GAMESCENES

GAME ART: SAVEME OH'S BOOSTER NIGHTS (2021)

"Dance when the booster gets down": this is where we are now.

The virtual alter-ego of Oscar Wagenmans - a Dutch theatre director and actor - SaveMe Oh is an infamous character in Second Life, where she is often labelled as a troll, griefer and even virus. The artistic community of Linden Lab’s virtual world is terrified by the idea that SaveMe Oh could show up unannounced during a vernissage, creating havoc. In the attempt to prevent a possible raid, the sims (or rather her haters) have been trying to protect themselves by banning her since 2007, when Wagenmans first appeared online. SaveMe Oh’s interventions in Second Life disrupt both the social conventions and shared rules of the real world, which are replicated online. Why do people feel obliged to act in Second Life as if they were in IRL, instead of realizing their full creative potential? This is the key question posed by SaveMe Oh. This retrospective includes a series of absurd, irreverent, often grotesque machinima starring SaveMe Oh produced between 2012-2019.

LINK: SaveMe Oh

EVENT: HILLEVI CECILIA HÖGSTRÖM (JANUARY 7 - 20 2022, ONLINE)

A HAND IN THE GAME

digital video, color, sound, 35’ 08”, 2017, Sweden

Created by Hillevi Cecilia Högström

January 7 - 20 2022

vral.org

introduced by Matteo Bittanti

 

A hand in the game is a video essay documenting the artist’s experience with SimPark (1996), a simulation published by Californian game company Maxis in which players cultivate and manage a successful park. Developed by Roxana Wolosenko and Claire Curtin, SimPark was explicitly targeted toward children: its objective was to educate the young about ecology and biodiversity. SimPark was accompanied by a 77-page manual which included tips on how to incorporate the game in the curriculum. Twenty years later, the artist intentionally tried to “mismanage the park enough to terminate all living things” in order to bring forth the simulation’s underlying ideology, which is grounded in capitalistic values and neoliberal imperatives. Specifically, Högström played four iterations — titled Termination 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 respectively — by altering the main variables, from the ratio between tropical, desert, and cold regions to the degree of animal agency, not to mention the effects of climate change upon the flora and fauna. The more she played, the more she realized that SimPark is deeply flawed: a supposedly pedagogical aid becomes a tool of disinformation.

Hillevi Cecilia Högström was born in 1994 in Jönköping, Sweden. She is currently completing her M.A. in Fine Arts at Malmö Art Academy. Previously, she received a B.A. in Fine Arts at the Iceland University of the Arts. Her work is concerned with the Anthropocene, which she defines as “the point in time where humans became an actual geological force capable of reforming the surface of the planet”, and its effects on the world. Her recent exhibitions include A Hand in the Game (solo, 2017), Bachelor Exhibition, Kubburin, Reykjavík, Iceland, and Full Vision (2020), Jönköpings länssmuseum, Jönköping, Sweden, Af stað!, Norræna Húsið, Reykjavík, Sweden (2019), and the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018), Main Project, Moscow, Russia. Her video works were featured at several international festivals, including EXiS (2021), Seoul, South Korea, and Impakt Algorithmic Superstructures (2018), Utrecht, Netherlands. Högström works and lives in Malmö, Sweden. 

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GAME ART: JORDY VEENSTRA'S EXPERIENCE (2021)

The latest project by Jordy Veenstra, one of the most talented filmmakers working today with the medium of machinima, is titled Experience, a visual study of a virtual fairground from a multitude of perspectives. Veenstra used Virtual Rides III, a funfair simulation game developed by German studio pixelsplit in which the player is given complete freedom regarding the customization and control of an ever expanding number of funfair rides to develop a machinima. The result is a fascinating experimental, non-narrative short film released on New Year's Eve. The incredible camerawork was achieved with the "freecam adjustment mod", developed by pixelsplit.

