonists – a stereotypical millennial and a child warrior – set off on a Dantean journey within a dystopian universe. The narrative interweaves imaginary scenes with characters from classical epic tales to yield a series of darkly surreal incidents: this is Rafman’s unconscious mind, augmented by online surfing, rendered visual.

Greeting visitors at the entrance of the Palazzina is the artist’s latest work, Legendary Reality (2017). In this he leads us on a voyage into ‘inner space’. An anonymous protagonist narrates a journey through what appears to be a sci-fi landscape – although he could just as easily be sitting at a computer screen on which historical depictions have become conflated with virtual experiences.

Jon Rafman (Montreal, 1981) is an artist who explores digital culture and subcultures, exposing the desires, obsessions and fetishes triggered by the use of technological devices. Recent solo shows in international contemporary art institutions include:I have ten thousand compound eyes and each is named suffering, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); Jon Rafman, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2016); Jon Rafman, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2015); The end of the end of the end,Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2014); Remember Carthage, First Look: New Art Online, New Museum, New York (2013); The Nine Eyes of Google Streetview, Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); Jon Rafman, online exhibition, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012). He has also participated in numerous group shows, including: I was raised on the Internet, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); Alone together, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2018); ARS 17: Hello world!, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2017–18); Jon Rafman / Stan Vanderbeek, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles (2017); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016);Welcome to the Jungle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2015);Speculations on Anonymous Materials, Fridericianum, Kassel (2013); NineEyes, Moscow Photobienniale (2012); Screenshots, William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut (2012); From Here On, Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, Arles (2011).

Together with Museo della Figurina, Fondazione Fotografia Modenaand Galleria Civica di Modena are part of FONDAZIONE MODENA ARTI VISIVE, an institution dedicated to the presentation and promotion of contemporary art and visual culture, directed by Diana Baldon.

Jon Rafman, Remember Carthage, 2013, Colour HD video with stereo sound, Runtime: 13’43” Courtesy of the artist 

Jon Rafman, Remember Carthage, 2013, Colour HD video with stereo sound, Runtime: 13’43” Courtesy of the artist  

LINK:  Jon Rafman. Il viaggiatore mentale

Game Art: Lu Yang's hysterical game worlds

"In late October 2017, M WOODS welcomed visitors to the world of Lu Yang, an ambitious solo exhibition comprising three new commissions and a constellation of previous works that include sculpture, video, installation, computer programming, and video games. A leading figure among a young generation of new media artists, Lu Yang’s creative practice often satirizes efforts to demystify human experience through scientific theory, dismantling them with humor and fluency in the language of popular culture. Citing knowledge gleaned from the realms of neurology and biology, her works also reflect an ongoing interest in spirituality as a state of being pursued through different forms of religion and creative expression.

Lu Yang, Electromagnetic Brainology! 4 Deities, 2017

Capturing a breadth of influences from hip hop to Goa trance, punk, gothic, and glam rock street styles, gaming, anime, and the practice of Otaku, Lu Yang’s mesmerizing, multisensory environments reflect the dynamic amorphism of today’s globalized cultural climate and the semi-porous understandings we use to define the current historical moment of China and beyond. Conceived in entirety by the artist, the exhibition is something of a Gesamtkunstwerk combining the neon glitz of an arcade and the ritual of a heretical temple.

Presented on the first floor, Electromagnetic Brainology represents a new direction in Lu’s video work. Unfolding in the ritual-like space of the central hall, the work incorporates motion sensor technology and a soundtrack contributed by acclaimed Japanese producer invisible manners (インビジブル・マナーズ), weaving together popular culture and pan-cultural religious iconography. Stemming from her interest in MikuMikuDance (MMD) and the internet folk culture surrounding it, Lu uses the popular freeware as a readymade to complete the “LikuLikuDance” seen within many of the videos.

Lu Yang, Uterus Man, 2013

The action and aesthetic of gaming recurs throughout the exhibition, from the adventures of Lu’s gender-curious superhero Uterus Man (2013), to the 8-bit nostalgia of Cancer Baby (2014). Affinities to the gaming world are equally present in Wrathful King Kong Core (2011), and a sculptural installation on the second floor inviting viewers to ‘play’ using augmented reality. Emphasis on engagement and a visual vernacular popularized by modern video games form one thread of Lu’s artistic strategy that in the show subvert the normal functions of the museum.

