GAMESCENES

EVENT: ELISA SANCHEZ (MAY 27 - JUNE 9 2022, ONLINE)

AU-DELÀ DU DÉSERT FLOU, PLUS AUCUNE SAUVEGARDE N’EST POSSIBLE

Digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound 43’, 2021, France

Created by Elisa Sanchez

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

Born in Toulouse, France in 1997, Elisa Sanchez is likely France’s most well known artiste-astronaute and a recent graduate of the Haute école des arts du Rhin Mulhouse, Strasbourg. In 2021, she completed her thesis project, Le Cowboy et Le Astronaut under the supervision of Anne Foret. Her first machinima, Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible, was screened at the international film festival Cinéma du Réel in March 2022.

“I’m tired of playing cowboy” says Elisa Sanchez, referring to her experience with Red Dead Redemption 2. To make spice up things, she uses cheat modes and modifies the original game. Such intervention allows her to discover weird architectures, bizarre landscapes, and bottomless rivers, among other things. So she begins a metaphysical journey into the Wilder West to escape her concrete “house arrests” due to the Pandemic lockdown. The result is a slow, contemplative, meditative machinima situated at the intersection of video art, video essay, and video diary. A warning: if you cross the blurred desert, you won’t be able to save your progress.

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EVENT: GAME UP (JUNE 1-26 2022, BERLIN, GERMANY)

Elaine Hoey, A Blind Eye, 2021

GAME UP

Open: June 1 - 26 (Preview: 18:00 - 21:00, Thursday June 2)

Wednesdays – Fridays 13:00 - 19:0

Saturdays & Sundays June 11:00 - 19:00 

Free entrance

transmediale studio

Gerichtstrasse 35

13347 Berlin

Germany

 

This is a killer exhibition. Highly recommended. (MB)

 

press release

GAME UP seeks to get under the skin of our increasingly digital planet as a springboard to new thinking and new action through the work of  artists, Alan Butler, Elaine Hoey, Conor McGarrigle, Rosa Menkman,  David OReilly and Paper Rad/Cory Arcangel. GAME UP is a reckoning, a rear mirror view and a look at the future of our hyper-connected world.  

What are the rules of engagement in this electronic superhighway and who is policing them?  What of our digital shadow and its instantaneous monetisation? How are race and gender played out in the digital space? By turning the technology on itself, the artists in GAME UP create ways to consider and expose this hidden world. The viewer is brought deep into virtuality by means of narratives and experiences that question and confront the digital contract.

Conor McGarrigle, practicing artist and lecturer in Fine Art in the Technological University, Dublin, reminds us in his Electronic Superhighway (2022) of the richness of historical material, even in the short decades since the internet was founded and early ‘70s telemental art.

Artist and  lecturer in Fine Art at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Elaine Hoey’s walk-in VR installation/performance brings the viewer awkwardly face to face with an Oracle far removed from its Delphic forebearer who might predict a different kind of future.

Alan Butler represented Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021, as a founding member of the collective of artists and architects, Annex. GAME UP presents Alan Butler’s 20 minute video Mondo Cane (2018), a journey through a sumptuous John Berger-like sequence of images and sounds mined from Grand Theft Auto.

Rosa Menkman is an artist, lecturer and pioneer of glitch art. Her work Glitch Studies Manifesto promises hope for what glitch might offer by suggesting disintegration might democratize society.

LA-based David OReilly works with animation, Augmented Reality and gaming. For GAME UP, the artist presents 4004 (2021), a free-standing resin monolith in which an Intel microchip - The Intel 4004 originally released by Intel Corporation in 1971 – has been preserved, resembling a factice out-of-place. The sculpture also exists as an NFT.

Chiptuner Paper Rad and video and game artist Cory Arcangel’s work, Super Mario Movie (2005), is a 15-minute movie programmed onto a Mario Brothers cartridge, in which we see the plumber evolving in a chaotic, corrupt and glitchy world.

 This exhibition is supported by Culture Ireland and curated by Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, with assistance from transmediale Festival of Art and Digital Culture, Berlin.

