GAMESCENES

EVENT: NATURE NUMÉRIQUE (MAY 21 - JUNE 5 2025, LA TOUR DE PEILZ, SWITZERLAND)

Pascal Greco

Nature Numérique: Photographier le jeu vidéo par Pascal Greco

May 21 - June 5 2025

Musée Suisse du Jeu
Rue du Château 11
1814 La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland

(English below)

Dans les années 1990, les mondes numériques ont souvent été pensés comme dissociés du réel : d’un côté, la réalité, le tangible. De l’autre, le virtuel, vu comme un simple divertissement, sans impact écologique ou politique. Face à la prolifération d’images générées par intelligence artificielle, de la remise en question des valeurs partagées qui permettent de faire société, de l’exploitation de nos échanges par le capitalisme de plateforme, force est de constater que les images « virtuelles » sont devenues politiques. Confronté à une culture visuelle générique, il devient crucial de repenser notre rapport aux images. Le travail de Pascal Greco s’inscrit dans cette perspective, en déplaçant la question du réalisme vers celle du sensible. À travers la photographie in-game, il interroge la tension entre réel et virtuel, questionnant la culture visuelle contemporaine et notre capacité d’action. Envisageant l’humain comme interface sensible, son travail refuse une vision technologique des images et privilégie l’expérience subjective : en photographiant des paysages de jeux vidéo, il questionne la frontière entre le réel et le virtuel et propose de renouer avec une écologie de l’attention et du sensible, condition essentielle pour repenser notre rapport au monde.

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In the 1990s, digital worlds were often conceived as separate from reality: on one side, the tangible world; on the other, the virtual, regarded as mere entertainment, devoid of ecological or political consequence. Today, confronted with the proliferation of AI-generated imagery, the erosion of shared social values, and the commodification of our interactions by platform capitalism, it is clear that so-called “virtual” images have become political. In the face of an increasingly generic visual culture, it is vital to reconsider our relationship to images. Pascal Greco’s work responds to this imperative by shifting the focus from realism to sensibility. Through in-game photography, he explores the tension between the real and the virtual, interrogating contemporary visual culture and our capacity for agency within it. Conceiving the human as a sensitive interface, his work rejects a purely technological understanding of images and instead foregrounds subjective experience. By photographing video game landscapes, Greco probes the boundary between reality and simulation, advocating for a renewed ecology of attention and sensibility—an essential condition for rethinking our relationship to the world.

Pascal Greco is a Swiss-Italian self-taught filmmaker and photographer whose work often explores the interplay between architecture and landscape. His projects have been exhibited internationally, reflecting a deep engagement with both urban environments and natural settings. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Greco innovatively turned to video games as a medium for artistic exploration. Unable to travel to Iceland for a photography project, he immersed himself in the virtual landscapes of Death Stranding, a game renowned for its expansive, Iceland-like terrains. Utilizing the game's photo mode, Greco captured images that emulate traditional photography, challenging the distinctions between virtual and real-world imagery. This endeavor culminated in his photobook Place(s), which presents these in-game photographs in a Polaroid format, prompting discussions about the evolving nature of photography in digital realms.

LINK: Nature Numérique

LINK: Pascal Greco

OPEN CALL FOR DIGITAL ART COMMISSIONS: PEREZ ART MUSEUM, FLORIDA (DEADLINE: JUNE 30 2025)

press release

(MIAMI, FL — April 30, 2025) — Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is thrilled to announce its inaugural open call for digital art commissions from the crossroads of the Americas. The museum’s first-of-its-kind program offers financial support to produce experimental digital artwork across South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora. Selected artists may be awarded between $1,000–$15,000 during an estimated 12-month period, expanding and advancing the museum’s presentation, study, and interpretation of international contemporary digital art.

The open call for digital art commissions launches on April 30, 2025. The application deadline is June 30, 2025, at 11:59pm PST.

The open call fosters the creation of innovative digital artworks that reflect PAMM's unique position at the crossroads of the Americas, bolstering artistic representation and reproduction within these regions. The open call aims to expand scholarship and engagement with digital art, advancing the museum’s mission to lead in the presentation, study, and interpretation of international contemporary digital art.

“This open call seeks to bolster new media practices across PAMM’s purview and reroute the history of digital art beyond what is typically shown in museums and galleries,” said Jay Mollica, PAMM senior director of digital engagement. "The economic, artistic, and scholarship opportunities built into the open call are vital for our digital arts ecosystem to thrive across South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora,” said Lauren Monzón, program manager of digital engagement.

