GAMESCENES

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)

GAME ART: SÉAMUS GALLAGHER'S A SPACE AND PLACE FOR US ALL (2017)

Seamus Gallagher, falling in love with whatever loves me first, pigment print, 44” x 66”, 2017

I'm in love with Séamus Gallagher's a space and place all for us, a triptych featuring images created digitally using 3D modeling programs like Blender, as well as Unity, a computer game engine. As Gallagher explains,

images of these video game environments are then extracted into print form, which i use to construct complex, large-scale installations for me to photograph, encompassing the camera’s frame. in bringing these digital aesthetics into a physical space, these photographs exist as dense visual environments that blur the line between the digital and the physical, the real and the fake. by photographing myself inside these constructed spaces, i want to explore what it means for the body to interact within virtual, otherworldly spaces.

Seamus Gallagher's is a an interdisciplinary artist originally from Moncton, New Brunswick, and currently finishing his undergraduate with a double major in Photography and Expanded Media at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. His practice centres around constructing complex, colourful spaces for myself to interact within, blending photography with installation and performance.

LINK: Seamus Gallagher

GAME ART: TOTAL REFUSAL'S SWINGS DON'T SWING (2019)

The latest work by Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) is a 4-channel video installation that brings to light the intrinsic contradictions of video game environments, i.e. the designers' obsession to achieve photorealism and the Potemkin Village-like syndrome which informs their representational logic. Far from being functional, several simulated elements are just props: they look "real", but they do not perform as one might expect. Specifically, the collective underlines the complete lack of usability of playground structures within shooter games, where the function of swings and slides is purely decorative. Hence, swings don't swing, slides don't slide and carousels don't... well, you get the idea. Far from being interactive, virtual playground spaces are "dead space".

installation view, 2019

Swings don't swing was conceived as an installation in which four screens literally swing in the gallery room as to compensate for the counterintuitive stasis of their digital replicas. As they write in their accompanying text, "They document different attempts to interact with the dysfunctional objects, showing how difficult it is to actually play within a video game." It is somehow ironic that, in a shooter, playful structures are stripped of their playful affordances. The playground thus becomes an arena for violent conflict. Or artistic subversion, like in this case. In other words: if a video game totally refuses to play, Total Refusal plays with the video game. 

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

GAME ART: SU HYUN NAM'S SURROGATE_ BEING II (2019)

A fascinating take at simulation vs. representation, memory vs. concreteness. 

Surrogate Being is an interactive virtual environment exploring possibilities of affective relationships between humans and machines and mindful approaches in the computation process for their sustainable coevolution of human and technology. This work negotiates the discrepancy between memories and digital data of a nostalgic place through the process of recreating the artist’s hometown in Korea. The heterogeneity of algorithmic digital images and affective memories are interwoven in the 3D environment.

This virtual space bridges my mind and digital technology and invites participants to explore the mediated landscape with curiosity. As memories remain indistinct and disintegrated until we recollect, the landscape is destructed when no participant is engaged. If a participant is approached to the fragmented image and stand in front of it, it turns into a navigable landscape. As s/he moves her/his head to look at the other side of the landscape, the virtual camera in the scene changes its direction responding to the participants' movement. This interaction suggests a potential depth in the digital landscape we can look into, thus the monitor or the projected image becomes a portal into the mediated memory space.

As the virtual environment is transformed based on input data of participants' movement, the participant's body is affected by reactive virtual images again. In this way, their interaction begins to flow in the feedback loop and ultimately makes the human mind and algorithmic process indistinguishable.

Su Hyun Nam investigates the complex emerging identity and implicit conflict of a foreign being by reconstructing familiar landscapes as uncanny digital images. Living as an immigrant, I experience and observe multiple incongruities in the seemingly coherent public world - generated by competing social norms and clashing cultural perspectives, and my digital images mediate those fragmented heterogeneous experiences of the society. In this process, digital technology inspires my own personal searching in a creative and mindful way, and consequently, the computation process becomes meditative beyond the canonical rule-driven approach.

LINK: Su Hyun Nam

EVENT: LAST STOP (OCTOBER 4 2019, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA)

LAST STOP

At LIKE LIKE gallery

Friday October 4th, 2019
7-11 PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

A show featuring New Urbanist Games for Transit-Oriented Teens. Celebrate public transportation as portrayed / idealized / fetishized by videogames. Take an infinite bus ride! Ride an infinite bus! Master the controls of a handsome Deutsche Bahn ICE 3M class 406! Plan the most efficient subway system! Drive a trolley in a whimsical world! Plan your commute on a future-Pittsburgh transit map!

Works by: Turnfollow /// Dinosaur Polo Club /// Alexander Perrin /// Holly Gramazio /// Dovetail Games

 LINK: Last Stop