As Veenstra explains on his website:

The project was almost two years in the making. Our fruitful collaboration started in late february 2020 with a simple proposition, and evolved into a fully fledged script and amazing looking endproduct. The recording process was finally started in early spring of 2021 on five different computers; out of which 2 windows computers and 3 macs. Can you tell the difference between the footage? Experience was originally coined as an idea a few years ago in 2016 when I decided I wanted to make a visual study of a real life fairground, and place additional focus on the lights, atmosphere, people, people flow, and the rides themselves. Inspiration was also found in a documentary idea I had carried with me with as long since 2010, during which I was researching the possibilities to make a full-length documentary of the local fair in the village I once lived in. Also, ever since I played VR3 since its release in 2017, I wanted to do something with a film inside of this magical environment.

Jordy Veenstra is a video editor, motion graphics designer, 2D animator, and experimental filmmaker based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In his practice, Veenstra connects art and narrative with technology and software through the medium of experimental film. His work examines often overlooked social and artistic concerns. His groundbreaking Depthmap was featured in the The Weird, The Eerie, and The Unreal program of the 2020 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL.

LINK: Jordy Veenstra

EVENT: GRAYSON EARLE (DECEMBER 10 - 23 2021, ONLINE)

Why don't the cops fight each other?

digital video, color, sound, 9’ 41”, 2021, United States of America, 2021

Created by Grayson Earle

Made with support from Media Art Exploration and Akademie Schloss Solitude

vral.org

 

Why don’t the cops fight each other? is a desktop documentary that chronicles the attempt by the artist to modify the behavior of virtual police officers within Grand Theft Auto V. This work also engages the modding scene that emerged around Grand Theft Auto, a community of people creating tools to modify the game’s environment, characters, and mechanics. While these mods allow for an almost infinite manipulation and transformation of the game features, one attribute seems completely immutable: the police officers in the game will never fight each other. Through an exhaustive forensic analysis of the game’s source code and interactions with mod developers, the artist illustrates the extent to which the cultural imaginary concerning the real world police is projected into the game space.

Born in California, Grayson Earle is a new media artist and educator. After graduating from the Hunter College Integrated Media Arts MFA program, he worked as a Visiting Professor at Oberlin College and the New York City College of Technology, and a part-time lecturer at Parsons and Eugene Lang at the New School. A member of The Illuminator Art Collective, Earle is the co-creator of Bail Bloc (2017), a computer program that bails people out of jail and Ai Wei Whoops! (2014), an online game that allows the player to smash Ai Weiwei’s urns. In 2020, he hacked the Hans Haacke career retrospective exhibition at the New Museum to criticize the Museum's efforts to union bust its employees. His artworks have been exhibited internationally. He is currently residing in Berlin, Germany, as a participant in the forthcoming Berlin Program for Artists.

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REMINDER: CALL FOR ARTWORKS_MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2022 : ONE WEEK LEFT!

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is an annual event showcasing audiovisual non-interactive works produced with video games otherwise known as machinima.

The fifth edition will take place between March 21-27 in Milan, Italy.

The call for submissions is open until December 15 2021.

Check out the past editions: MMF 2021, MMF 2020, MMF 2019, MMF 2018

LINK: MMF 2022

EVENT: GINA HARA'S AT THE END (THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9 2021, 7-8 PM, MONTREAL AND ONLINE)

Artist and filmmaker Gina Hara, the recipient of the 2021 Milan Machinima Festival's Critics Choice Award among other things, will deliver At the end, her residency presentation at Ada X, a feminist artist-run center based Montreal with a focus on media arts and digital culture tomorrow, Thursday, December 9th from 7-8pm (that's 1:00 AM – 2:00 AM CET). Inspired by the rise of AIs in mental health contexts, Gina Hara used the world of Minecraft as a backdrop for exchanges with an AI-powered chatbot. This process and the resulting narrative are documented in a short machinima film premiering on the day of the event. This will be followed by a discussion with Marie LeBlanc Flanagan and a Q&A with the public.

REGISTER AT THIS LINK

Présentation de résidence | vidéo + discussion
Jeudi 9 décembre, de 19h à 20h
En ligne | Inscription via ce lien
Avec Gina Hara
Discussion modérée par Marie LeBlanc Flanagan

Prenez-part à la présentation du travail que Gina Hara a produit en résidence chez Ada X! S’inspirant de l’essor des IA en santé mentale, Gina prend l’univers de Minecraft comme toile de fond pour faire émerger des échanges avec une amie chatbot en IA, développée spécifiquement pour ce projet. Ce processus et la narration qui en découle sont documentés dans un court film machinima, présenté en primeur le jour de l’événement et suivi d’une discussion.

« Alliant l’IA, les mondes virtuels et les récits qui en émergent, AI The End brouille la frontière entre l’humain et la machine tout en contemplant la solitude de la vie contemporaine. De nature autoréflexive, l’œuvre de Hara ne propose pas de parabole ni de solution aux problèmes de la société. Plutôt, à travers un design itératif, Hara contemple les rythmes lents de la solitude ainsi que nos relations naissantes avec les non-humains. » — Michael Iantorno

Cette résidence a bénéficié du soutien de Algora Lab, un laboratoire universitaire interdisciplinaire qui développe une éthique délibérative de l’IA et de l’innovation numérique

LIRE +

LINK: At the End

LINK: Gina Hara

EVENT: CHLOÉ DESMOINEAUX (NOVEMBER 26 - DECEMBER 9 2021, ONLINE)

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LIPSTRIKE

live recording of online performance

digital video (1280 x 720), sound, color, 10’, 2021 [2016], France

Created by Chloé Desmoineaux

vral.org

 

Originally created in 2016, Lipstrike is an online performance in Counter-Strike that uses an unusual device as a weapon: a lipstick. Each time the artist applies cosmetics on her lips, her gun unleashes a torrent of bullets. She broadcast her performances on Twitch, receiving thousands of snarky comments by angry gamers, which were subsequently collected and published in a limited edition booklet. Five years later, the artist has updated the original iteration for VRAL. One question remains: has anything changed since #Gamergate?

Interested in tactical media, hacking culture, and cyberfeminism, Chloé Desmoineaux creates media experiments through performances, installations, and hijacked video games. She is particularly concerned about the place given to women as well as dissident and “minority” people in the video game industry and she tries to create spaces of visibility and reflection to discuss these issues. She is a member of the Freesson Collective which focuses on supporting creative practices and electronic music. It also organizes events and workshops on digital art and culture. Co-organizer of the Art Games Demos (2017-2019) initiative with Isabelle Arvers, Desmoineaux has curated several exhibitions about the culture, aesthetics and ideology of gaming in the past decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She led several workshops on alternative controllers, glitch aesthetics, interactive animations, and video games. Desmoineaux lives and works in Marseille.

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EVENT: BENJAMIN HALL (NOVEMBER 12 - NOVEMBER 25 2021, ONLINE)

CROWDSOURCING

edited recording of live a simulation

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 6’ 08”, 2021, United Kingdom

Created by Benjamin Hall

vral.org

A live simulation created with Unity, Crowdsourcing examines the fatalistic relationship between predictability and chaos, and their conflation and obfuscation through systems of digital control. A large crowd congregates at the border of what Hall calls an “algorithmic predestination and aesthetic incoherence”. The crowd moves spasmodically: here the simulation does not reproduce the features of an ultra-detailed world, but rather its contours and contradictions.

Benjamin Hall is an artist, animator, filmmaker, game designer and writer. He received a BA Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art, where he led DS2020 Simulator, a student project that virtually recreated his peers’ cancelled degree show as a free and accessible game-based space. Featuring the works of 136 graduates, DS2020 Simulator was discussed, among others, by BBC One, BBC Radio Scotland, the List UK and more. Benjamin’s work was featured in The Wrong Biennale (2019), Visual Arts Scotland’s Graduate Showcase (2020), HomeBrew Digital Commissions (2020), and Digital Artist Residency (2020). In September 2020, he moved to Jonava, Lithuania to transform the local public library into a virtual archival simulation. In 2021 he led the development of and participated in spur.world, an in-browser virtual multiverse featuring 14 fully explorable sub-worlds. Hall lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

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GAME ART: LUCA MIRANDA'S SEX WORKER (2021)

Sex Worker is currently on display at

Pon de Replay

Mock Jungle, Bologna

October 16 - November 5 2021

Artist line-up: The Discreet Artist, -ness, Francesca Cornacchini, Valerio Veneruso, Carola Bonfili, Daniele Sciacca, Claudia Holzinger + Raphael Unger, Luca Miranda, Luca Grimaldi

Mock Jungle, a project included in the institutional program of ART CITY Bologna 2021 promoted by the Municipality of Bologna in the framework of Bologna Estate, continues its broadcasts from the Chapel of Santa Maria dei Carcerati in Palazzo Re Enzo, Piazza del Nettuno 1.

Playlist video, 24/7, curated by ISIT (Alessandra Cecchini, Federica Di Pietrantonio, Andrea Frosolini)

Luca Miranda, Sex worker, 2021, 54’43’’
The work is both an autonomous part and an integral part of a larger project focused on investigating and documenting the routines of NPCs that began in 2020. Here, the term routine is not only understood in the sense of "technical programming", but also as a dimension that lies parallel to and beyond our approaching, conceptualising and relating to virtual prostheses and simulacral identities. I have used - and I still use - three triple-A open world video games as a field of testing and investigation: Grand Theft Auto V (2013), Fallout 4 (2015), Rage 2 (2019). In this type of games, NPCs are interesting for a twofold reason: they represent a virtually real sociality and externalize different types of interstitial fractures with their pre-purposed function. They function - and conceptualise - not simply as a mere virtual counterpart of a simulated population, thus making explicit a real anthropological potential. What do NPCs do in their lives (expressed in seconds, minutes, hours)? Where do they go? In what way and why are their behaviours triggered that are opposed or complementary to the system that governs them? Are they subject to secret reactions and actions, or do they refer solely to their daily lives? And how is this supposed daily routine configured? In a way, their daily routines and our relationship with their existence are often no different from the 'ordinary' relationship between human beings. Take, for instance, the great subways: interfaces, screens and extras of flesh, bone, blood and synapses spurt - more or less quickly, more or less swirling - past each other without questioning each other's wandering. Instead, from an exquisitely technical perspective, NPCs often demonstrate that they do not respond (or counter-respond, as the case may be) to the roles imposed on them by the system, while others seem instead to be seduced and subjugated in an essentially infinite loop-cycle.  Sex Worker is the prolonged 'pursuit' of a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto V, a documentation of the behaviour of this type of virtualised identity subject. As such, it is (and is) invested with a series of rhetorics and idealisations. The work is inspired by both artistic theory and practice. On the one hand, the researcher W. J. T. Mitchell's questioning of the will of images, their organicity and their being alive and vital. On the other hand, the performance-routine of the artist Vito Acconci in his Following Piece (1969). A final source of inspiration probably concerns the unspeakable: fractures, fragments, archives and cognitive and mnemonic collections that have guided my practice up to this point, and of which, perhaps, I remember nothing. Luca Miranda is an artist, writer, curator and independent researcher that works and lives in Italy. His artist practice looks at the relationship between reality and simulation and at the historic and politic rhetoric that lies beneath. He is interested in investigating video game as text and critic tool to highlight its inner contradictions as well as the contemporary media culture’s paradoxes. Part of Miranda practice concerns about the analysis of the avatar figure, its functions, and purposes within culture and the videoludic. Some of his areas of work are machinima and game photography, together with experimentation with filmic and photographic traditional languages. In 2018 he co-founded Eremo, an artistic collective based in Milan that operates among the intersections of video game, sound art, performance and contemporary art. He actively collaborates with writer and researcher Riccardo Retez, with several projects underway. Since 2020 he is part of the Milan Machinima Festival curatorial Committee, a festival dedicated to machinima, Game art and cinematographic experimentation.

LINK: Luca Miranda

LINK: Pon de Replay

All images courtesy of the Artist

GAME ART: THE RUSSIANS PWNED THE 17TH BIENNALE OF ARCHITECTURE (MAY 22 - NOVEMBER 21 2021, VENICE, ITALY AND ONLINE)

 

 

In case you are wondering - I know you are - the answer is yes, Open—Russian Federation Pavilion is, by far, the greatest thing that ever graced the Venice Biennial of Architecture (May 22 - November 21 2021), which will end its majestic run in just a few weeks - game over is expected in less than a month from today, so you still have some time. A penetrating examination of the artistic, cultural and social role played by video games and digital environments in our society, the Russian Pavillion features not one, not two, but three outstanding artworks, specifically:

 

Sanatorium Anthropocene Retreat, a post-apocalyptic rendering of the Pavilion building itself, by artist Mikhail Maximov (don't miss the related Let's Play).

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic scenario: awaking to a deserted Russian Pavilion in Giardini, the game stages a fantasy-like performance in which the main character (the player) mutates between human and non-human entities – a robot, a virus, and a humanoid – navigating a derelict digital environment and trying to recollect what has happened.

Its Winter, 2019, a hauntological, first-player simulation of a post-Soviet suburban residential tower block during winter. This amazing sandbox game was developed by Moscow-based poet and musician Ilia Mazo and developer Alexandr Ignatov (aka sad3d).

 

 

Yuha’s Nightmares from Yuliya Kozhemyako (aka Supr). A simulation game about the nightmares that are tormenting the main character, Yuha, the virtual doppelganger of the game designer. This interactive dream disguised as a video game is set in a surreal world  full of strange things and unexpected events. The deeper part of Yua's consciousness is depicted through the "flip side" of the 3D world. The player is frequently stuck in textures, sees through mesh and wanders around at every level in «inappropriate» places. The glitches in the game are accordingly integrated to make for an intense and inusual experience.

 

For the past several months, the Russians also delivered an overwhelming amount of juicy video content, which is freely available on a variety of video streaming platforms including Vimeo, featuring, among other: Federico Campagna with Ilia Mazo, Paolo Pedercini aka Molleindustria, Keiken, and many more as part of their digital takes (DTO) program. There's enough material for three PhD dissertations, seriously.

 

Another highlight is Into the Sandbox, a three-part film program curated by Vladimir Nadein for Open exploring the interconnections between cinema, digital gaming worlds, virtual landscapes, and gamification, featuring modern masterpieces likeSwatted (2018) by Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, How to Disappear (2020) by Total Refusal, Hotel (2014) by Benjamin Nuel, My Own Landscapes (2020) by Antoine Chapon, The Letters About the End of the World (2021) by Dina Karaman, FeatherFall (2020) by Total Refusal, Swamp City (2021) by Alice Bucknell, AIDOL (2019) by Lawrence Lek, Feel My Metaverse (2019) by Keiken + George Jasper Stone.

The 2021 Russian Pavilion is commissioned by Teresa Iarocci Mavica, director of the V-A-C Foundation; curated by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli in collaboration with curator’s team (Erica Petrillo, Giacomo Ardesio, Vladimir Nadein, Liza Dorrer, and Dasha Nasonova) and managed by Anastasia Karneeva of Smart Art.

Final score: A sheer display of Game Art super-power. A new benchmark. Actually, no: a brand new paradigm.

 

LINK: Open_Russian Pavillion at the 17th Biennale of Architecture in Venice

 

All images courtesy of The Russian Pavillion, photos by Marco Cappelletti