In LuYang Delusional Mandala (2015) and LuYang Delusional Crime and Punishment (2016), relations of violence and domination become a solipsistic theatre revolving around her own likeness. Lu’s interest in deep brain stimulation (DBS), a treatment for tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease, is taken further through the invention of a halo-like, stereotactic surgery device that short-circuits the limbic system and results in religious delusions. For Lu, these investigations into the mechanisms of the mind and spirit, as well as our abilities to visualize them, lie at the heart of identity in the twenty-first century. Regularly featuring in her own films and animations, the artist’s own identity is deconstructed and she is re-incarnated in various works as a giant sculptural kite, a lifelike but genderless, non-binary simulation, and a guardian of the gates to ‘Luyang Hell’.

Collaborating with musicians, actors, and animators, the exhibition culminates in an exorcism, writhing to a soundtrack of post-trance core. As an artist whose playful irreverence and wicked humor constantly question norms of acceptability, Lu’s last gesture raises deep polemical issues about the cathartic role art and art institutions play within society. As the artist’s first exhibition at a non-profit institution in China, and the first solo show by a Chinese artist at M WOODS, Lu Yang’s exhibition brings together many of her best-known works while pointing to new directions within her practice." (M Woods)

LuYang, Cancer Baby, 2014

Born and based in Shanghai, Lu Yang graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2010. Her works have been featured in important solo and group exhibitions at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), Centre Pompidou, 56th Venice Biennale 2015 China Pavillion, the Third Istanbul Design Biennial, Liverpool Biennial 2016, Shanghai Biennale 2012, Montreal International Digital Art Biennial 2016, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, Momentum (Berlin), Tampa Museum of Art, Fifth Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, and the NYU Shanghai Art Gallery among others.

LINK: Lu Yang 

LINK: Lu Yang at M Woods (alla images courtesy of M Woods)

Game Art: Fall On Your Sword's Blaze of Thunder (2014)

Fall on Your Sword is a music production, scoring, and audio post company founded by multi-media composer Will Bates. Located in both Williamsburg Brooklyn and Los Angeles, the FOYS 7.1 Studios serve their clients in all aspects of audio post-production. Specializing in music for feature films as well as advertising, FOYS are also creators of interactive artworks. Their pieces have been displayed at galleries and museums around the globe. Their 2015 artwork, Blaze Of Thunder, 

puts the viewer in the driving seat of a heart pounding slot car race around a certain Brooklyn apartment. Stepping up to the platform starts the race, hitting the red button triggers a crash. Inspired by the work of the late Tony Scott, this interactive thrill ride aims to fullfill one's NASCAR fantasies and destructive tendencies.

LINK: Fall on Your Sword 

Game Art: Victor Morales' Esperpento (in progress)

Victor Morales, Esperpento, test installation at 3 Legged Dog, 2018

Victor Morales' latest project is titled Esperpento, an immersive three dimensional space inspired by the aesthetic vision of Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Specifically the War Paintings and his famous, Caprichos series,

As Morales writes:

The project is a universe where tragedy, sarcasm, and comedy are portrayed as a deformed and apocalyptic mirror of reality; In this world, circumstance is the source of tragedy, and the grimace produced by this tragedy is what rules its form.

Esperpento is an exploration about the rejection of the different and the dehumanization of the stranger. Why the foreigner (who looks different) is often shunned, despised and criminalized?

This virtual universe will work primarily as an immersive interactive installation and performance its first iteration will take place in the Fall of 2018 at 3 Legged Dog Art and Technology Center in NYC.

Esperpento (a Spanish literary term for “monstrosity”) is a digital performance event - a charged visual performance that allows the viewer to see through a monstrous lens. Rather than using the “monster” to critique societal ills, Esperpento embraces strangeness and deformity in order to challenge conventions of beauty, familiarity, and what is “normal” or “native” to the human condition.

Esperpento is a series of 3D digital events which explores the dehumanization of the stranger. In a vivid sequence of natural and manmade disasters, rendered through a real-time video game engine, victims and perpetrators collide with increasingly interchangeable ethnic, class and cultural markers. These "Esperpento Events" are a digital meditation on the rejection of foreignness, and why we shun those who look (or appear to look) different from the people in the US.

Goya’s War Disasters and Black Paintings are, in substance and form, a template for Esperpento. These paintings are a testament of genuine protest, full of style and piercing opinion, that simultaneously document and comment on reality.

The Latino community and other minorities will be the main focus group for this production. The technology and the delivery of the animations are the major points for connection with these communities, basically promoting technology made by and for Latinos. (Victor Morales) 

Morales has launched a crowdfunding project for Esperpento. As writes:

Esperpento is also a Play! "Two Black Lights and a Red One" written by the great Billy Burns! The show is about the vicissitudes of a Blind Poet "Max Starpower" in a strange ultra violent place called - you guessed - Esperpento. We need your help to make this happen, so we started a crowdfunding campaign, please help us create this piece. For the record, all the money collected is ONLY to pay all collaborators that are working on Esperpento, and if you are a friend of Billy Burns, notice that one of the perks is to bring him to New York from Berlin so he can help directing and polishing the play. Spread the word!

