GAMESCENES

GAME ART: KIT KIRBY'S LADY RUGS COMPILATION (2019)

A new project by Kit Kirby, a student in Eddo Stern's phenomenal UCLA GameLab:

As Pablo Picasso once observed, "There are two kinds of women: Goddesses and Doormats." Lady Rugs riffs on this expression through a series of rugs depicting actual women from history who respond when the rugs are stepped on. Each woman--Harriet Tubman, Hillary Clinton, Roberta Williams, and Gertrude Stein--is a pioneer in a traditionally male dominated field, but is often overlooked, underappreciated, even despised. Each rug has a fabric pressure sensor, which triggers audio clips of voices explaining why each woman has been devalued. The voices also explain why fields such as the military, politics, video game development, and fine art remain part of "a man's world. Created by Kit kirby.

Kit Kirby is a designer, artist, half-troll madwoman who employs absurdity and dark humor to create art about identity and expectation. A recent arrival from the east coast, Kit has a degree in Graphic Design from Boston University and a Post-Baccalaureate in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Arts. Just like the Kirby Nintendo character, she is round, adorable and utter chaos in Super Smash Brothers. (UCLA Gamelab)

LINK: Kit Kirby

GAME ART: TOTAL REFUSAL'S CIRCUMVENTING THE CIRCLE OF DEATH (2018)

Total Refusal - Digital Disarmament Movement is a collective comprising Austrian artists Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel and Michael Stumpf funded in 2018 which promotes a subversively pacifist approach to violent video games. The trifecta operates as an "ideological antidote, unveiling the regressive characteristics of contemporary gaming media and reopening them as playgrounds for practicing creative disobedience and dissent." As they write,

The vast majority of contemporary video games is characterized by combative gameplay. This seems especially remarkable now that video games have long arrived in the entertainment mainstream and have managed to drop the boy’s room stigmata. With gaming becoming both commercially and culturally more and more relevant, the question arises how artists can modify and make use of this media for their own  purposes. In “Total Refusal”, artists Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf aim to peacefully appropriate the existing mechanics of digital gaming media in order to find new use for their virtual combat zones. As such, “Total Refusal” is a pacifistic statement, realized in digital space.

Circumventing the Circle of Death is a performance - hereby documented as a machinima piece - in which the artists highlight the absurd behavior of some computer game algorithms. In this case, by keeping two armies of a real-time strategy game in constant motion so that they do not come in "frontal view" with each other and thus begin an armed confrontation, the game becomes something else, that is, a virtual dance (and potentially interminable) between two factions. We hear the soldiers shouting menacingly at each other, and yet shots are not fired. Destruction is replaced by distraction. Inspired by the tactics of the International Situationists, the artists sabotaged the game without tempering with the code: gameplay is subverted by exploiting the algorithm's "blindness". And yet, the almost comical dance is no less absurd that the urge to destroy and annihilate. If anything, the former produces sweat, while the latter blood. 

Total Refusal - Digital Disarmament Movement has produced several other performances, installations, and video pieces including Landscape for a Battle Panorama (64 Soldiers hiding from the Player), Sculptering a Peace Model, Operation Jane Walk, and the upcoming How to Disappear.

Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel and Michael Stumpf, Circumventing the Circle of Death, 2018, installation view.

LINK: Leonhard Müllner

GAME ART: KEB CERDA'S SUPER NARDO (FALSE PROFITS) (2019)

"Venturing into more creative possibilities in the integration of traditional art forms and new media, young Filipino contemporary artist Keb Cerda introduces his latest set of works as components of an augmented reality adventure game. Paintings turn into virtual playgrounds or battlefields where viewers can participate and perform actions through a mobile application developed especially for his works. Each piece represents a stage of a game, progressing and culminating as the player completes tasks and collects bounties. The ultimate reward comes in the form of a catalogue and a limited edition toy sculpture from the artist. These explorations aim to take the interactive platform to another level in his artistic practice, and interlink the manual production of images to the language of digital technology." (Keb Cerda)

2-2 Hometown, oil on canvas, 2019, 60” x 60” (152 cm x 152 cm)

Keb Cerda is a Filipino Asian Modern & Contemporary painter who was born in 1991. Their work was featured in exhibitions at the Nunu Fine Art.

