GAMESCENES

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: GAMEGIRLPOWER'S MUSCLE GIRLS (2019-)

Phenomenal, uncanny stuff from GameGirl Power: muscle fetish, femdom fandom, and virtual steroids like it's raining. She has been making short films of female muscle and strength fantasies since 2013. As she writes: "What started with mods of Street Fighter and others games has since become a real filmmaking effort." She originally dedicated her YouTube channel "to strong women in video games and art, hoping to demonstrate that there is beauty in physical strength, and that there is an alternative to portraying female characters as skinny dolls." Eventually, she began producing at least four videos per month on Patreon, working with other artists and developers; each production is "scored, edited, choreographed and in beautiful 4K UHD definition." What's not to love?

LINK: GameGirlPower (all images and videos (c) GameGirlPower).

GAME ART: JORDAN BARUCH'S MIDNIGHT RAINS (2019)

In Jordan Baruch's machinima, "a farmer, enticed by the appearance of a mysterious figure in his town, discovers his existence is arbitrarily criminalized by a militant policeman who chases him into poverty and isolation." Shot entirely with/in GTA V and edited with Premiere Pro, Midnight Rains was created by a New York-based screenwriter, filmmaker and video artist Jordan Baruch.

LINK: Jordan Baruch

GAME ART: EDDIE LOHMEYER'S MAPS (2019)

A new machinima work by Eddie Lohmeyer:

Maps is an experimental machinima film that uses composited gamespaces to generate seductive forms of abstraction. Created through appropriated game footage of map walkthroughs, the film produces colorful swirling and gyrating game fragments by blending the dynamic motion of avatars as they traverse giant gameworlds. Here, color mixing each game overlaid upon the other creates vibrant rhythms of pixels that continuously explode and swallow themselves. These psychedelic sequences are accompanied by a warped recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4, F Minor, Op.36 resulting in a visual symphony; a synesthesia of fractured spaces with the changing pitches and echoes of orchestral movements. Following in the traditions of avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Tony Conrad, Maps explores the material contours of game engines and the 3D environments they render by transforming familiar gamespaces into a kaleidoscope of ever-changing polygons. (Eddie Lohmeyer)

Lohmeyer’s work explores the intersections among body and technology, particularly in how interactivity can open participants to novel sensory and perceptual experiences. Through installation, sculpture, and video these media interventions prompt a politics of the body that reconsider our habitual encounters with technologies through new avenues of play and engaging with unfamiliar and uncanny interfaces. These works upend and play with the media we have grown up around and have a nostalgic affinity for, often through intentionally deconstructive approaches: glitch, physical modifications to hardware, and assemblage. The bizarre and playful encounters with these strange media unveil the normal attitudes and perceptions of technologies that have become a mundane extension of our bodies, while also questioning the knowledge frameworks through which we perceive and sense the world via media artifacts. Lohmeyer is also an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Nicholson School of Communication and Media at the University of Central Florida. 

LINK: Eddie Lohmeyer

EVENT: GAMEPLAY. VIDEO GAME CULTURE (DECEMBER 19 2019 - MAY 3 2020, BARCELONA, SPAIN)

GAMEPLAY. Video Game Culture

19 December 2019 - 3 May 2020

Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona

Inauguration
18 December 2019 - 19.00

7.00 pm Audiovisual performance by Alba G. Corral & Tutu

 

Dates and hours
19 December 2019 - 3 May 2020
From Tuesday to Sunday, 11.00 - 20.00

Curated by Óliver Pérez Latorre, Jérôme Nguyen

Gameplay journeys to the origins of video games, analyses their language and highlights the impact they have had on popular digital culture and on art and society. The exhibition is designed as a space for recreation and reflection where visitors can play and (re)discover video game culture. Since their popularisation in the seventies and eighties, video games have developed as an expressive and entertainment medium and now occupy a central space in our imaginary to the point that, today, it is impossible to understand contemporary society and culture without relating them with video gaming.