LINK: GAME UP

EVENT: GRAND THEFT ARTAUD (MAY 29 2022, ATHENS, GREECE)

Sam Crane

Grand Theft Artaud: Live performance and spectatorship inside online video games

May 29 2022, 6 PM

Athens Digital Arts Festival (ADAF) FutuRetro

Athens, Greece

What happens when you try to perform Shakespeare inside Grand Theft Auto Online, a game space notorious for its aggression and gratuitous violence? You might expect the other players in your server to respond with heavy weaponry, perhaps a mini SMG, or a compact grenade launcher. And indeed, this is often what happens. Yet occasionally you may come across someone who responds in an entirely unexpected manner … In this talk Sam Crane will show how, by integrating the world of classical theatre with the chaotic, youthful and truly diverse realm of online gaming, we can open up fascinating new dramatic frontiers for both artists and audiences.

Sam Crane (UK) is an award-winning video artist and actor. In a theatre career spanning twenty years he has been critically acclaimed for his performances at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, in The West End and on Broadway. In the guise of his alter ego, Rustic Mascara, he attracted over 50 thousand views in two weeks to his radical attempts to perform Shakespeare inside GTA online. His films have been screened at contemporary art and film festivals worldwide. He won the Critics’ Choice award at Milan Machinima Festival MMXXII, and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2022. He has recently been awarded funding by the British Film Institute to make a documentary film about this work. He is one of six international emerging artistic researchers in the PEERS pre-PhD programme of the Department of Performing Arts and Film at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDk).

The Athens Digital Arts Festival (ADAF) is an annual international festival dedicated to exploring the relationship between art, science, and technology. Showcasing contemporary digital art forms from a diverse global community of artists and scientists, ADAF has been representing Greece internationally in digital arts since 2005 and is the first institution of its kind to be established in the region.

LINK: Grand Theft Artaud

LINK: Sam "Rustic Mascara" Crane

NEWS: VRAL IS NOW ON PATREON

We are happy to announce that online platform VRAL is now available through Patreon. Here's the curators' spiel:

We are using Patreon to build a community for all appreciators of machinima and game videos situated at the intersection of video art, experimental cinema, contemporary art, and avant-garde gaming: we believe that Jack Conte's platform is ideally suited for bringing together people sharing the same passions and interests.

Our primary goal is to produce a deeper, broader understanding of machinima as an artform and through Patreon we will make VRAL more sustainable in the long term, provide a compensation to all artists involved while maintaining full creative and curatorial independence from external sources, such as institutions and/or sponsors.

Although our monthly program comprising two VRAL exhibitions accompanied by an-depth interview will remain freely accessible on vral.org, we will significantly expand our critical and curatorial efforts by introducing exclusive, platform-specific content, such as articles, essays, video essays, interviews, and a variety of perks, including discounts for books and special events, such as the Milan Machinima Festival. Currently we offer three subscription options corresponding to different tiers (official, all-access, VIP) priced at 3, 6 and 9 euro per month respectively (sorry we do not accept cryptocurrencies at the moment). The content is in English.

Introduced in April 2020 amidst a global pandemic, VRAL is a uniquely curated game video experience, offering screenings of machinima selected on their cultural relevance, artistic achievement, and innovative style. Often presented only in the context of new media art festivals, film retrospectives, and exhibitions, these works best represent the variety, ingenuity, and creativity of game-based video practices. An online space that provides access to a range of diverse voices supplementing/expanding the Milan Machinima Festival, VRAL celebrates a new generation of digital filmmakers and artists.

So far, we curated two seasons comprising 43 exhibitions overall. In 2021, we published a book collecting all the interviews. The second volume in the series will be available soon and we will share a sneak preview through Patreon.

Finally, VRAL Season 03 dropped May 13 2022 with Felix Klee's My paws are soft, my bones are heavy.

This season will be going more experimental than ever. You have been warned.

The VRAL subscription platform on Patreon is accessible here.

EVENT: FELIX KLEE (MAY 13 - MAY 26 2022, ONLINE)

My paws are soft, my bones are heavy

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound (stereo), 4’ 57”, Germany, 2021

Created by Felix Klee, 2021

vral.org

 

Can an artificial intelligence dream? Apparently, yes. In this oneiric short, it imagines itself as a virtual mountain lion wandering through digital landscapes. After jumping off a cliff, the animal dives into the ocean, looking for some tranquility. Written by an artificial intelligence, narrated by a text-to-speech converter and shot within a modified video game, My paws are soft, my bones are heavy is blatantly post-human.

