GAMESCENES

CALL FOR ENTRIES: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2021 (DEADLINE: DECEMBER 15, 2020)

The fourth edition of the MACHINIMA FILM FESTIVAL will once again take place at IULM University (Milan, Italy) during the Milano Digital Week, which celebrates the driving forces that are reshaping art, culture, and technology of Italy’s most vibrant city.

Filmmakers and video artists engaged in the practice of appropriating, repurposing, and remixing video games are encouraged to send us their work for consideration. All submissions will be judged by an international panel of jurors comprising scholars, curators, and critics. A Critics' Award will be awarded to the most groundbreaking work.

Screenings of selected machinima will be curated around different themes and presented in different sections. The most interesting submissions are those which seek to capture or highlight a specific facet of contemporary life, from politics to art, from violence to creativity, from technology to ideology, through the aesthetic lenses of digital gaming.

The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2020. 

The full program will be announced in February 2021

Please carefully read our simple submission guidelines and requirements below before sending your work.

INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL FOR NEW MEDIA ARTWORKS GUIDELINES:

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL defines machinima as any digital video made using video games technology (game engines, game tools, assets such as characters, items, environments etc.).

Submissions must feature machinima made with specifically with video games (not virtual worlds, e.g. Second Life).

Submissions must be 10 minutes or less in length. The minimum duration is 2 minutes.

Submissions must have been produced between January 1, 2020 and December 15, 2020.

Multiple versions of the same machinima will not be considered.

Acceptable submission formats: Digital video files only.

Acceptable exhibition formats: mp4, avi, mpg, Quicktime file (ProRes 422).

All applicants must complete the official festival submission form located on filmfreeway.com

One-time, nominal submission fee: 15 euros payable via PayPal to the festival organizers. Submissions that have not been accepted will not be refunded.

The applicant holds the sole responsibility of copyright clearance of any copyrighted material in the machinima.

The submission must include an accompanying artist statement/description no longer than 500 words.

The MMF is under no obligation to provide comments regarding submitted machinima to any applicant.

Submission deadline: December 15, 2020

LINK: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2021: CALL FOR ENTRIES

GAME ART: PETRA SZÉMAN'S MONOMYTH: GAIDEN / MASTER OF TWO WORLDS (2020)

Petra Széman, Monomyth: gaiden/ Master of Two Worlds, 2020, digital video, color, sound 10' 40"

Petra Széman's monumental Monomyth: gaiden series has reached its destination. With the latest and last installment Monomyth: gaiden/ Master of Two Worlds, Széman's the meta-referential, self-reflexive series that pay homage to Skyrim, among other things, is now complete. The grinding of everyday life acquires a whole new meaning in an endless loop of identity play. The penultimate episode, Return, was recently exhibited on VRAL.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like immersive installations. Her practice is centered around instances in which real life can be experienced as fictional. Using a virtual version of herself as a protagonist across various digital realms, she explores liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction both on- and off-screen. Rejecting the idea of cyberspace as a radically alternative realm, Petra walks the line situated between dystopia and utopia. Petra is a recent Fine Art graduate from Newcastle University (2013-2017) and has exhibited since graduation at NEoN Festival in Dundee, Scotland; Big Screen Southend; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, as well as various galleries across the North East of England. She is currently based in Tsukuba, Japan, developing new work as a recipient of a research scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture (2018-2020). 

LINK: Petrà Széman

EVENT: VRAL #6_BRENTON ALEXANDER SMITH (JULY 17 - JULY 30 2020, ONLINE)

THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW

Digital video, color, sound, 7’ 01”, 2020

July 17 - July 30 2020

Introduced by Luca Miranda

Things are different now (2020) is both a variation of The Soft Crash (2020 – ongoing) and a complementary, consequential conversation with Brenton Alexander Smith’s other works I Feel Like a Nervous Wreck (2019) and Inverted Black Box (2020). All these works center on an impossible dialogue between the human and the machine. Things are different now tests the limits of the physics simulation in the driving game BeamNg.drive. The video shows a twitching car located in (or rather, on) a multi level car park environment. The jerky motion makes the vehicle look vulnerable and fragile, but the absurdity of the situation has comical undertones as well. Crashforms, the name given by the artist these hybrid artifacts, are both living corpses and the embodiment of one’s desires. In Things are different now, the machine is no longer a human prosthesis or appendix. It is transfiguration.

Brenton Alexander Smith is an Australian artist whose work explores the relation between the human and the mechanic, and the affective and sentimental responses generated through this relationship. Smith deliberately avoids narrative structures, preferring instead an apparently chaotic openendedness. Imbued with a sense of uncanny, his work transports the viewer into media res, that is, in a series of always already unfolding events. Smith received a Bachelor in Visual Arts in 2014 at the Sydney College of Arts in Australia and took part in several group and solo exhibitions. He exhibited at Kudos Gallery in Sydney, Australia and at The Wrong Biennale (2019) in Valencia, Spain. His solo exhibitions include I Feel Like a Nervous Wreck (2019) in the virtual gallery of Closed on Monday Gallery and Inverted Black Box (2020) in the Black Box Space in Sydney.

