GAMESCENES

EVENT: LARS PREISSER (NOVEMBER 10 - NOVEMBER 23 2023, ONLINE)

HOME/NOME

Video installation, SNES game consoles, animation, video, Hi8, miniDV, Bang & Olufsen 90s TV sets, hereby presented as digital video, color, sound, 4’ 16, 2021-2022, Germany

Created by Lars Preisser

 

NOME/HOME is an immersive video installation exploring the relationship between memory, interior design, and video games. Specifically, NOME/HOME recreates Preisser’s former Berlin apartment through the pixelated rendering of Mario Paint, breathing renewed life into the spaces he once inhabited. Participants traverse disorienting rooms as Preisser’s own voice echoes hauntingly around them. This audible tableau juxtaposed with the visual fragmentation of the gaming software creates a palpable sense of nostalgia and loss. Visitors are transported into uncanny reimaginings of real spaces that over time have been distorted by the urban forces of gentrification. By reviving the past through both analog and digital artifacts, Preisser contemplates the ephemerality of memory and the erasure of history in the built environment. NOME/HOME provides an entry point to meditate on the entwined nature of place, recollection, and selfhood within the ever-changing terrain of the city.

Lars Preisser is a multidisciplinary German artist whose work spans various media including weaving, drawing, and moving images. Born in 1984 in Lindau, Preisser holds degrees in textile art and media art from Otago Polytechnic and HGB Leipzig. His research-intensive projects result in intricate formations that address issues like gentrification, technology, climate change, and post-colonialism through a personal lens. Preisser’s family heritage and background in industrial machinery inform his practice. The artist has exhibited internationally at venues like Bauhaus Dessau, nGbK Berlin, and the contemporary textile art biennial Contextile among others. Preisser spent formative years in New Zealand before returning to Berlin where he currently lives and maintains an active studio practice.

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GAME ART: JULIANA HALPER'S CIVILIZATION (2023)

Juliana Halpert, My castles, archival inket print on cold press paper, found frame, unique, 32x41 inches, frames, 2023

press release

"Civilization by Los Angeles–based artist and writer, Juliana Halpert [...] reconstruct the artist's long-standing pastime playing the turn-based strategy video game, Civilization in which players lead a human civilization over several millennia. The exhibition centers around the artist’s chosen game character ueen Maria eresa, the eighteenth-century ruler of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire. Displayed throughout the gallery and domestic space, the text and photographs piece together Halpert’s built world within the game’s skewed historic and geographic realms.

In line with the fragmented and re-assembled world histories found in the game, Halpert’s photographs span various timelines and she has utilized multiple techniques for capturing and printing the work. While some images have been sourced and photographed or scanned by Halpert from within old history books, others have been captured directly by the artist in present-day California. The photographs and text works have then either been traditionally processed in the darkroom as silver gelatin prints or digitally processed as archival inkjet prints on cold press paper."

Juliana Halpert  Civilization, February 13 - April 16 202, Larder, Los Angeles; images courtesy of Larder; Photos: Evan Walsh 

Juliana Halpert (b. 1989, Montpelier, VT) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Halpert holds an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design (2020). Recent exhibitions include Plasma at Scherben, Berlin (2022); Animal at Gattopardo, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Everything at The Finley, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Wake up sleepers! at No Moon LA, Los Angeles, CA (2021) and The Goodbye Present at Kristina Kite, Los Angeles, CA (2021). She has contributed writing to Artforum, Bookforum, Aperture, Frieze, Art in America, and X-TRA, among other publications. 

LINK: JULIANA HALPERT

LINK: Civilization @ Larder, LA

GAME ART: ISABELLE FRANCES MCGUIRE'S LOOP (2023)

Isabelle Frances McGuire, Bust2{“Assassins Creed NPC”, “Normandy”, “New United States Flag”}, 2023. detail

Isabelle Frances McGuire, Bust1{“Elvis”, “Modern WarFare II NVG”}, 2023

animatronic Elvis bust, night vision goggles, wood, 66 x 17 x 20 inches, 167.64 x 43.18 x 50.8 cm

Isabelle Frances McGuire, SelfPortrait2 {“Ghost”}, 2023

PLA plastic, fabric, children’s tactical vest, cord, leather boots, metal, children’s knee and elbow pads, 49 x 29 x 24 inches, 124.46 x 73.66 x 60.96 cm

"In LOOP, Isabelle Frances McGuire fabricates icons of video games, television shows, and American popular culture to create a disorienting playground of re-enactments. While re-enactments are typically meant to honor the integrity of the past or reproduce a figure of fact or fiction, McGuire abandons the art of faithful imitation in favor of animatronic chimeras of readymade repetition.