Gameplay takes a look at the history of the medium, video game language, experimentation and artistic innovation, and critical and political video games.vThe exhibition also raises the issue of the increasing gamification of society: from mobile games to YouTubers and electronic sports (esports) to so-called serious games, educational video games with applications that go beyond entertainment. With 28 game points, from the first arcade and historic computer games to the new immersive options, Gameplay is devised as an exhibition where visitors can play and, at the same time, understand and enjoy video game culture from a critical viewpoint. The show pays particular attention to Catalan production, especially pioneering works, recent indie creations and local artists, and university projects.

Gameplay. Video Game Culture is an extended adaptation of Gameplay. The Next Level, designed by and first presented at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

LINK: GAMEPLAY

GAME ART: HUGO MONTEMBEAULT'S VERTIGE (2019)

Vertige is a relatively rare example of a machinima created by combining gameplay footage from different games - Downward (Caracal Games, 2017), No70: Eye of Basir (Oldmoustache Gameworks, 2017), Rememoried (Vladimir Kudelka, 2015), Stairs (GreyLight Entertainment, 2015), Superhot (SUPERHOT Team, 2016), The Beginner's Guide (Davey Wreden, 2015), The Tape (Kazakov Oleg, 2015), The Town of Light (LKA, 2016) - captured by the Author. All glitches seen in the machinima were generated through databending and misalignment techniques using Audacity.

Hugo Montembeault is a lecturer in video game studies at the University of Montreal and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Film Studies of the same institution. He works as a research assistant for the “Video games Observation and Documentation University Lab” (ludov.ca). His main research studies the expressive, critical, and political potential of glitches to determine how their subversive nature shapes game design, gameplay, and gaming culture. His second area of interest examines how videoludic self-reflexivity and meta-referentiality impact the player experience. Others of his contributions focus especially on the subject of gameplay archives and the discourse analysis of the video game specialized press. In collaboration with Maxime Deslongchamps-Gagnon, he cohosts a French academic podcast called Profil Ludique dedicated to the in-depth analysis of the walking simulator through the lens of genre theory.

LINK: Hugo Montembeault

GAME ART: KARL MUNSTEDT'S GRAND THEFT HOMO (2019)

Karl Munstedt's Grand Theft Homo is an ongoing project comprising mods, hacks, and queer-ings of Grand Theft Auto V intended to subvert and obscure the hetero-masculine tropes embedded within the algorithms of the game. New mods are added to an online repository, which will augment the GTA world over time piece by piece. All mods are published as open-source files and include instructions for their implementation. Aspart of his Queertopia initiative, Munstedt has created the Fagbus, Billboards and Atrazine Store (related to his previous project Something in the Water).

Karl Munstedt is an artist and technologist living and working in Brooklyn NY. In his practice, he employs technologies like gaming, augmented reality, and the web to explore future, destruction, and fantasy. He graduated with a BFA in digital art from Pratt in 2018.

 

LINK: Karl Munstedt

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: TOTAL REFUSAL'S HOW TO DISAPPEAR. DESERTING BATTLEFIELD (2019)

Total Refusal, How to Disappear, machinima, 2019, 20:06

A game video essay on the nature of war - both "real", that is, unmediated, and its remediation through ludic means - How to Disappear. Deserting Battlefield is a profound, moving, and enlightening meditation on topics ranging from the weaponization of nationalism to the ideology of physical exercising in military contexts.

The artists, who previously visited a virtual New York to illustrate the neoliberal principles informing the logic of urban spaces in digital games (see Operation Jane Walk), appropriated Battlefield V to highlight the contradictions of "playing war". Embracing the role of the spoilsport, the collective Total Refusal - Digital Disarmament Movement examines the practice of deserting in online gaming situations. The approach is not necessarily new - consider Joseph DeLappe's dead-in-iraq (2006-2011) project which turned American's Army on its head and elevated the artist to the role of the activist, or the creative deserter (something that was subsequently parodied by Eva and Franco Mattes with Freedom, 2010). However, in How to Disappear, the anti-war message is simultaneously more explicit and more subdued. Total Refusal's machinima is a collection of in-game performances in which several characters refuse to play. Instead, the kill themselves by jumping off cliffs (an homage to Brody Condon's seminal Suicide Solution, perhaps) or targeting a standing pole with their machine guns, surprised by the resilience of the pennant. 