Also from Cerda

I Bet Some Bastard Will Beat That, oil on canvas, 2018, 60” x 48” (152 cm x 122 cm)

LINK: Keb Cerda

GAME ART: AKIHIKO TANIGUCHI'S VIRTUAL SELFIE (2019)

In his latest project, Akihiko Taniguchi conflates game engines, video game editors, and selfies:

This is a software that can generate 3D avatars from a single photo of a face, and take selfies in a virtual space. The part that generates 3D face shapes from a single photo uses the Avatar SDK, a tool that uses deep learning. In other words, 3D models are generated by inferring the 3D shape from the participant's face photo from the huge number of someone's face photo and 3D model learning data. The face of the 3D model generated in this way is fragmentarily similar to the vast majority of past learning data. Can you conclude that all of the generated 3D heads are mine?Also, in photographs taken in a virtual space, the subject is already rendered every frame before shooting, and is represented as a set of pixels on the screen. In other words, can you call it a picture when what you see and the picture taken are exactly the same physically? Or what does "shooting" in a virtual photograph reflect?

Akihiko Taniguchi lives and works in Japan. Artist. He is a full time lecturer of Tama Art University and part-time lecturer of Musashino Art University. His practice features installations, performances and video works using self-built devices and software. In recent years, he has been focusing on net.art and sometimes VJing.  Among others, his work was presented at "dangling media" ("emergencies! 004" at "Open Space 2007," ICC, Tokyo, 2007), "Space of Imperception" (Radiator Festival, UK, 2009), "redundant web" (Internet, 2010) "[Internet Art Future?]" (ICC, Tokyo, 2012) and others.

LINK: Akihiko Taniguchi

GAME ART: KARL OROZCO'S TALIM VS - HORIZONTAL MOVES (2019)

Karl Orozco is an artist from Queens, New York currently practicing a form of de- and re-construction the backstories of “ethnic” fighting game characters to be more congruent with the historical traumas and spiritual practices their creators mine. His latest project centers on Soulcalibur II. Orozco modified the game files of the game to remove all background art and other characters and allow users to assume control of Talim and her power to control the winds.

As the Artist writes:

Talim is a playable character from the fighting game Soulcalibur II and is widely considered the first Filipina video game character. Talim is a young babaylan ("shaman" or "community healer") who hails from the Village of the Wind Deity on the Eastern Visayan island of Samar. In the SoulCalibur universe, Talim is the last babaylan in her community as Spanish Catholic colonists persecuted all who practiced these rites and burned everything associated with indigenous spirituality. In Talim VS, I have modified the game files of Soulcalibur II to remove all background art and other characters and allow users to assume control of Talim and her power to control the winds. Upon prompting from a small “player’s guide,” participants input fighting moves on a customized PlayStation controller as body rituals to rid Talim's home from the specter of colonialism.

Talim VS - Horizontal Moves is part of a larger project focusing on Soul Calibur II.

Karl Orozco, Talim VS, video excerpt from modified Soul Calibur II Rom, 2019

Orozco's Talim VS installation features a Microsoft Surface, matte board, paint and tape, and a modified  Soul Calibur II ROM.

Karl Orozco is an artist and educator based in Queens, NY. He is interested in gaming as a multidisciplinary art form for community building and non-linear storytelling. He believes good art is playful. Orozco’s artistic practice centers around the games we play and the ones we inherit – digital, analog, and psychological. Orozco was the 2018 National Artist-in-Residence at the Neon Museum of Las Vegas, NV, where he transformed their project space into a public, intergenerational mahjong parlor based on his grandmother’s underground Manila gambling den. 

 

LINK: Karl Orozco

GAME ART: RAÚL ENTTER & MÓNICA RIKIĆ'S WE WILL NEVER FORGET (2019)

Created by Raúl Entter & Mónica Rikić, We will never forget uses Openframeworks + Kinect Videogame Installation produced for Negocio, a critical game exhibition. Here's the description:

Pope Benedict XVI was accused of conspiracy to cover up sexual abuse in the United States. At the Vatican's request, President Bush granted the pope immunity from prosecution.

Raúl Berrueco, better known as Entter, is a Spanish visual artist who studied Fine Arts at the Basque Country University. Born in Santander in 1977, Entter worked as a motionographer, digital designer and Art Director for web and media. As visual artist, he worked as professional video jockey and performer for years, collaborating with electronic musicians on acclaimed audiovisual shows. 