Applicants can submit proposals for original projects in any production phase, including pre- to post-production. Successful digital art proposals will use the internet and digital processes to conceptually and practically shape their projects, including many disciplines spanning video art, film, augmented reality, net art, 3-D sculpture, video games, virtual reality, generative art, as well as forms yet to be discovered.

There is no fee for the museum’s open call for digital art commissions. Proposals must be submitted electronically through PAMM’s application portal here.

Learn more about the open call, applicant eligibility, evaluation criteria, and how to apply by clicking here.

EVENT: MANY GHOSTS, MANY SHELLS (MAY 1 - 31 2025, LONDON)

Many Ghosts, Many Shells

David Blandy and Petra Szemán; John Powell-Jones; Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

 

Curated by Rebecca Edwards

Seventeen

1st – 31st May 2025
PV 1st May 6pm

270-276 Kingsland RoadLondonE8 4DG

t. +44(0) 207 249 7789

press release

Many Ghosts, Many Shells debuts new collaborative work by Petra Szemán and David Blandy, in parallel with other artists working in the realms of identity and selfhood, reality and simulation. Each artist uses radical gameplay practices to ask where the self ends and the character begins, and what gets left behind. Also featuring works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and John Powell-Jones, Many Ghosts, Many Shells presents gaming experiences as devices for establishing surrogate modes of existence, a new world through new selves.

When identities are increasingly fragmented across digital landscapes, these artists question how we reconcile our dispersed selves within today’s  techno-political milieu. By bridging gaps between player and world, character and creator, the works in the exhibition challenge the very nature of agency and identity in a hyper-connected age where Away From Keyboard is never quite separate from Meatspace. Alter egos are often used to describe a concealed or contrasting side of a person’s personality, but in the case of playable characters or in the case of this exhibition, these alter egos become imbued with a sense of possibility – figures existing in a state of perpetual becoming, never fully whole but never entirely detached. Breaching a biographical narrative, the works in the exhibition question nostalgia, self-construction, and the processes of negotiating trauma and lived experiences that often percolate unsaid.

Sharing imaginaries across different practices, cultures and generations allows for a co-creation of richer, more inclusive visions, grounded in diverse experiences, knowledge systems, and values. In their game Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1 Blandy and Szeman share layered references to games of their youth, nostalgic artefacts and anime inspirations in a pixelated landscape of memory. Lucid game structures, immersive storytelling, and nonlinear narratives allow the works to invite a navigation into speculative futures and alternate pathways of existence. For Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley this means confronting histories of violence and mutilation through the uncovering of familial ties and oral testimony, asking questions of accountability and acceptance; while John Powell-Jones’ Web Wide World animated choose-your-own-adventure game and related ephemera encourages encounters with strange beings as we seek to understand the new universe of Durt where the protagonist Atamur has awoken void of a protective skin layer. From interrogating power and erasure in digital archives, to uncovering shared imaginaries that transcend cultures and generations, the exhibition positions gameplay as a radical tool for rethinking action in embodied engagement.

Featured works:

Petra Szemán and David Blandy, Our Ghosts, Our Shells, part 1, 2025
John Powell-Jones, Web Wide World, 2021
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, I’m Not Doing This For The Likes, 2022

David Blandy is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas that range from ecology, history and science to arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He searches for meaning in cultural life, an expanded form for auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives; Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. He builds complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence,  through visual poetry and immersive play.  https://davidblandy.co.uk/

Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, new forms of cultural production and artistic development, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. https://rebeccaedwards.xyz/

John Powell Jones is an artist whose work includes 3D and 2D animations, life-size characters. comic books, ceramics and wall hangings. He takes inspiration from European folklore, horror and science fiction. https://www.johnpowell-jones.co.uk/

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin and London-based artist. They received an BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works in animation, sound, performance and video game development. Their practice focuses on combining lived experience with fiction to archive Black Trans existence and challenge the audience’s moral standing. https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/

Petra Szemán is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Their practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line separating real and fictional, and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore 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). Turning away from thinking of the cyberspace as a radically ’other’ realm, Petra hopes to walk the line situated between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons.  https://www.petraszeman.com/

LINK: Many Ghosts, Many Shells

EVENT: GAMEPLAY. PLAYING FOR IMPACT (APRIL 17 - NOVEMBER 16 2025, VILNIUS, LITHUANIA)

Gameplay. Playing for Impact

curated by Agnė Kuprytė, Laura Schmidtù

MO Museum

Pylimo str. 17, Vilnius, LT-01141

press release

The fact that digital games have developed into a leading medium is nothing new. The social and aesthetic significance of this interactive and multimedia form can no longer be overlooked. 

