GAMESCENES

EVENT: BETWEEN WORLDS (JUNE 23 - SEPTEMBER 24 2023, LONDON)

Second Life (still), 2023, Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

Between Worlds

June 23 - September 24 2023

The Photographers’ Gallery

16–18 Ramillies Street London W1F 7LW

United Kingdom

 

press release

What happened to your first online game, website, social platform or virtual world?

Our everyday lives have been digitised and scattered through different spaces since the internet was created. Opening on 23 June 2023 – the 20th anniversary of virtual world Second Life – Between Worlds examines the digital folklore created by online communities and worlds. The social exchanges, digital artefacts and politics that inform our current experiences of online life are all explored in the exhibition.

Many virtual worlds – like Second Life and PlayStation Home – have been created and inhabited online, bringing close-knit user communities together. Second Life is a rarity to still be active – many virtual worlds appear and disappear within a few years. The end of many of these worlds, often linked to profits, have been marked by ‘end of the world’ parties – one last community get-together before the servers are switched off.

Despite many virtual worlds ending, improved usability has led to a resurgence of interest in online communal spaces. All helped by significant increases in domestic computer capacity, changing social attitudes; as well as the rise of VR headsets, metaverses and Web3 technologies.

Between Worlds traces the development from Maze, considered the first 3D first-person game ever made, and the influence these early games had on the development of virtual communities. In Preserving Worlds, a documentary series through aging and beloved virtual worlds, Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil invite users, developers and preservation communities to discuss historically important spaces such as WorldsChat, Myst Online and ActiveWorlds.

Second Life (still), Courtesy of Preserving Worlds

Reflecting more recent developments, Between Worlds includes screenshots from viral ‘meeting my internet best friend’ videos where relationships formed in virtual communities spill out of virtual spaces; and the EU-funded metaverse Global Gateway, an initiative designed to engage young people in topics such as climate, connectivity, health, which highlights the increasing interests of governments in virtual worlds.

Between Worlds also includes a newly commissioned video game with Glasgow-based creative developers Benjamin Hall and Frances Lingard. In the World Imagining Game, you are invited to create new and alternative virtual worlds while exploring the power dynamics, aesthetic possibilities, and legacies at play. Imagine your own visuals, characters, modes of gameplay in your world, and think about who your world is for, how it is moderated, and how it operates economically.

Second Life (still), 2023, Courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery

Between Worlds marks a new strand of programming and research through The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme into the structural and socio-political issues around online worlds, and precedes a new PhD collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University.

LINK: Between Worlds

EVENT: BRENT WATANABE (MAY 19 - JUNE 1 20923, ONLINE)

MINE

machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 37’ 06”, United States, 2023

Created by Brent Watanabe

 

The latest work by Brent Watanabe is a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between virtual reality and contemporary culture. Originally conceived as a semi-narrative interactive experience, MINE spans eight mesmerizing episodes, each presenting a different facet of our complex relationship with consumption, waste, the environment, and the digital world. Originally presented on Meta/Facebook's VR platform Horizon Worlds, visitors are invited to journey through a kaleidoscopic array of immersive and fully-realized virtual environments, each revealing a new layer of insight and critique. From the grotesque realities of animal exploitation to the dark allure of gaming, guns, and surveillance, MINE is a bold and unflinching statement on the pressing issues of our time. The original work has been reimagined as a single-channel walk-through video edited by the artist for VRAL. 

Brent Watanabe’s art practice defies categorization, fusing traditional techniques with cutting-edge technology to create installations that are at once visually arresting and intellectually engaging. Drawing on his extensive background in drawing and sculpture, Watanabe uses computer programming and electronics to create kinetic sculptures that are at the forefront of a new wave of digital art. Watanabe’s work has been recognized both nationally and internationally, with his groundbreaking 2016 project, San Andreas Deer Cam, receiving over 800,000 visitors in its first three months alone and being featured in publications such as New York Magazine, the BBC, and WIRED. In addition to his solo work, Watanabe has participated in group shows and screenings around the world, including Through Machine Eyes at the NeMe Arts Center in Limassol, Cyprus, Game Changers at MassArt Art Museum in Boston, and Playmode at the MATT Museum in Lisbon, Portugal. With recent solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as SOIL Art Gallery, McLeod Residency, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Gallery 4Culture, Anchor Art Space, and the Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival, Watanabe continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of digital art. 