In DeLappe's performance, the artist/player refused to play according to the rules. Instead, he entered the online US Army recruiting game in order to manually type the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person who perished in the Iraq war. As Delappe wrote, dead-in-iraq "is essentially a fleeting, online memorial to those military personnel who have been killed in this ongoing conflict. My actions are also intended as a cautionary gesture." How to Disappear, on the other hand, is more open to interpretation: the narrator provides contextual information, but no definite didactic takeaways or explicit warnings about the implications of militarization. What it does, unequivocally and convincingly, is demonstrating that the bridge separating "real life" and the simulation is much shorter than one may think. 

The artists provide remarkable commentary upon the most puzzling aspects of the game, e.g. the aforementioned, inexplicable indestructibility of flags - which are imbued of that sacred aura that often justifies the most vile acts of "patriotism". In other words, these are not bugs but features: ideology mostly is hegemonic. Implicit, not explicit. How to Disappear is metagame walkthrough, a Let's play sui generis that focuses on the game mechanics to bring to surface the embedded ideologies, thus completely disrupting the banal excuse that close textual analysis of games is unwarranted and unnecessary because, well, "it's just a game", the abused "common sense" approach to gaming that validates its values and messages a priori while simultaneously dismissing them as harmless. In all cases the uncanny nature of the game is highlighted not with incredible stunts or masterful maneuvers ("high performance play", as Henry Lowood put it), but by simply showing the characters' aspect and basic moves, like pointing a gun or crawling on the ground. The banality of such actions, emphasized by a fixed, lingering camera, is deeply unnerving. 

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

Related: Swings Don't Swing and Friendly Fire

GAME ART: JONA KLEINLEIN'S HIDDEN CONFLICTS (2019)

Jona Kleinlein, Hidden Conflicts, machinima, 23' 05", 2019

Jona Kleinlein is a multi-media artist working with film, video and installation living and working in Norway. He is interested in exploring the increasingly porous boundaries between filmmaking, video games, and simulation. Hidden Conflicts is Jona's new short, created as a final project for his B.A. in Moving Images at Nordland College of Art and Film in Norway. Jona calls it a hybrid documentary, a game video essay that uses Arma 3 to document the MilSim scene (i.e., an activity that strives to realistically simulate the experience of armed conflict, often taking place in video games, and enacted by civilians). In a private email, Jona explains that he selected Arma 3 to shoot his documentary because of its incredible modding community, which makes filming extremely flexible. "It was important to me that my in-game character would be a real cameraman using a 'real' camera - says Jona - so if I would film somebody within the game environment, they would know. That worked like magic. There were several awesome mod creators that have created incredibly sophisticated camera models." Jona was invited to discuss his project to a roleplaying group via discord : "I pitched my idea to the whole group and they were as excited as I was, given the roleplay potential having a press officer onboard. I personally tried to roleplay some sort of cameraman character as well." The entire process - from shooting to post-production - took approximately six months. "All the interviews are made ingame, recorded with screen capture software and Discord. The conversations of the other players are mostly in-game and in so called 'debriefs' of the players." Jona says that the conflation of reality and simulation was a truly powerful experience. Before creating Hidden Conflicts, Jona spent several months inside The Witcher 3 to learn about filming in three dimensional worlds. "Machinima has really opened my eyes and now I see video games in a completely different light. There is so much untapped potential, loopholes, and stories to be found that the creators of the videogame never intended. Video games perfectly captured the zeitgeist" Jona adds. "Filming inside a video game can quickly become a political matter and I like that. I find hard to communicate that aspect to people that are unfamiliar with video games: their understanding of the medium is really basic, and thus they won't understand what I tried to achieve with Hidden Conflicts." The film has not been released yet, but Jona is submitting it to various festivals around the world and it truly deserves to be seen.

 

LINK: Jona Kleinlein