Over 60 years have passed since the emergence of digital games and much has changed. Digital games have freed themselves from their origins as laboratory experiments and toys, becoming the defining medium of digital society. Positioned between pop culture, entertainment, and art, games now permeate every aspect of modern life. They shape how we learn, socialize, and perceive reality. Video games have increasingly attracted talented artists and independent developers who push boundaries and question established conventions in digital games and design, exploring unconventional subjects, aesthetics, and game mechanics.

By combining traditional art forms – graphics, film, animation, music, sculpture, and literature – digital games offer artists an unprecedented opportunity to communicate with audiences and have become a medium of artistic expression. “GamePlay – Playing for Impact” invites you to play, reflect, and learn more about the multifaceted forms that video games can take. 

This exhibition is a product of a collaboration with the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany and is an adaptation of their acclaimed gaming exhibition “zkm_gameplay. the next level”. This exhibition at MO Museum focuses on three key areas: games that push creative and aesthetic boundaries, games that address current social and political issues, and games that foster empathy through personal narratives.

MO Museum, a personal initiative of Lithuanian scientists and philanthropists Danguolė and Viktoras Butkus, functioned as an art museum without walls for close to ten years. The collection of around 6 000 modern and contemporary pieces contains major Lithuanian artworks from the 1960s to this day.

From October 18th, 2018 MO has become an excellent place to spend free time. MO invites visitors to attend exhibitions, film screenings, educational activities, concerts and events geared to all age groups. One of MO’s goals is to create an active community of MOdernists who support the idea of MO and want to help us create a new kind of museum – together!

LINK: Gameplay. Playing for Impact

EVENT: SATELLITES (APRIL 18 - AUGUST 25 2025, TOKYO, JAPAN)

SATELLITES

PRADA AOYAMA

18 April - 25 August 2025
5-2-6 Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Monday to Sunday: 11am - 8pm

“Satellites” is an exhibition conceived by Danish movie director Nicolas Winding Refn with Japanese game creator Hideo Kojima, presented at Prada Aoyama Tokyo from 18 April to 25 August 2025.

press release

A project organized with the support of Fondazione Prada and envisioned by the creative studio byNWR.

The collaboration between Refn and Kojima highlights their elective affinities, allowing them to transcend the individual dimension and overcome language barriers. The show transports visitors to a cinema-inspired interior set where suspended images of Refn and Kojima appear, locked in a contemplative conversation as they investigate the universal concept of human connection. The interrelation between two distant entities, also evoked by the metaphorical orbits of satellites in the exhibition title, is the focal point of the entire project. This topic resonates in Kojima’s game dynamics, where the connection of territories and people reshapes the idea of multiplayer, and in Refn’s cinematic poetics, where mental and affective concatenations transcend the logic of reality.

Both artists operate in the belief that today, the film and video game industries and processes tend to draw closer and overlap and, in the future, may merge into a shared digital dimension, offering new possibilities for individual or collective experiences.

The fifth floor of Prada Aoyama is transformed into a mid-century domestic space that transports visitors into an alternate dimension. The installation comprises six retro-futuristic televisions, where suspended images of Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima engage in a deep and contemplative conversation. Their dialogue addresses many themes, including friendship, creative collaboration, new technologies and creativity, identity and communication, death and what remains afterwards. In the nearby dressing room a cassette player sits amid stacks of tapes. The tapes blend sound bites and cinema soundtracks, interwoven with alternate, AI-translated versions of Refn and Kojima’s conversation in various languages. Visitors piece together a unique, personalized version of the dialogue by sifting through the different languages on each tape.

LINK: Satellites

EVENT: MARVELS OF MEDIA FESTIVAL 2025 (MARCH 27 - 29 2025, NEW YORK)

MARVELS OF MEDIA FESTIVAL 2025

MARCH 27-29 2025

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

36-01 35 Avenue

Astoria, NY 11106

press release

The Marvels of Media Festival kicks off with a festive opening night celebration recognizing the outstanding work of autistic media-makers. Throughout the weekend, guests are invited to explore exhibitions: The Adventure of Nature and the Senses, featuring virtual reality experiences and video art, and Marvels of Media Game Lab Exhibition, showcasing playable video games. Join us for a workshop, networking mixer, and five film programs of new comedies, animations, and documentaries followed by panel discussions.