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EVENT: WORLDBUILDING: VIDEO GAMES AND ART IN THE DIGITAL ERA (JUNE 10 2023 - JAN 15 2024, METZ, FRANCE)

Theo Triantafyllidis, Pastoral, 2019

 

Worldbuilding: Video Games And Art In The Digital Era

Centre Pompidou-Metz
1 Parvis des Droits de l'Homme
57020 Metz
France

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London

press release

Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”. Around a hundred years ago, in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the source of culture.

More recently, in his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that games, particularly video games, are a distinct type of art which “let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own”. As such, gaming has the potential to unleash powerful psychic forces. Video games have proven to be an effective tool for the development of training and strategy. Indeed, scientists have made good use of video games simulating biological systems to speculate on the possible origins and destination of life. Accordingly, video games as a digital art form offer a means for an existential quest beyond the embodied physical world and into the multiverse. By their very nature, they open the potential to imagine and build new worlds.

Several of the featured artists in the exhibit began making work that refers to video games as early as the 1980s while most of the others were just born around that time. For the works in this show, artists have addressed video games in various ways. Some have adapted their themes and visual style to make videos. Others have modified, hacked, and subverted existing video games. Finally, some have created their own video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist writes, “traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people…producing games with a very limited perspective. This is now changing rapidly… Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to create [their own] virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion”. Through these means, the artists are taking this format beyond pure entertainment value to probe social, political, and aesthetic questions. While video games have been the topic of numerous exhibitions in recent years, most of these highlighted their legitimacy as an artistic medium or focused on aspects of “game art”.

Worldbuilding is the first transgenerational, multinational show of this scope to examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their chosen form of expression. In so doing, this exhibit presents a plurality of voices and a multitude of perspectives.

With works by Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, Meriem Benanni, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Kim Heecheon, Institute of Queer Ecology, Rindon Johnson, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, Sturtevant, Theo Triantafyllidis, Suzanne Treister, Angela Washko, Lu Yang, among others.

LINK: Worldbuilding

See also

EVENT: ART IN THE AGE OF THE METAVERSE (MARCH 10-12 2023, AMSTERDAM & ONLINE)

Artwork: Kévin Bray. Graphic Design: Clara Lezla.

AGE IN THE AGE OF METAVERSE

International Conference
10 – 12 March 2023
De Balie, Amsterdam & online

Hartwig Art Foundation
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten
Memory Gems

A new technological universe has created new artistic landscapes. During this conference, artists, curators, activists and industry professionals who work at the intersection of contemporary art and digital technologies, will take us deep into the metaverse, a shared space at the nexus of the virtual and the physical that is gaining increased attention as a space for artistic production and experiences. How are we interacting with it, and how can we shape its future direction in a more ethical and collaborative manner?

Through talks, discussions, and presentations, the speakers will share their insights and explore key questions such as: What are the forms of artistic practices at the intersection of the physical and the virtual? How do artists, using these technologies, engage with the ethical, social, and environmental implications? How can we counter big tech in deciding what the metaverse is and can become? And what role do we, as participants, play in shaping the future direction?

The conference will open on Friday at 8 p.m. at De Balie with the Dutch premiere screening of Ian Cheng’s Life after BOB: The Chalice Study, followed by a conversation with Ian Cheng.

Confirmed speakers include Morehshin Allahyari, Black Swan, Ian Cheng, Barbara Cueto, Ali Eslami, The Hmm, Trevor McFedries, Micaela Mantegna, Moving Castle (Arthur Roeing Baer+GVN), Marina Otero Verzier, Chao Tayiana, Shuruq Tramontini, and Veronica So. Further confirmed participants will be continuously added.