WATCH NOW

GAME ART: KIM HEECHEON'S SLEIGH RIDE CHILL (2016)

Kim Heecheon, Sleigh Ride Chill, single channel video, 17' 27", 2016

In the 2016 single channel video Sleigh Ride Chill, Kim Heecheon combines three different aesthetics and themes a live-streaming session of a video game play, an online suicide club and a cautionary tale of a leaked sex tape, which come to represent the subject in a digital world in South Korea: decentered, disembodied, and disarticulated through video gaming, face swapping, virtual reality. Sleigh Ride Chill features both filmed and found footage with CGI to comment upon the soulless state of mankind in contemporary Seoul where losing a smartphone means losing everything. 

Born in 1989, Kim Heecheon is a Korean Asian Modern & Contemporary artist who studied architecture. His work was featured in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Serpentine Gallery and the Art Sonje Center. 

LINK: Kim Heecheon

GAME ART: TOM DAVIES VALLS' VIN DIESEL’S ALTERNATIVE GUIDE TO BARCELONA (2020)

Inspired by Operation JaneWalk by Leonhard Müllner and Robin Klengel (a tour of New York through its representation in the videogame The Division 2), Vin Diesel’s Alternative Guide To Barcelona is a video essay providing an accurate account of the history and culture of the Spanish city through the eyes of a virtual Vin Diesel. His avatar from the 2009 video game Wheelman (Vin Diesel) frames the entire movie, which culminates with a powerful meditation on the City's inexorable gentrification process. Clocking at around 30 minutes, Vin Diesel’s Alternative Guide To Barcelona comprises video game footage, archive footage from a variety of sources, and video shot by the artist. The time-lapse showing the rise and rise of Barcelona is truly breathtaking: it looks like something out of SimCity or Cities: Skylines. As Tom Davies writes,

Vin Diesel is re-imagined as a knowledgeable local guide, his soft gravely voice leading us through turbulences past and present. The narration, just like the video, is a composite of both literary and historical accounts documenting the huge transformations that have grown to characterize the city, as well as incorporating my perspective as someone who was born here and has experienced it’s most recent history myself. 

Tom Davies is a media-tinkerer from Barcelona, Spain. He studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at University of Barcelona. He’s interested in images as vessels of information and mystery. Today, he thinks the purpose of art, perhaps, is to trick people into listening to each other.

LINK: Tom Davies Valls

RESOURCE: ART JOURNAL, SUMMER 2020

The Summer 2020 issue of Art Journal is now available in print and online and it features an outstanding selection of essays and articles on the relationship between art and video games, including contributions from guest editor Soraya Murray, Tracy Fullerton, Dorothy R. Santos, Eugénie Shinkle, Alenda Y. Chang, Hava Aldouby, and COLL.EO, i.e. Colleen Flaherty and Matteo Bittanti, with a project titled The Long Road of Silicon.

The cover cover features Walden Pond, from Walden, a game (USC Game Innovation Lab, 2017), video game, designed by Tracy Fullerton (screenshot by Tracy Fullerton).

The digital version is free to explore through September 30th.

EVENT: VRAL #5_THOMAS HAWRANKE (JULY 3 - JULY 16 2020, ONLINE)

SHADOWS:ULTRA

Digital video, color, sound, 9’ 30”, 2019

July 3 - July 16 2020

VRAL

Introduced by Luca Miranda

Shadows:ULTRA shows overlapping animal shadows within the Dunia game engine, a software fork of CryEngine designed by Kirmaan Aboobaker while working at Crytek. Thomas Hawranke filmed the individual images from the monitor with a Kodak Tri-X 7266 eight millimeter camera, and subsequently exposed, cut, and again digitized the film material. The limited resolution of the shadow maps within the game engine is negated by the grain of the film material. The soundtrack was created by assembling various field recordings created in the 1930s by Ludwig Koch, a musician and animal voice collector.

Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern in his practice is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and is currently finishing his practice-based PhD at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of Susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the Next Level Festival in Essen and the Weltkunstzimmer in Düsseldorf. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: THE ENDLESS FOREST, AURIEA HARVEY & MICHAËL SAMYN (JUNE 23 – JULY 7, 2020)

Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, still from The Endless Forest, online multiplayer game, 2005/2020-ongoing.

bitforms gallery x Small Data Industries presents:
The Endless Forest, Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn
Streaming online June 23–July 7, 2020
bitforms.art/stream
 
bitforms gallery is proud to present The Endless Forest by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn as the second work in a series of streaming generative artworks, presented in collaboration with Small Data Industries. The Endless Forest is an online multiplayer game where players interact as deer in a magical forest. There are no specific goals to achieve or rules to follow in the forest—players are encouraged to engage with other deer and explore and find magic in the wilderness. Access to this work has been offered online as a free download since 2005, given that users have a Windows machine and a fast 3D videocard. However, this unique collaboration with Small Data Industries allows viewers to access The Endless Forest in a live format without a Windows machine or downloadable files. In this configuration, the artwork is self-playing—referenced as Deer Observation Mode by the artists—and oscillates between a peacefully sleeping deer to variable glimpses of the lush forest and social interactions with other players (deer). (BITFORMS)