The free festival is part of the Museum’s year-round Marvels of Media initiative, which showcases, celebrates, and supports autistic media-makers of all ages and skill sets. The fourth annual Marvels of Media Festival expands the Museum’s accessibility efforts for autistic visitors through the creation of a sensory relief space in the Media Lab and sensory kits, which are available at the front desk.  

This year’s festival was organized by MoMI’s Associate Curator of Public Programs Tiffany Joy Butler, MoMI’s Director of Education Leonardo Santana-Zubieta, Access Consultant Miranda Lee, Tour Consultant Sachar Mathias, and MoMI Intern Alex Poppe, with the Marvels of Media Steering Committee: filmmaker and playwright Jackson Tucker-Meyer, President and Founder of Strokes of Genius, Inc. Rosa Martínez, and Film Event Accessibility Consultant and Producer Yaara Kedem. 

To create an inclusive environment, the festival will have accessible components for autistic and other neurodivergent visitors, such as a sensory relief room, sensory kit, and visual guide.  

LINK: Marvels of Media Festival 2025

EVENT: HOLDING PATTERN (MARCH 15 - JULY 27, DORTMUND, GERMANY)

HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein
at the Dortmunder U, Level 3
Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse
44137 Dortmund
Germany

press release

Holding Pattern is the English term for the tactic used by air traffic controllers to keep several aeroplanes in the air above a busy airport without allowing them to crash. This symbolic scenario unfolds the motif of remote control and mastery: the sense that human destinies are closely interwoven with the circuits of technology - interwoven with expectation and fear, danger and rescue, as well as geometry, aesthetics and even beauty.

What are the patterns that guide our lives? Do we design them ourselves, or are they written elsewhere, in dark zones that we can only glimpse but never fully see? Holding Pattern presents a selection of international artists who explore the choreographies, rhythms and algorithms that characterise modern life, the ways in which data is embodied and how bodies are transformed into data.

Panhans/Winkler,, »Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 – Installation Version«, 2017/2025 4K video, single-channel-projection, colour/sound, 16:13 mins, stage elements, crowd control systems, chains, handbags, motorbike helmets, carbon fibre, silicone, pizza-delivery-bag, functional shirt, novel, etc., variable sizes

The exhibition Holding Pattern includes major installation pieces such as as Hasselblad Award-winner Stan Douglas’ Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), a six-hour loop depicting an imaginary jam session in New York’s legendary Columbia 30th Street Studio; Turner Prize-winner Elizabeth Price’s SLOW DANS (2019), an elaborate fictional history binding together mining, data storage and the female ‘teachers’ of a mysterious underground ritual as well as the short videos of FOOTNOTES (2020), that reprise and annotate these themes; Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007), a 12-channel extrapolation of the physical, social, security and broadcast patterns shaping a high-profile international football game; and Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 – Installation Version All Choices All Endings II (2025), which toggles between human dancers and digital avatars as it examines the interaction sequences (by turns violent and tender), the loops and glitches of the Grand Theft Auto universe. It includes Turner Prize-winner Susan Philipsz’ Ambient Air (2021), in which she draws a literal holding pattern across Berlin’s sky as she hums Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” from the cockpit of a small plane, transmitting her voice via radio tower to Tegel Airport’s PA system. Also, Åke Hodell’s work igevär (1963, english: “to arms”), in which the titular military command-word gathering soldiers into formation is unlocked through repetition to suggest other, more emancipatory calls-to-arms.

Artists: Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, Elizabeth Price

The exhibition will be on display at the HMKV from 15 March to 27 July 2025. The opening will take place on Friday, 14 March 2025 at 19:00.

LINK: Holding Pattern 

EVENT: RADICAL SOFTWARE: WOMEN, ART & COMPUTING 1960-1991 (FEBRUARY 28 - MAY 25 2025, VIENNA, AUSTRIA)

Dara Birnbaum, Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, 1980, © Courtesy Dara Birnbaum und / and Eletrconic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Radical Software
Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991
February 28–May 25, 2025

Exhibition opening: February 27, 7pm

Symposium: February 28, 9am–6pm

kunsthallewien.at

Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien

press release

Kunsthalle Wien presents a major new exhibition examining the pioneering role of women in digital art. Organised in collaboration with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 brings together over one hundred works by fifty artists including painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts.