LINK: ART IN THE AGE OF THE METAVERSE

EVENT: XMUSEUM.ORG (ONLINE)

press release

Artists: Kim Laughton, Gabriel Massan, CheeseTalk, ayrtbh

X Virtual Incubator is the inaugural project of X Virtual—an assemblage of virtual worlds that provides 3D meetups for art enthusiasts and creative intellectuals. The project features first-person exploration of new digital art commissions and is a result of the project team’s two-year research on virtual environments and online exhibitions. X Virtual Incubator brings together four artists working across China, the UK, and Brazil, whose practices spark new methodological archetypes for the impending network of virtual art. The project is co-curated by Poppy Dongxue Wu and Pete Jiadong Qiang.

The speculative future of The Spatial Web prompts the deployment of new digital infrastructure on a global scale whilst art practitioners enlightening by the oldest pioneer of the metaverse—massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). With the game engine becoming a prominent tool beyond the gaming industry, a broader group of artists started to create various works ranging from digital sculpture and audio-visual space to performance and indie games. This new protocol of art production in the virtual context has reconfigured the existing cultural and technological interface, spiking new branches in the expanded field previously framed by physical-virtual division. From the construction of an eerie archaeological temple standing in an untrodden desert to a series of intra-related virtual worlds conceptually threaded by violence and freedom, the artists in the show weave fictional civilisation, immigration histories and cross-continent geopolitics into uncanny cyberrealities, extending new territories between art and technology.

The project delves into spatiality and its multiple connotations in the virtual environment by commissioning artists to work primarily on X Virtual’s online community. From algorithmic music clips scattered around a meditative and boundless virtual space to AI chatbots in a fictional agency for hybrid cyborgs, the artists in the show envision new forms of audio-visual experience, after-image of the digital object, as well as potential sentient mutants brought by the accelerated development of cyborgs. X Virtual Incubator grounds interdisciplinary attempts that destabilise and re-envision the intricate web between digital art, virtual space and video game through text, sound, video, scene, AI chatbot and indie games.

A physical showcase of the project, including two immersive installations will be on view from September 2022 at X Museum in Beijing. With offline participation, new meanings that do not pre-exist in the online virtual worlds will be generated by artists and audiences. This project is in strategic partnership with Silicon Valet.

Join our Discord server here.

LINK: X MUSEUM

EVENT: SLIP.STREAM.SLIP RESISTANCE AND VELOCITY IN GAME ENGINE CULTURE (JUNE 24 - SEPTEMBER 18 2022, MANCHESTER, UK)

Slip.Stream.Slip

Curated by Valentino Catricalà

From 24 June 2022, 10am – 4pm

MODAL gallery, SODA, New School of Digital Arts

Manchester Metropolitan University

School of Digital Arts (SODA),
14 Higher Chatham Street,
Manchester,
M15 6ED

Featuring nine international artists, our inaugural exhibition celebrates game engine culture and how our relationship to images, sounds and interactivity has been transformed by technologies such as the Unity and Unreal engines.

The inaugural exhibition at Modal gallery focuses on game engine culture and the shift toward gamification as a model for understanding our lived experiences. Slippage between real life and simulated worlds has reinforced a lexicon of competition, changing our relationship to social interaction, media production, and time and space.

The game engine sits behind processes that go beyond creative production into healthcare and manufacturing, cementing its place as the central authoring tool of our time. Slip.Stream.Slip explores the tensions and contested spaces that open up when the micro politics of everyday living meet complex, simulated worlds.