Auriea Harvey is co-founder of Tale of Tales. Net art pioneers, she and Michael Samyn have been creating award winning independent games and digital artworks together for the past twenty years. From multiplayer deer screensaver The Endless Forest to IGF Nuovo prize winning sex game Luxuria Superbia to the extreme politics of Sunset to technicolor horror fairy tale The Path; Auriea has designed, modeled, and experimented with the medium of polygons inside game engines. Her philosophy is to do whatever it takes, whatever she can, to get across a concept. Using digital and analog techniques, drawing from diverse cultural references, she creates works of subtle (and not so subtle) expression. Her emphasis is always on what it means to be human with your finger on the button. She is currently creating paintings, sculptures, and experiments with VR. She teaches in Kassel, Germany, and Milan, Italy.

Michaël Samyn is half of Tale of Tales, an artist couple that has been masquerading as an independent game development studio for 12 years during which they published 8 games - The Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path, Fatale, Vanitas, Bientôt l'été, Luxuria Superbia and Sunset -, each of which was met with equal measures of applause and consternation. Michaël sort of hates games. But he loves the medium that videogames use because he sees in it the possibility to continue the great tradition of art and culture that was rudely interrupted by the modernism of the 20th century. With a background in graphic design, furniture design, music, web design, net.art and videogames, and a passion for Old Master art and Christian architecture, Michaël currently explores the amalgamation of the sacred and the digital in Tale-of-Tales' first post-games project, Cathedral-in-the-Clouds.

To view this work streaming generatively, click here.

EVENT: VRAL #4_PETRA SZÉMAN (JUNE 19 - JULY 2 2020, ONLINE)

MONOMYTH: GAIDEN/RETURN

Created by Petra Széman

June 19 - July 2 2020

VRAL

Introduced by Gemma Fantacci

Monomyth: gaiden / Return (2019) is the third installment in the ongoing Monomyth: gaiden series (2018-). Structured around the trope of the hero’s journey, it investigates how real life might be experienced as a mediated narrative, focusing on such notions as digital identity, presence, memory, and storytelling. In / Return, the protagonist leaves the Underworld behind and returns to her so-called real life. But is such a reversion possible as the self is inextricably scattered across a network of virtual realms, platforms, and personae? Is narrative closure possible in the age of infinite scrolling?

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like immersive installations. Her practice is centered around instances in which real life can be experienced as fictional. Using a virtual version of herself as a protagonist across various digital realms, she explores liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction both on- and off-screen. Rejecting the idea of cyberspace as a radically alternative realm, Petra walks the line situated between dystopia and utopia. Petra is a recent Fine Art graduate from Newcastle University (2013-2017) and has exhibited since graduation at NEoN Festival in Dundee, Scotland; Big Screen Southend; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, as well as various galleries across the North East of England. She is currently based in Tsukuba, Japan, developing new work as a recipient of a research scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture (2018-2020).

WATCH NOW

GAME ART: LA IMAGEN RENACIDA: JON RAFMAN II (ONLINE)

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL may be over, but machinima keeps growing and evolving pretty much everywhere. 

Curated by Andrew Michael Davis, La Filmoteca Española introduced a new program titled La imagen renacida, which 

"explora los profundos cambios en la cultura audiovisual del siglo XXI y el papel del cine como parte integral de ello. Desde los 90, los avances tecnológicos han propiciado importantes cambios tanto en la producción como en la distribución del cine, pero quizás donde mas se haya notado esta revolución sea en el rol del espectador frente a la pantalla. Donde antaño el público se quedaba quieto en la oscuridad de la sala, ahora es protagonista y participante activo en la cultura visual que le rodea. Cada uno de nosotros cuenta hoy con un archivo de imágenes de nuestras propias vidas y herramientas para editarlas, así como acceso a miles de películas, juegos, vídeos o redes sociales, y nos movemos por ciudades atestadas de pantallas. Es un entorno audiovisual que arrastra al cine, incluso a su pesar, hacia un futuro imprevisible y plural."

["explores the profound changes in the audiovisual culture of the 21st century and the role of cinema as an integral part of it. Since the 1990s, technological advances have brought about important changes in both the production and distribution of films, but perhaps where this revolution has been most noticeable is in the role of the spectator in front of the screen. Where once the audience stood still in the darkness of the cinema, now they are protagonists and active participants in the visual culture that surrounds them. Today, each of us has an image archive of our own lives and tools to edit them, as well as access to thousands of films, games, videos or social networks, and we move around screen-crowded cities. It is an audiovisual environment that is dragging the cinema, even reluctantly, into an unpredictable and pluralistic future.]

Currently on display is the second part of a monograph on Canadian artist Jon Rafman:

Poor Magic (Jon Rafman, 2017) Canadá. 7’
Dream Journals (Jon Rafman, 2016-2019) Canadá. VOSE 18’
Disasters Under The Sun (Jon Rafman, 2019) Canadá. 8’

All artworks are subtitled in Spanish.

LINK: Filmoteca Española