On Level 1, the viewer is greeted by three sculptures sitting on wooden plinths modeled after those used in ballistics testing. Sitting at 5’ 6”, the plinths position the sculptures roughly at eye level with the artist. The viewer first encounters Bust2{“Assassins Creed NPC”, “Normandy”, “New United States Flag”}, a wax model of a non-playable character from the Assassin's Creed video game franchise. Monstrously unblinking, the chain-mail adorned bust stares the viewer down with the eyeballs of a berserk mutant. While static, a motion sensor embedded in the head of the bust triggers a sound bite from Call of Duty: WWII, depicting the Allies landing at Normandy. The muffled chorus of mortar shells and machine gun fire complements the New United States of America (NUSA) flag visible under the chain mail, which is taken from the dystopian future state of the multimedia Cyberpunk franchise. With its back to the assassin, a readymade Elvis Presley animatronic moves with mechanical jerks and gyrations.

Titled Bust1{“Elvis”, “Modern Warfare II NVG”}, the slowly deteriorating bust spits readymade hallmark quotes in an endless cycle of middle-American sentimentality. The ice blue irises of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll are obfuscated by a fully functional pair of night vision goggles modeled after the in-game equipment of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. What should serve as a novelty for gawking onlookers instead renders the viewer an unwilling target of tactical convulsions." (continues) (Max Hart, curator)

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Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994 Austin, Texas) lives and works in Chicago, IL. McGuire received a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo and duo exhibition include LOOP, King’s Leap, NYC (2023); Bailey Connolly & Isabelle Frances McGuire, Scerben, Berlin, Germany (2022); Dedicated to Those Who Continue to Dwell in Lightless Descent, King’s Leap, NYC (2021); Dresses Without Women, Mickey Gallery, Chicago (2020); Snafu, Shitshow, Clusterfuck, Julius Caesar, Chicago (2020); and P**** B**** Arena, Curated by Good Weather held at Et Al., San Francisco (2020). Recent residencies and awards include Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (2021), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2020), Artist Residency, Latitude Chicago (2019) and Alternative Worksite Residency Program (Founded by Linda Burnham and supported by the Robert Overby Estate) (2018).

Images courtesy of the artists and King's Leap Fine Arts, New York. Photos by Stefany Lazar.

LINK: Isabelle Frances McGuire

LINK: LOOP (April 20 to June 17 2023)

GAME ART: NICHOLAS ALOISIO-SHEARER'S BIG GAME HUNTING (2017)

Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer and Finn Marchant, Big Game Hunting, Bus Projects, 2017

Big Game Hunting examines the disjuncture between the material and the digital and how this separation has engendered an anxiety of the digital. Through the deconstruction and materialisation of fantasy role-playing video games Big Game Hunting interrogates how video games might shape and reflect human emotion, affect and desire.

Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer is an artist and independent curator currently living in Australia whose practice is concerned with the digital conditions of contemporary life. His practice engages with the cultural functions of imaging technologies and examines how networked cultures make use of the history of representation.

LINK: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

GAME ART: MARIO MU'S THE SUN, THE MAST OR GRAVITY (2022)

Mario Mu, The Sun, The Mast or Gravity, 2022 (video installation, HD, 7 min. ,wood panels)

Mario Mu has unveiled his latest video creation, titled The Sun, The Mast or Gravity, which delves into the intricate interplay of architecture and decay. This 7-minute film was crafted using the Unity video game engine and draws inspiration from the visionary architectural concepts of 20th-century Yugoslavian architect Vjenceslav Richter, which never came to fruition. At the core of Mu's work lies an intricate neural-like structure constructed from weathered steel cables, seemingly providing the life force for the virtual realm it inhabits. As these cables twist and coil, the surrounding architecture undergoes a mesmerizing metamorphosis. It transitions from an interpretation of Richter's unrealized concrete mast intended for the Yugoslavian pavilion to the haunting remnants of the National Museum of Aleppo in Syria, a casualty of the ongoing civil conflict.