Victor Morales born in Venezuela, received a Law Degree from Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, in Caracas, in 1990. During his time there he was an active member of the University Theater Group, where he directed several plays, including writing and directing Mueca 23, for which he won the New Director’s Prize in the Festival de Teatro Para La Ciudad (Caracas). Based in New York City since 1991, he completed a Master’s degree in Technology Applied to the Arts at New York University’'s Gallatin Division, in 1992. He is a director, performer and designer, whose work includes video animation and design, text, sound design, and movement. Since 2003 he has been obsessed with the art of video game modifications and has implemented different game engines into most of the works he has participated in or created.

LINK: Victor Morales' Esperpento at 3-legged Dog

Video: AAA Collective's ACID GAMES (2018)

JUNE 20, 2018/20 GIUGNO 2018
Aula seminari
Università IULM (IULM 1)
Via Carlo Bo, 1
20143 Milano

Filming: Lorenzo Mosna

AAA COLLECTIVE
ACID GAMES

In this talk, members of the collective AAA (Merle Leufgen, Gabriel Helfenstein, Troy Duguid, Chloe Langford, Jessica Palmer) will present their work and reflect on their collaborative practices which intent to propose an alternative to the often accepted thinking that the way we live and organize society is the only possible way. The aim of the talk will be to show how games and collaborative exchange in game development can help break the inertia resulting from the perceived lack of possibles disrupting the current status quo - in our everyday lives as well as in the production of art.

Active in Berlin, the AAA Collective comprises artists, designers, and creators from all over the world. Its founding members are Merle Leufgen, a software artist, curator and independent researcher, Gabriel Helfenstein, a French transmedia artist, curator, and writer, Troy Duguid, and Australian artist working with game engines, and Jessica Palmer, a Canadian multimedia artist interested in neuroscience.

LINK: AAA Collective

Game Art: Paolo Pedercini and Tenley Schmida's Glitchscarf (2018)

Paolo Pedercini and Tenley Schmida's Glitcscarf is "a playful performance and a system to mess with knitting patterns in real time. Design or glitch a scarf as it's being made, wear your artful errors." Created during a game jam at the Carnegie Mellon University Textiles Lab, Glitcscarf was developed with AYAB (All Yarns Are Beautiful), Processing, and a Brother KH910.

Pure genius.

LINK: Paolo Pedercini

Game Art: Phillip Birch, Office-Shadow (Persona) (2018)

 

Office-Shadow (Persona) is Philip Birch's latest project, six animated movies set on a single floor of a computer generated office building. Think of The Stanley Parable, only weireder. Each video acts as a single chapter of a longer narrative which is told through a first person perspective. By remediating the aesthetics of videogames, Birch is upgrading contemporary art as a whole. The videos also juxtapose Greek mythology and role playing games. Ludic themes pervade Birch's oeuvre, like Entering God Mode, Oubliette and The Hand of God. After the Flesh, an homage to David Cronenberg's masterpiece eXistenz, even features a gamepod. 

Philip Birch, After the Flesh, installation.

Philip Birch (b. 1978, Detroit) is represented by Lyles & King and his recent solo exhibitions and performances include Milespires and Reliquaries, Lyles & King, NY; Entering God Mode, Jack Hanley, NY; The Crown of Modernity, 47 Canal, NY; The Hand of God, Essex Flowers, NY; The Chair After Its Method of Implementation, Cleopatra’s, NY.

LINK: Philip Birch (via the mighty Daata Edtions)

Game Art: Peter Burr's Pattern Language (2016)

Developed with a video game engine, Pattern Language is Peter Burr's 2016 colossal multimedia project. A mesmerizing composition patterned in black and white Pattern Language pays homage to John Conway's Game of Life. According to Burr, the work is the result of his "ongoing practice designing modern day labyrinths; dense self-supporting structures that emulate living organisms." Burr created the project as part of his residency at 3-Legged Dog in Lower Manhattan where he spent time observing transit patterns through New York’s various megastructures. Burr is interested "in the way our own universe may operate on a similar set of discrete digital rules, bursting from a few small pixels into a life of patterns from screen to screen." The work also exists as a single channel video. 

Peter Burr (b. 1980) is an artist from Brooklyn, NY, USA specializing in animation and installation

LINK: Peter Burr (Images and videos courtesy of the Artist)