A principally analogue exhibition about digital art, Radical Software focuses on the decades that preceded the rise of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of digital information and images that ensued, shaping artistic production and visual culture in the following decades. The exhibition is titled after the magazine that Beryl Korot started with fellow artists Phyllis (Gershuny) Segura and Ira Schneider in 1970. They adopted the term software (as opposed to hardware) as a metaphor and powerful tool for social change. The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial model and mission to serve as “an evolving handbook of technology,” decentralising access to information, predated the World Wide Web by two decades.

Beginning with works from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition spans a period from the first years of integrated circuit computing to the “microcomputer revolution,” which led to the birth of personal computing in the 1980s. The first works date from a time in which artists, poets, writers and filmmakers experimented with mainframe and minicomputers alongside mathematicians, scientists and engineers to produce and exhibit the first computer-generated images and texts. During these three decades the computer migrated from the laboratory to private, domestic space. Yet with each retelling of this history, the significant engagement of women with the technology has been largely overlooked. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, this exhibition documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on women.

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 also engages with contemporary questions of how technology interfaces with issues of identity and equality. The exhibition follows a renewed interest in the post-internet discourse of cyberfeminism, which highlights the role that women played in the creation of new digital technologies and engages critically with the entanglement of technology and power structures.

Artists: Rebecca Allen (b. 1953, Detroit), Elena Asins (b. 1940, Madrid–d. 2015, Navarra), Colette Stuebe Bangert (b. 1934, Columbus) & Charles Jeffries Bangert (b. 1938, Fargo–d. 2019, Lawrence), Gretchen Bender (b. 1951, Seaford, Delaware–d. 2004, New York City), Gudrun Bielz (b. 1954, Linz) & Ruth Schnell (b. 1956, Feldkirch), Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, New York City), Inge Borchardt (b. 1935, Szczecin, formerly Stettin), Barbara Buckner (b. 1950, Chicago), Doris Chase (b. 1923–d. 2008, Seattle), Analívia Cordeiro (b. 1954, São Paulo), Betty Danon (b. 1927, Istanbul–d. 2002, Milan), Hanne Darboven (b. 1941, Munich–d. 2009, Hamburg), Bia Davou (b. 1932–d. 1996, Athens), Agnes Denes (b. 1938, Budapest), VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Linz), Anna Bella Geiger (1933, Rio de Janeiro), Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Bad Oldesloe), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965, Strasbourg), Lily Greenham (b. 1924, Vienna–d. 2001, London), Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem), Barbara Hammer (b. 1939, Los Angeles–d. 2019, New York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland), Grace C. Hertlein (b. 1924, Chicago–d. 2015, Chico), Channa Horwitz (b. 1932–d. 2013, Los Angeles), Irma Hünerfauth (b. 1907, Donaueschingen–d. 1998, Kreuth), Charlotte Johannesson (b. 1943, Malmö), Alison Knowles (b. 1933, New York City), Beryl Korot (b. 1945, New York City), Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad), Ruth Leavitt (b. 1944, St. Paul, Minnesota–d. 2025, Baltimore), Liliane Lijn (b. 1939, New York), Vera Molnár (b. 1924, Budapest–d. 2023, Paris), Monique Nahas (b. 1940, Paris) & Hervé Huitric (b. 1945, Paris), Katherine Nash (b. 1910–1982, Minneapolis), Sonya Rapoport (b. 1923, Brookline–d. 2015, Berkeley), Deborah Remington (b. 1930, Haddonfield–d. 2010, Moorestown), Sylvia Roubaud (b. 1941, Munich), Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923, Toronto–d. 2015, Hampton Bays), Lillian Schwartz (b. 1927, Cincinnati, Ohio–d. 2024, New York City), Sonia Sheridan (b. 1925, Newark–d. 2021, Hanover), Nina Sobell (b. 1947, Patchogue), Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena), Tamiko Thiel (b. 1957, Oakland), Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952, Schwerte), Joan Truckenbrod (b. 1945, Greensboro), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp), Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942, Stockholm)

Symposium: Radical Software: On the first day of the exhibition, 28 February 2025, Kunsthalle Wien and TU Wien will host a symposium bringing together highly distinguished female researchers from the fields of art and science including Gerti Kappel, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Margit Rosen, Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Ina Wagner and artists Gudrun Bielz, Inge Borchardt, Anna Bella Geiger, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liliane Lijn, Sylvia Roubaud, Ruth Schnell, Nina Sobell, Tamiko Thiel and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven.

Exhibition publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication including essays by Tina Rivers Ryan, Margit Rosen and the exhibition’s curator, Michelle Cotton. Co-published with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, it features over 200 illustrations, a timeline and twenty-seven new interviews with artists from the exhibition.

Kunsthalle Wien is financed by the Magistratsabteilung Kultur der Stadt Wien (MA 7). The artistic programme is also supported by the members and patrons of the Kunsthalle Wien Club. The exhibition and symposium are made possible through the generous support of Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

LINK: Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 

Previously

EVENT: JUST PLAYIN’ AROUND (JANUARY 21 - APRIL 26 2025, PORTLAND, OREGON)

Matthew Earl Williams, Twentysix Gasoline Stations In Grand Theft Auto V, 2014-24, digital prints, Each 16 x 20 inches framed, © m. earl Williams, Courtesy of the artist.

 

Just Playin' Around

curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin

January 21 - April 26 2025

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

PSU1855 SW Broadway

Portland, OR 97201

press release

Once our basic needs are met, we humans have always turned to play and art. Children learn how to navigate the world by playing. Adults depend on play to bring joy and connection to others. The United Nations recognizes play as a universal right of children, and mental health specialists increasingly recommend play for its therapeutic benefit at all ages.

Artists often talk about their work as a form of play involving materials, ideas, and imagination. Play can be part of the process of making art, but can also be its subject matter. Artists create meaning from childhood memories, toys, games, and sport, reframing the past, interpreting the present, or imagining the future. Play is also a way for artists to seek release from meaning, to resist others’ need to interpret or instrumentalize their work, as seen in absurdist art-historical movements such as Dada.

Industrialized societies often treat play as childlike or trivial, an obstacle to productivity. Our cultural institutions define which artworks and artists are worthy of attention, often presenting art in distinctly unplayful settings, equating seriousness with cultural value. This belies the ways in which playfulness, surprise, silliness, and humor in art are able to engage charged emotional, social, and political issues.

Not all art needs to be playful, but in the end, play and art may not be so different. In both, we seek freedom, release, and community. Sometimes we create and receive meaning through our games and our art, and sometimes we just want to have fun. Just Playin’ Around is a peephole into some of the many ways in which art is play, play is art, and both are in all of us.

Just Playin’ Around is curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin. This exhibition is supported by The Ford Family Foundation, The Reser Family Foundation, the Jackson Foundation, Elements Roofing, the Richard and Helen Phillips Charitable Fund, and the JSMA Exhibition Circle.

LINK: Just Playin' Around

EVENT: MATTHEW EARL WILLIAMS’S INDIANS FROM THE UNCANNY VALLEY (JANUARY 25 - MARCH 7 2024, ITHACA, NY)

Matthew Earl Williams

Indians from the Uncanny Valley

January 25 – March 7, 2024

Ithaca College 953 Danby Road, Ithaca, NY 14850

1/25/2024 Opening Reception 5 – 6:30pm

1/25/2024 Artist Talk: 1:15p.m

A Tintype is a one-of-a-kind positive image on a metal plate and a popular visual medium of the Mid 1800’s. Around this time my ancestors were being forced to decide between signing away most of their rights in treaties or face extinction by colonizers. These portraits are created by documenting people's avatars in the cowboy roleplaying video game Red Dead Redemption 2. In the game you can create and play with around 24,000 other real people online daily. Most people create some sort of cowboy player but there are forums and social groups of players that choose to create their characters or avatars as Indians in the game. I have been meeting up with them in the game and taking Tintype portraits of them in this virtual world. I’m curious about why someone would want to roleplay as a Native American character during one of the hardest times in their history. Is it because the romanticized images of the so-called vanishing Indian have become so commonplace in common media? Do they not know that these images have fueled identity issues that many natives still struggle with? Do they think that by playing as these figures that they are somehow honoring us? Just as they think they honor us with a school mascot. Do they hope to find some connection to the native experience that will help with the guilt? Or do they just like to root for an underdog?

Matthew Earl Williams, The Lord Marvel, 8” X 10” Tintype, 2021 (c) Matthew Earl Williams

Williams is an artist, educator, and enrolled tribal member of The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. M. Earl received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography and a Master of Arts in Studio Art from the University of Iowa. He also received a BFA in Photography at the University of Oregon. His work is shown internationally with recent cities including Rome, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, New York, Denver, Portland, and Phoenix. Currently he resides in his ancestral homelands, the Oregon Willamette Valley, where he is the Multimedia Specialist for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.

Indians from the Uncanny Valley is currently on display in the context of the exhibition Just Plating Around, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, 1855 S.W. Broadway, Portland.

LINK: Matthew Earl Williams

LINK: INDIANS FROM THE UNCANNY VALLEY