As Mu writes in his artistic statement, this work strives to redefine our perception of space by merging the constructed environment with the echoes of destruction. Mu translates Richter's modernist visual language into a novel digital domain, the language of video games, skillfully arranging geometric forms and images into intellectually stimulating configurations. The result is a contemplative and cyclical exploration of the delicate equilibrium between construction and decay. Mu's video underscores the fragility of even the most ambitious architectural endeavors, as they ultimately succumb to disarray. Yet, from these remnants, new forms emerge, perpetuating the eternal cycle.

The Sun, The Mast or Gravity is the latest installment in Mu's. ongoing artistic venture, Sites of Encounter. It represents a groundbreaking utilization of video game technology to address key questions concerning human progress versus entropy. As Mu continues to refine his digital world-building prowess, anticipation builds around the possibilities his future works may unveil within the realm of new media art.

Mario Mu is a Berlin-based visual artist and director known for his work on research projects often presented as extended gaming platforms. His creative practice spans game design, 3D animation, performance, sound, and drawing. Mu holds a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, and an MFA from the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany.Between 2016 and 2017, Mu was actively involved with the Research Center for Proxy Politics. Since 2017, he has been an author and collaborator on a series of events held at various prestigious venues, including the TAP-Théâtre auditorium de Poitiers in France, V2 Rotterdam in the Netherlands, MGLC Ljubljana in Slovenia, MAAT Lisbon in Portugal, Play Co London in the UK, Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and several locations in Berlin, Germany such as Ufer Studios, Galerie gr_und, and Silent Green, among others. He has also participated in events in Zagreb, Croatia, including MSU, Pogon, and GMK. Mario Mu's digital and online projects involve collaborations with notable entities like AVYSS, Mizuha, The Killscreen, The Carillon, BoCA Biennial, Milan Machinima Festival, Gamescenes, Itch.io, Gestalten Publishing, FACT Magazine, Wrong Biennale, The School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe, STYLY, Lima Sky, Pivilion, and Inquiry Inc. His multidisciplinary work has made a significant impact on the intersection of art, technology, and gaming.

LINK: Mario Mu

EVENT: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2023: SHADOW WORK (JULY 6-16, TORONTO, CANADA)

Vector Festival 2023: shadow work

July 6–16, 2023

InterAccess
Unit 1
950 Dupont Street
Toronto ON M6H 1Z2
Canada

press release

Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices.

Vector Festival 2023: shadow work, curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi, engages the formal and informal and mundane and arcane ways that classification systems attempt to contain the messy realities of our lives and shape our conditions. Confronting the work that both maintains and disrupts these systems, shadow work presents interventions on labour, the calculability of human life, the ungovernable, the echoes and reverberations of colonization and propositions for new, “life-giving” languages.

Through a hybrid online and in-person program of exhibitions, performances, screenings, and workshops, this 10-day festival invites artists and audiences to come together as we navigate the systems uninformed of our humanity.

Details will continue to be announced at vectorfestival.org

Program highlights

shadow work
Flagship Exhibition, July 6–August 5, 2023
Curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi

Through AR, VR, solar power, and immersive projection, shadow workexplores classification systems in contrast with the messy reality of our lives.

Worldbuilding towards...
Game Jam, July 7–16, 2023
Curated by Bracy Appeikumoh

This participatory game jam encourages game makers to create worlds radically different from our current realities, ones that foster care, compassion, and community. Together, we’ll ask (and work to answer): what world would you like to live in?