Featured artists: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Auriea Harvey, Cécile B. Evans, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela, Joshua Citarella, Juan Cortés, Lu Yang, Rachel Maclean, and DIS.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Liminal Lands

Lu Yang, DOKU Digital Alaya

Read more here

LINK: Slip.Stream.Slip (all images courtesy of SODA/MODAL)

LINK: Modal Gallery

EVENT: LATURBO AVEDON, PARDON OUR DUST (JUNE 22 - SEPTEMBER 25 2022, WIEN, AUSTRIA)

LaTurbo Avedon, Pardon Our Dust
June 22–September 25 2022

Curated by Marlies Wirth, Curator, Digital Culture and MAK Design Collection

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
Stubenring 5
1010 Vienna Austria
Hours: Tuesday 10am–9pm,
Wednesday–Sunday 10am–6pm

LINK: LaTurbo Avedon

LINK: Pardon our Dust

press release

“have i loaded, once again
i could see it all reflecting back
a canopy advertising every heaven
infinite subdivisions, simulated parcels
in the surface of this reloading stream”

With Pardon Our Dust, the MAK is presenting the first solo exhibition by LaTurbo Avedon in Austria. La Turbo Avedon, a non-binary artist and curator exclusively performs as an avatar in the virtual world. For the MAK, they developed a new time-based CGI-installation told from the perspective of the avatar in the form of an endlessly looped simulation.

Presented on a central largescale projection and five synchronized screens the virtual journey leads through different landscapes and spaces that are in a state of construction and deconstruction—an allusion to the title of the exhibition and the development of Web3.

LaTurbo Avedon, Pardon Our Dust, 2022, MAK Vienna

The narration begins and ends at a flooded petrol station with the sign “Lethe”: The name is linked to the mythological river Lethe, meaning oblivion also in the sense of concealment. According to the Greek mythology, drinkers of the Lethe’s water would lose their memories before entering the realm of the dead in order to forget everything that was and be reborn into immortality.

LaTurbo Avedon, Pardon Our Dust, 2022, MAK Vienna

Various interactions with water thus structure the complex narration that unfolds around questions of transformation and time through the avatar’s poetic monologue. While the story line develops on the central projection, moving through different abandoned virtual environments like suburban houses or a lush forest, the vertical screens turn into virtual “fortune-telling machines” with four different animated versions of LaTurbo Avedon avatar-self, prompting visitors to leave flowers. The horizontal screen acts as a “mirror” and portal to the virtual world, reflecting the spoken text. A machine learning algorithm temporarily takes control of the rendered image sequences creating abstract images which eventually merge to a timeless virtual space, infinitely reflecting brand messages until the focus shifts to a shimmering light in the distance: “Lethe.”

LaTurbo Avedon, Pardon Our Dust, 2022, MAK Vienna

Pardon Our Dust refers to the development of the internet in the 1990s when this slogan was used on websites under construction. Alluding to the construction of Web3, the metaverse and the jargon of the crypto community, LaTurbo Avedon assumes a critical position regarding the alleged decentralization of the internet, privatization of digital space, and the commercial and colonialist heritage of the physical world which is propagated online.

LaTurbo Avedon, Pardon Our Dust, 2022, MAK Vienna

About La Turbo Avedon
As an artist, LaTurbo Avedon was “born” in 2008/09 in the metaverse of the collective online computer game Second Life. Since then, La Turbo Avedon has been living and working in cyberspace, creating digital installations, simulations, sculptures, videos, and performances while running virtual art spaces like Club Rothko and Panther Modern. The extensive queer and subcultural history of the new media and the beginnings of the internet are a repeating theme for LaTurbo Avedon regarding the creation of their own identities as well as the exploration and creation of virtual realities and meaningful encounters within them. In their work LaTurbo Avedon assimilates elements from video game environments as well as quotes from the current web culture and critically addresses the medium of the internet and its technological and economic developments.

RESOURCE: FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS: ART x METAVERSE BY SERPENTINE R&D PLATFORM

Ask not what the metaverse can do for your art, but ask what your art can do for the metaverse.

Check out Serpentine R&D platform's briefing for more insights.

LINK: FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS: ART x METAVERSE,