Felix Klee is studying documentary filmmaking at the University of Television and Film in Munich, Germany. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich — where he studied time-based media under Julian Rosefeldt and painting under Pia Fries — Klee previously studied painting under Thomas Hartmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and was a guest student at Universidad de las Artes Aguascalientes México. He co-founded the ReKollektiv, a collective of media artists and directors working towards the democratization of footage and a collectivist approach to film editing. From 2020-2022 he served as an advisory board member at Locarno Film Festival. Klee lives and works in Munich, Germany.

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VRAL is now on Patreon

EVENT: CONTROL ALT PLAY: LUDIC ALTERNATIVES ON CONTROL (MAY 12 - NOVEMBER 12 2022, ZARAGOZA, SPAIN)

CONTROL ALT PLAY: LUDIC ALTERNATIVES ON CONTROL

May 12 - November 12 2022

Curated by Luca Carruba and Eurídice Cabañes

Produced by Zaragoza City Council and the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, through Etopia Art and Technology Centre,

Vernissage: May 12 2022, 7:30 pm

eTopia

Avda. Ciudad de Soria, 8 50003 – Zaragoza, Spain

 

Control Alt Play proposes a journey through 24 works by national and international artists. From the interactive or playable pieces, visitors can extend their visit to the exhibition up to four hours and enjoy a multisensory experience through sight, hearing, smell and touch.The exhibition that is the result of a collaboration between Zaragoza City Council and the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, will be presented next Thursday at 9.30am by the Director of the Foundation, Daniel Sarasa, and its curators Eurídice Cabañes and Luca Carrubba, members of the ArsGames association. ArsGames is an international non-profit organisation that promotes and manages cultural projects related to video games and technology based on art, pedagogy, scientific research, inclusion and participation.

 

Patrick Lemiueux, Octopad, 2018

Antonin Fourneau, GhostPad, installation, 2009

About the notion of control in videogames by Luca Carruba and Eurídice Cabañes

Playing video games feeds the pleasure of learning to control complex systems in order to achieve certain predefined ends. We want the visitor to understand the different ways in which video games relate to control and how video games place players in an ambiguous tension between discipline and rebellion against the strict logic of the game algorithm. The practice of gaming, played by more than 2.7 billion players worldwide, demonstrates that there are multiple ways to coexist within this tension. With digital games it is possible to imagine new worlds and different ways of relating to each other: we can realise utopias of liberation but also stage fantasies of domination. Or we can break with all of them. The act of playing in virtual environments offers the possibility of being, at the same time, subjects and objects of control.

Credits of the exhibition
Curated by: Luca Carrubba and Eurídice Cabañes - Arsgames
Artists: Patrick Lemieux, Aida Navarro, Alejandro Cura, Mathias Klenner, Javier Laspiur, Robin Baumgarten, Foone Turing, Sofía Balbontín, Joan Lavandeira, Keiichi Matsuda, Mónica Riḱic, Román Torre, Antonin Fourneau, Galamot, Fictiorama, Luca Carrubba, Eurídice Cabañes, Maria Ibarra, Gianluca Saporito, AAA Collective, Guim Camps - Sindicado Virtual de Mods, Rabia Williams, Nidal Nijm Games, Jose Sanchez, David O'Really, Xavi Manzanares, Draw me a píxel, Arsgames.
Production Coordination: Blanca Perez Ferrer - FZC
Executive production and editing: Trazacultura
Editing: Municipal Brigades and Etopia maintenance officers.
Production assistants: Julieta Averbuj and Marga Avendaño
Exhibit Design: Kaori Project, Raquel Clemente Muñoz
Graphic Design: Buenu, Col-lectiva Gràfica
Communication: Laura Montañés- FZC
Technical coordination: Guillermo Malón-FZC
Education: Pilar Martín- FZC
Responsible for content: Elena Giner Smart City Service
Mediation: Noray Collective
Exhibition produced by Etopia Art and Technology Centre through the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation.