Anthropo-digitalism
Multi-site exhibition, July 6–July 16, 2023
Curated by keiko Hart

How does the digital (re)animate our environments? How do we imprint our humanness upon the digital, and how does digitalness imprint upon us humans? Ruminate on your human/digital reflections with the anthropomorphic inventions of Marisa Fulper-Estrada, Jon McCurley, Kristin McWharter, Lorna Mills, Sunny Nestler, and Seth Scriver.

a language of bodies
Screening, July 12, 2023    
Curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa

This screening brings together artists who are each transcending sealed forms and exploding the classification systems which govern “bodies”. By engaging physical bodies, bodies of water, and bodies of knowledge, these artists are working in the spaces between, celebrating the undefined and uncontrollable.

ponyHAUS performance
Performance, July 14, 2023
Curated by ponyHAUS

In true hybrid fashion, you're invited to a night of moving in and out of screen-based worlds. Contrast and draw parallels between our IRL and URL lives, supported by a selection of experimental music performances.

A Very Human Screening
Screening, July 15, 2023
Curated by Insomniac Film Festival

Go outside! Touch Grass! Logging off has become harder and harder to do. Our jobs, our social lives and our societal infrastructures have all moved online. Our identities, our bodies even, are shaped by the internet. So what now? Do we fight harder for our three-dimensional lives, or do we submit to the digital one we have? Joining us in pondering these questions with Insomniac in the genuine, outdoor, real life world.

Festival After Party
July 16, 2023
Details TBA, stay tuned.

Workshop series

SinkInSync: Creating Interactive VR with Brainwave Data
Online via Zoom, July 8
Facilitated by Tiange Wang and Xin Feng

Explore creating interactive and responsive VR environments leveraging brainwave data using Unity3D, Muse Headband, and Oculus VR Headset (Muse Headband or the VR Headset not required to participate). Upon completion of the workshop, participants will have created a 3D environment with dynamic visual elements responsive to data, and obtained the knowledge to independently implement neurofeedback VR experiences with commercially-available tools.

Tiling into AI
In-person, July 9
Facilitated by Blaine Cambell and Mohamed Somani

Patterning is an accessible activity regardless of age and skill that has deep roots across cultures. It is also a way for people to connect in verbal and non-verbal ways—in the moment of the activity but also across geographies and time. Join us in a freeform pattern making workshop where participants create individual or group patterns using various coloured cut geometric mat board shapes. These creations will be augmented by an AI model which will insert a collaborative “buffer” to connect our creations and create a cohesive, continuous pattern.

Utopics
In-person, July 13
Facilitated by Geoffrey Pugen

In this workshop Geoffry Pugen will demonstrate how to create a labyrinth as a 3d asset and export a rendered video walk through of the scene. Using Unreal engine 5.1 and Blender 3.5

Making a Solar-Server: DIY Web Design & Eco Media Art
In-person, July 22
Facilitated by Imogen Clendinning

Learn about DIY Internet technology and solar-powered media with one of Vector Festival 2023’s exhibiting artists. Participants will be led through the creation of a static HTML web server hosted on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and a live demonstration on powering a microcomputer using solar energy.

Registration, more details, and updates with workshops soon to be announced. More programming announcements to come!

Keep in touch with us at @interaccessto on Instagram and at vectorfestival.org
If you have any questions about the Vector Festival or our programming, please email [email protected].

LINK: Vector Festival 2023

EVENT: LARRY ACHIAMPONG'S AND I SAW A NEW HEAVEN (MAY 4 - JUNE 17 2023, LONDON

Larry Achiampong, And I saw a new heaven. Photo credit: Reece Straw, Copperfield Gallery, 2023

 

Larry Achiampong

And I saw a new heaven

4 May - 17 June 2023

Copperfield Gallery

6 Copperfield Street
London SE1 0EP
info (at) copperfieldlondon . com
+44 (0) 7455 029002
+44 (0) 7845 594549​

Press release:

Referencing the unlikely trinity of HBO TV, video games and Christianity, the title drawn from dialogues from the game-turned-series The Last of Us and ultimately from the Bible encapsulates the references for Larry Achiampong’s second solo show at Copperfield. From computer games to church the cast of faces represented there has almost always been white. The already problematic status quo that church is high culture and gaming is low or pop culture breaks down here when one references the other, but the exhibition brings real game play for visitors into direct dialogue with Achiampong’s collaged paintings. 
 
