New Statements is a new media exhibition by Chris Howlett that showcases an installation of interactive and screen-based machinima works that were developed from 2016-19 for his PhD. This practice–led research project explores the operations of a ‘techno-stice’ that demonstrates digital technology's capacity to generate dissensual space in the form of new subjectivities and ethico-political perspectives in contemporary art.
Chris Howlett, Joystick Drama, 2017-2019
LINK: Chris Howlett
Suzanne Treister, Fictional Videogame Still/Q, 1992 (via Akron Art Museum)
OPEN WORLD: VIDEO GAMES AND CONTEMPORARY ART
ONE SOUTH HIGH
AKRON, OHIO 44308
United States of America
According to a 2015 Entertainment Software Association survey, 155 million Americans play video games. Visual artists are gamers too, yet video games are rarely examined as a major influence on contemporary art. Open World draws attention to this phenomenon through the presentation of artworks including painting, sculpture, textiles, prints, drawings, animation, video games, video game modifications and game-based performances and interventions by makers who self-identify as artists.
The artworks in Open World reference a broad cross-section of games, ranging from early text adventure and arcade games to modern massively multi-player online roleplaying games and first-person shooters. Participating artists are influenced by some of the most beloved video game franchises including Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, The Sims and Final Fantasy.
The exhibition’s title refers to open-world video games, which allow a player to roam through a virtual world, freely selecting their objectives. The title also draws attention to the rich opportunities video games offer for creative expression. Through games, artists build immersive, alternate words. They use digital games to create meaning through imagery, music, sound effects, animation and narrative. The rules governing the experience of playing a video game can express a viewpoint and encourage critical thinking or empathy by directing the player’s attention to systems at work within the real world.
As part of Open World, the Akron Art Museum is calling for submissions of video games and table top games from developers, students and game-creators for Open World Arcade, a day-long indie game event held at the museum on Saturday, December 7, 2019. Click here for more Information or to submit your game.
Tim Portlock, Clone, 2012, inkjet print. (via Akron Art Museum)
TRAVELOGUE
by Matteo Bittanti
Release date: May 15 2019
Features: Softcover, 148 pages, color illustrations
Format: 6×9 in, 15×23 cm
Language: English and Italian
ISBN: 9780368668197
Price: $22.99
I'm very happy to announce that my latest book, TRAVELOGUE, is now available from Concrete Press in bilingual edition (English/Italian).
TRAVELOGUE is a survey of audiovisual artworks made with or inspired by video games. Using machinima and interactive installations, fifteen artists examine the virtual automobile as medium, message, technological commodity, status symbol, interface, and prosthetics. Created through a process of appropriation and remix, these works lie at the intersection of fiction and documentation, performance and simulation, video art and experimental cinema.
This book is an extended catalogue of the exhibition TRAVELOGUE that I curated between September 7- 11 2016, in Mantua, Italy as part of Festivaletteratura 2016, featuring artworks by Max Almy and Teri Yarbrow, Hugo Arcier, Dave Ball, William Beaudine, Bob-Bicknell Knight, COLL.EO, Clint Enns, Matthew Hillock, JODI, Kristin Lucas, Victor Morales, Leonardo Sang, Palle Torsson. Available in bilingual edition (English and Italian) TRAVELOGUE is the follow-up to MACHINIMA. 32 conversazioni sull'arte del videogioco, which was released in 2017.
You can purchase a copy of TRAVELOGUE on Blurb orAmazon US It will soon be available on Amazon Italy.
TRAVELOGUE è una rassegna di opere audiovisive – machinima ed installazioni – realizzate per mezzo dei videogiochi. Quindici artisti internazionali esplorano l’automobile virtuale, ivi intesa come mezzo e messaggio, tecnologia e status symbol, interfaccia e protesi. Frutto di appropriazione e remix, queste opere si collocano all’intersezione tra narrazione e documentazione, performance e simulazione, videoarte e cinema sperimentale. Questo libro è il catalogo ampliato della mostra TRAVELOGUE curata da Matteo Bittanti nel settembre 2016) a Mantova, nell’ambito di Festivaletteratura 2016, con opere di Max Almy e Teri Yarbrow, Hugo Arcier, Dave Ball, William Beaudine, Bob-Bicknell Knight, COLL.EO, Clint Enns, Matthew Hillock, JODI, Kristin Lucas, Victor Morales, Leonardo Sang, Palle Torsson.
LINK: TRAVELOGUE
Buy more! Buy bigger! Buy better! "Now for sale in the SaveMe Oh shop at Marketplace. Fully 3D animated art for which you need not only a wall but also a floor. The animated Animesh SaveMe is included in the artwork." Available here.
LINK: Save Me Oh
Mikhail Maksimov's The Death of Father Men is a "neuro crime-story" based on machine learning. The film focuses on the brutal assassination of the ecumenic Russian Orthodox priest, scholar and theologian Alexander Vladimirovich Men, aka Father Men, a controversial figure in Russia during the second half of the 20th century. The Death of Father Men was selected for the Locarno Film Festival 2018 and it's available for a limited time on the awesome online platform Vdrome. Also, don't miss Vladimir Nadein's interview with the artist. Here's a salient passage:
VN: Speaking of your love for gaming and game development, being inside the game, experiencing it rather than walking it through—how important is it for you?