LINK: Control Alt Play

EVENT: MACHINIMA, THE NEW AVANTGARDE (MAY 6 2022, ONLINE)

 

Media Innovation Circle #11
May 6 2022 @2pm-3pm (Lisbon Time)

Zoom link https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/86896643186

Free (registration required)

Machinima. How a vernacular practice became a new artistic avantgarde
Speaker: Matteo Bittanti, IULM University, Italy
Moderation: Pedro Cardoso, University of Aveiro

In this talk, Matteo Bittanti discusses the origins and the evolution of machinima, a genre of video art that deliberately appropriates and repurposes video game content, providing an overview of an ever expanding practice. Bittanti argues that although machinima emerged both in vernacular and avantgarde contexts, it the the latter that has evolved in remarkable ways, while the former has largely plateaued. The talk will touch upon several examples of artists engaged with contemporary machinima and chart the possible future of the medium.

DigiMedia (Digital Media and Interaction Research Centre) presents the Media Innovation Circle, an opportunity to explore the digital media landscapes. The Circle consists of a series of scientific moments for discussion on new approaches, practices, methods, and techniques supporting media innovation. It will be a monthly cycle of online conversations with national and international experts doing research on digital media and interaction, which may take the form of keynote talks, seminars or workshops. There will be time for a short talk by the invited guest, followed by discussion and Q+A. The sessions will be online and the link will be shared with the registered participants. If you wish to join this Circle, please Register.

LINK: MATTEO BITTANTI MIC #11

GAME ART: TOTAL REFUSAL + JAN-WIEGER VAN DEN BERG'S DECONSTRUCTING THE BRIDGE (2022)

A new work by guerrilla collective Total Refusal in collaboration with artist and curator Jan-Wieger van den Berg created with/in Battlefield V. As the collective writes,

Together with the local artist and operator of the Besienderhuis residency Jan-Wieger van den Berg, the media guerilla Total Refusal walks through the digital replica of the area next to the city of Nijmegen within the video game Battlefield V. This Dutch town and its famous bridge appear in many World War II shooters, famous for its bridge which played a crucial role during the liberation of Europe. While van der Berg is using his avatar to walk through the devastated battlefield he explains particular events, reconstructing the history of a digitally estranged Nijmegen and its famous bridge. The absence of fighting on the battlefield reveals the catastrophe of fighting itself: As the essence of war is destruction, bridges are torn down only to be reconstructed in moments of peace.

Full video:

LINK: Total Refusal

LINK: Jan-Wieger van den Berg

EVENT: SJORS RIGTERS (APRIL 22 - MAY 5 2022, ONLINE)

The Virtual Frontier

digital video, color, sound, 3’, 2020, The Netherlands

Created by Sjors Rigters

vral.org

The popular video game Minecraft exemplifies the inner contradictions of the digital age. Lauded by many pundits as a highly creative form of entertainment, the so-called “digital LEGO” is a powerful vessel for neoliberal ideologies and hyper-capitalistic imperatives, with its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, and exploitation. An effective indoctrination tool now pervasive in thousands of US elementary schools, Minecraft is a techno-dream of endless growth, a manifesto for the perpetuation of devastating patterns of consumption, competition, and destruction. Informed by colonialist principles, its gameplay elevates numbing grinding routines into a recipe for the good life, casting the player as both a conqueror and an entrepreneur. In his video The Virtual Frontier, Dutch designer Sjors Rigters brings to the foreground the toxic message of one of the most successful video games of all time.

Sjors Rigters (b. 1995) is a graphic designer specializing in visual identity and editorial design. After receiving his BA in Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, he opened his own studio. Sjors lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

 

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GAME ART: ILARIA PANDINI'S ROAMING_NOWHERE (2018)

Roaming_Nowhere is a video art project created by Ilaria Pandini at Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, Italy. As Ilaria was playing Skyrim, she encountered an interesting bug that allowed her to walk in the sky and on the water. She decided to record her experience. As Ilaria writes, "I was surprised and amazed by the weird terrain and level structures I discovered roaming in those infinite lands of something I assume it is an unfinished level in the game." Soundtrack: Jeremy Soule's Sovngarde. Ilaria lives and works in Modena, Italy. 

LINK: Ilaria Pandini