“video games have had huge influence on my art work and the reality of their sophistication and cultural referencing is ignored by the rest of the creative sphere. It’s time for video games to take their place as context in the gallery while I work on my ultimate goal; a playable artwork. At its core gaming is storytelling, world building, fantasy, exploration and human culture in one”
 
What is missing still, trailing behind even film and TV, is minority representation in games. What scant references there have been to people of colour or the queer community for example have almost always been negative or derogatory with just one or two recent exceptions like Beyonetta. Why though when nearly half of game players in the US alone are people of colour? While the mechanics differ, this cause and effect of this uncomfortable fact can ultimately be connected to a similar peculiarity in religion.
 
Almost anywhere in the world touched by white missionary work, from the Philippines to Ghana, you can find congregations of colour surrounded by posters and imagery with an entirely white cast of God, Mary, Jesus, disciples and crew. The incongruity of a chalk white Jesus with his apparently middle eastern origins is hugely questionable, but in the context of countries that have been repressed by white western imperialism, the apparent perpetuation of these images by these congregations becomes even more unsettling. As a starting point for the works in the exhibition, Achiampong has selected a series of typical religious posters from Ghana to paint over. Their plethora of graphic and immediate imagery draws on a pastiche of dated advertising styles and, in turn, so does Achiampong’s response. While the Golliwog or minstrel show character is an uncomfortably recognisable icon of Britain and America's colonial past, the immediacy of this image when reduced here to an internet style avatar, belies its complex and often obscured history. Other more subtle painted edits and editions amplify the way in which these works question, disrupt and take ownership of these problematic legacies by obscuring parts of the posters. The frame on the face of each panel is custom made by hand by Larry in a nod to the idealised story of Christ as carpenter vs the realities faced by many undervalued manual work forces today. The framing style is comparable with the kind found in the humble places of worship Achiampong experienced as a child — grand in form but with no pretence of gilding or hiding the knots — in other words, strangely honest. 
 
Nearby, games like Bayonetta 2, The Binding of Isaac, and Blasphemous give context to the works for visitors through play. The Binding of Isaac was made in darkly humorous response to the game developers Catholic and Baptist upbringing which Achiampong’s childhood shares, and is loosely based on the Bible story of the same name, but has as much to say about childhood as organised religion. In their aesthetics and sounds, and references to literature and history, Blasphemous and Bayonetta 2 relate to Christianity – specifically, the Catholicism with which the artist grew up – and explore the problematic aspects of religion and blind Faith. An uncanny dialogue thus arises between these games and the artworks, from their use of racialised imagery, to that of language: Biblical commands, lifted from Latin; teachings from Psalms demanding control of the self under the guise of support. It is a question of independently analysing the instruction given to us by a ‘higher power’, of considering the self in the broader context of accepted traditions and behaviours.
 
It is the intro sequence from 2014 blockbuster game Bioshock Infinite that welcomes visitors to the exhibition. While part fantasy, the game draws on some of humanities darkest moments, and gives context to the kind of processes that have led to historic whitewashing across culture. The game is set in the fictional city of Columbia, founded by self-proclaimed prophet Zachary Comstock, and funded by the American government as a floating world's fair within the ideology of American exceptionalism. Worshipped as a prophet, Comstock has transformed the city into a theocratic police state, with the Founding Fathers of the United States venerated as religious icons. Play makes it clear that institutional racism and elitism are widespread in the city, with minorities serving as a labour underclass on the verge of rebellion.
Sound familiar?

 

LINK: And I Saw A New Heaven

LINK: Larry Achiampong

EVENT: WORLDBUILDING: VIDEO GAMES AND ART IN THE DIGITAL ERA (JUNE 10 2023 - JAN 15 2024, METZ, FRANCE)

Theo Triantafyllidis, Pastoral, 2019

 

Worldbuilding: Video Games And Art In The Digital Era

Centre Pompidou-Metz
1 Parvis des Droits de l'Homme
57020 Metz
France

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London

press release

Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”. Around a hundred years ago, in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the source of culture.

More recently, in his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that games, particularly video games, are a distinct type of art which “let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own”. As such, gaming has the potential to unleash powerful psychic forces. Video games have proven to be an effective tool for the development of training and strategy. Indeed, scientists have made good use of video games simulating biological systems to speculate on the possible origins and destination of life. Accordingly, video games as a digital art form offer a means for an existential quest beyond the embodied physical world and into the multiverse. By their very nature, they open the potential to imagine and build new worlds.