MM: It’s quite logical. As I said, it’s interesting to excerpt the chunks, the concentration of life and kind of hold it in your hands, examine it. GTA 5 has a non-linear video editor, it allows you to combine bits of life filmed on different cameras into one. By clicking REC in GTA 5, before working in the video editor, you can record the life of the whole state of California at that moment. And when you start editing, you work with this life. This state’s life piece is served to you like a piece of cake. And then any cat running down the street could catch your eye and you’d be able to work with that cat. That is the point: you film not the thing you want, but the whole imagery procedure and later when you realise why did you film it: not because your character bumped oddly into the corner, but rather because this cat hit you. So, you could focus your efforts on it. This game allows you to save moments in their rich diversity rather than in its flatness, it’s kind of pseudoscientific discipline. The pseudoscience of digital physics. Actually, there is such notion, it’s not pseudoscience, it has substantial grounds and advocates, including physicians.
Mikhail Maksimov manages almost impossible: he combines heavy Russian mysticism where theosophy and cosmism are intervened with the spirits of nature, with the contemporary form of glossy pop culture — 3D-graphics. It is this gap that creates wow-effect for the audience when you remain stuck to a video-work or computer game.
LINK: Mikhail Maksimo
FUNCTION, a new Digital & Electronic Art Festival Mallorca at the Centre Cultural Casa Planas, will debut on May 24 2019.
This year’s theme is innocence:
Digital art focuses on how reality is modified by the growing influence in our daily lives of new circumstances closely linked to automatization. Ranging from critical perspectives to exploring the possibilities of magic through technology, digital art pushes at the limits of our experience and definition of art itself. Above all, it defines in real time our relationship with an omnipresent technology.
The festival showcases videos, performances, webart, sound art and much more.
COLL.EO, Reasonable, machinima, color, sound, 2018
The video section includes machinima from COLL.EO and Ignacio Bosch's project Travelling without moving, a videogame designed as an auto executable app or as an immersive RV videogame that invites the player/spectator to embark on an eternal journey where the combination between magic and the mythical join his/her exploration desires. During the path, the player/spectator will find different elements and situations that would generate a reflection on matters as nature, borders, loneliness and fear.
Ignacio Bosch, TRavelling without moving, 2018
LINK: Function
Fernando Villela, Damn, Time Flies, Installation video, shot, edited, and displayed on a cracked iPhone SE, 2018.
A new work by Fernando Villela, the artist behind Procedural Generation, an in-game photography project developed with Grand Theft Auto V.
Fernando Villela is a photographer from São Paulo (b.93), currently living and working in New York. A diligent observer, his subject matter is the everyday, the living experience, the shared existence. He believes it is here to be witnessed, to be observed. With interests in existentialism, urban life, and the systems that operate (the invisible hands that orchestrate), Fernando looks and aims his camera to the action unfolding around him, surveying the sidewalk, the buildings, the day and its inhabitants.
LINK: Fernando Villela
PLAY.GROUND II: Video Game Art from Hong Kong
Curated by IP Yuk-Yui
May 10 - August 18, 2019VIDEO GAME ART GALLERY
2418 W Bloomingale Ave Apt 102
Chicago, IL 60647
Opening Reception Friday, May 10, 6-9pm
With its distinctive urban landscape and rich cultural legacies, Hong Kong has always been a great source of creative inspiration for video games. Hong Kong is one of the most frequently depicted locations in video games, alongside New York City and Tokyo. As both a physical place and a cultural icon, Hong Kong unquestionably occupies a unique position in the video game imaginary.
Against this cultural context, PLAY.GROUND II features a collection of video game and game-inspired artworks by five Hong Kong-based media artists: HUI Wai-Keung, IP Yuk-Yiu, Vvzela KOOK, Alan KWAN and Edwin LO, providing an extended showcase and a creative overview of the distinctive state of Hong Kong video game art and its recent development. Originally shown in Tokyo Arts and Space, this is the first exhibition of its kind to tour to North America.
LINK: VIDEOGAME ART GALLERY
stills from Algorithmic Oracle, 9 channel moving image installation on screens or tablets or a single channel video., 2018 -2019, 8:12 min
In one of the most sophisticated projects with The Sims (the third chapter, to be precise) since Angela Washko's Free Will Mode (2014-2017) and Jacky Connolly's Anhedonia (2017), Letta Shtohryn tackles algorithmic narratives and what if? scenarios:
Algorithmic Oracle attempts to grasp multiple realities at the same time. Letting a simulation game algorithm decide according to its own standards how a real-life event could have unfolded. One of the scenarios was witnessed IRL. SIMS3 used here as a way to employ a "higher" algorithmic power to find out possible "what-if" scenarios of the experienced event. All the players in the video are crafted to fit their real characteristics and looks. The game starts every scenario with the single directed action, controlled by the player. After the action is completed the game runs scenarios based on its own probability algorithm without interference resulting in a multitude of outcomes. The work is available on Daata Editions.
Letta Shtohryn works predominantly with media art,sculpture, installation, text and intervention. Her academic background is in Photography (Art School Vienna); Philosophy and Sociology (University of Vienna); MFA Digital Art (University of Malta, 2016).
LINK: Letta Shtohryn
Beyond The Door, curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight for Daata Editions, featuring Bob Bicknell-Knight, Peter Burr, Kara Gut, Tomasz Kobialka, Cassie McQuater, Georgie Roxby Smith.
Daata Editions commissions artist video, sound, poetry and web. This new, logical and innovative way to collect art is designed as a native platform to a new generation of artists who work with moving image and sound. Limited edition artworks can be viewed and acquired as digital downloads.
LINK: Daata Editions