LINK: Raúl Entter

EVENT: CHRIS HOWLETT'S NEW STATEMENTS (15-17 MAY 2019, BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA)

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

GAME ART: REGINE PETERSEN'S CIVILIZATION II (2013)

Regine Petersen, Civilization II hit by Park Forest meteorite in 2003,Archival pigment ink print, 130 x 108 cm

Regine Petersen (b. 1976 in Hamburg, Germany) received her MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London (2009). Her work has been presented in various solo and group shows internationally, such as Rencontres d'Arles in France, Foam Museum in Amsterdam and Aperture Gallery in New York. She captures moments that are both spontaneous and carefully engineered. These images are a vehicle for thinking, for ruminating on the balance between what is visible and invisible, and the fine line between intimacy and detachment. She often chooses subjects that can be studied from various angles, like meteorites, which she examines as cosmological, astronomical, geological, philosophical, historical, and emotional artifacts. She also photographs objects hit by meteorites, like the package of Sid Meier's Civilization II. A premediation of the planet's imminent destruction? 

LINK: Regine Petersen 

GAME ART: BRENTON SMITH'S STOP FOR A MOMENT (MARCH 7 - 17 2019, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA)

Brenton Alexander Smith, Stop for a moment, machinima, 4' 42", color, sound, 2019

BRENTON ALEXANDER SMITH

STOP FOR A MOMENT

SCRATCH ARTSPACE

67 Sydenham Road Marrickville NSW 2204

Sydney, Australia

John Chamberlain meets the digital uncanny. In Brenton Smith's solo show at SCRATCH ARTSPACE in Sydney, Australia, stop for a moment, James Graham Ballard, video games, and automobiles collide and collude to create situations that appear both familiar and bizarre. Smith gives machinima a third dimension using crushed automobile parts welded together and electronic parts to bring them to simulated life. The automobiles' viscera are on display, both on the screen and in the gallery space. Both virtual and physical, these organic/mechanic/machinic creatures know and crashforms evoke Shinya Tsukamoto's cyborgian entities.

Stop for a Moment underpins an endeavour to explore the potential for nonhuman entities to elicit an affect in human viewers. The car accident is a central theme using the driving simulator video game BeamNg.drive, known for its ability to realistically simulate car crashes. By pushing the limits of what the game engine allows, Brenton Alexander Smith forces the game into a crash scenario that would be impossible in the real world producing organic-chaotic shapes in response to the extreme input, coupled with strange twitching movements that afford them a sense of nonhuman liveliness referred to as ‘crashforms’. The title of the show invites the viewer to not only take a moment to view the work but to take a break from the pressure to perform in today’s technologically driven society. Like the crashform, it invites the viewer to allow a certain vulnerability for just a little while.

Brenton Alexander Smith’s practice emerged from an interest in the relationship between humans and machines. His work explores the point of connection and disconnection between humans and the artificial in the cycle of technological renewal. He frequently draws from abandoned and damaged technical artifacts, such as crashed cars, to create works that seek to elicit an affective response in the viewer. Many of his works aim to arouse feelings of sympathy for broken or discarded machines. Smith’s practice takes form in a variety of media. In several works, the residue of car accidents acts as a sculptural material that echoes the organic through mechanical forms. These sculptures are part relic and part creature, inert yet imbued with a faint sense of liveliness. Smith graduated from the Sydney College of the Arts with honours in 2014. Since then, he completed an artist residency in Iceland, where he held his first solo exhibition at the Akureyri Art Museum. The same year Smith received the Freedman Foundation Travelling scholarship. He is currently working on an MFA at UNSW Art and Design in Sydney.

LINK: Brenton Alexander Smith (All images and videos (c) Brenton Alexander Smith)

EVENT: FAMILY COMPUTER: FAMILIAR INTERIORS (JAN 29 – MARCH 24, 2019, ATLANTA, USA)

Family Computer: Familiar Interiors
A new series of cyanotypes by Ashley Anderson
On view in the CCBC Gallery January 29 – March 24, 2019

271 W HANCOCK AVE. ATHENS, GEORGIA 30601

Family Computer: Familiar Interiors showcases a new series of pixelated cyanotypes that pays homage to the intertwining histories of art and video games. A follow-up to the Atlanta based artist’s exhibition Family Computer: Family Portrait (Kibbee Gallery, Atlanta, October 2018), Familiar Interiors focuses on landscapes in classic home video games and encourages a consideration of how humans interact with digital space. The 11 scenes represented in this show should look familiar to those who grew up playing early home video games like Duck Hunt (1984) for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), though slightly modified. Anderson digitally collaged background elements from the video game sources to create original images that feel more like imperfect memories than screenshots. Full of callbacks to real-world art and imagery from classic video games, Familiar Interiors leads viewers to examine their own layered experiences of reality: physical to digital to conceptual and back.

LINK: Ashley Anderson 's Family Computer: Familiar Interiors