Several of the featured artists in the exhibit began making work that refers to video games as early as the 1980s while most of the others were just born around that time. For the works in this show, artists have addressed video games in various ways. Some have adapted their themes and visual style to make videos. Others have modified, hacked, and subverted existing video games. Finally, some have created their own video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist writes, “traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people…producing games with a very limited perspective. This is now changing rapidly… Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to create [their own] virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion”. Through these means, the artists are taking this format beyond pure entertainment value to probe social, political, and aesthetic questions. While video games have been the topic of numerous exhibitions in recent years, most of these highlighted their legitimacy as an artistic medium or focused on aspects of “game art”.

Worldbuilding is the first transgenerational, multinational show of this scope to examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their chosen form of expression. In so doing, this exhibit presents a plurality of voices and a multitude of perspectives.

With works by Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, Meriem Benanni, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Kim Heecheon, Institute of Queer Ecology, Rindon Johnson, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, Sturtevant, Theo Triantafyllidis, Suzanne Treister, Angela Washko, Lu Yang, among others.

LINK: Worldbuilding

See also

EVENT: SIMONETTA FADDA (MARCH 31 - APRIL 13 2023, ONLINE)

GAME OVER

One channel video (SD, 676x540), color, sound, 4’ 27”, 2002 Italy

Created by Simonetta Fadda

March 13 - April 13 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

Driving at night in the video game-like suburban French city of Enghien Les Bains can be an exciting or demoralizing experience, depending on the driver or, perhaps, on the filmmaker. Simonetta Fadda’s carscapes are both delirious and hyper-real, suggesting a toxic convergence of realities.

Born in Savona, Simonetta Fadda is an artist, educator, essayist, and translator. Her teaching activities include the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. Since the Eighties, she has been working with video art. Her artworks are featured in public and private collections in Italy and in Europe. She participated in major international events such as Movimenta – Biennale de l’image en mouvement, projet Mondes Flottants: Grandes Images, Nice, France (2017) and Parallel Program of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Institut Français d’Istanbul, Istanbul (2013). In Italy she was featured, among others, at Festival del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, Pesaro – Italy (in We Want Cinema: cinema e video di ricerca 2018, and in Satellite 2016) and Bergamo Film Meeting, Bergamo – Italy (2010). A prolific writer and critic, Fadda is the author of the seminal Definition zero: origins of video art between politics and communication (Costa & Nolan, 1999), the first Italian study on video as a medium of art and political activism, which was reprinted in an expanded format in 2017 by Meltemi Edizioni. In 2020, Franco Angeli published her new book, Media and art. She also translated into Italian and edited Gene Youngblood’s seminal book Expanded Cinema.

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EVENT: LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL (APRIL 28 - SEPTEMBER 17 2023, LIVERPOOL)

LuYang show at the Zabludowicz collection, London. (Credit: David Bebber)

LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL

April 28-September 17 2023

FACT Liverpool
88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ

 

Tokyo-based virtuoso LuYang astounds in a monumental opening of FACT Liverpool's 20th anniversary program with an exhibition of multimedia, playable video game works that transform the gallery into an interactive retrofuturist arcade. LuYang Arcade Liverpool invites visitors to embark on a journey through the prodigious artist's eccentric digital spaces, which merge the realms of anime, video games, and sci-fi. LuYang's interactive works are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking, immersing visitors in a world that is at once dark and bizarre. These works of art probe the concept of 'living on the internet,' inviting us to abandon binary understandings of identity, time, and space.

In LuYang's own words: "Creating a game is like constructing your own universe. The works exhibited in my solo show at FACT are interactive works - game works - from my art practices. The digital spaces I create are a meeting point of Buddhism, popular culture, and my research into neuroscience and technology, designed to stretch the exploration of morality, the mechanics of the human body and mind, and transcendence beyond the binary. Welcome to my worlds."

This upcoming exhibition is a testament to the power of video games as an art form, and a must-see for those interested in exploring the intersection between technology and art.

LINK: LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL