GAMESCENES

GAME ART: MARK SCHOENING'S "THE RED TULIP GLITCH MEMORIAL" IN ANIMAL CROSSING (2020)

Mark Schoening
The Red Tulip Glitch Memorial
April 23 - 29, 2020

On March 27, 2020, Julia Maiuri, a first year MFA student at the University of Minnesota has launched the Museum of Contemporary Art Kittengale within Animal Crossing: New Horizon, a social simulation video game for the Nintendo Switch that allows players to hang out, connect, and interact in a fantasy world. Programming is facilitated by Julia Maiuri and Joolz, her avatar within the game. Working on this platform, Maiuri pushes the limitations of the game to curate weekly virtual exhibitions by real life artists. Among the first exhibitions held in the newly launched gallery space is Mark Schoening's The Red Tulip Glitch Memorial. Schoening is an artist and also co-founder of Porch Gallery in south Minneapolis. Schoening created the artwork - two portraits of red tulips facing each other on opposite walls, and, on the third wall, white letters on a red background spell out “never again" - using Photoshop, and then uploaded the work through acpatterns.com, which creates a QR code that the game can read. The artwork and the message reference a glitch that occurred fifteen years ago, in the “Animal Crossing: Wild World (2006)." The glitch froze thousands of players, forcing them to remain isolated in their houses for months, separated from one another. There's a fil rouge connecting the previous lockdown with the current situation. Screenshots of the show can be seen on Maiuri's Instagram account @moca.kittengale.

LINK: Mark Schoening's The Red Tulip Glitch Memorial (all images courtesy of the artists)

ART GAME: OLIVER MAUCO AND ABDEL BOUNANE'S PRISME7 (2020)

A new game from Oliver Mauco and his team is about experiencing art in an immersive, engaging way, navigating through the enormous online collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, and interact with the artworks in a playful way. Developed for the Centre Pompidou on contemporary and modern art by Olivier Mauco of Game in Society and Abdel Bounane, Prism7 is free and supported by the French Ministry of Education. Researchers from the Ircam worked on the sound design. Prisme7 is available for both smartphone/tablets running iOS and Android) and computers (PC/Mac).

 

Here's a description of the gameplay:

As they make their way between colour and light, players explore an organism that is constructed gradually as they discover the physical and sensory properties of the works of art. As they interact with Le Rhinocéros by Xavier Veilhan, New York City by Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair or the famous “pipes” of the Centre Pompidou building imagined by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, players progress on their way through the game. After an initial introductory level (to familiarise themselves with the gameplay), there are six game worlds where they can explore a selection of 40 iconic works from the Centre Pompidou collection, through the relationships between colour and function, colour and emotion or light and immersion.  

 

LINK: PRISME7

EVENT: SCREEN WALK WITH ALAN BUTLER (APRIL 22 2020, ONLINE)

Screen Walk with Alan Butler on 22nd April 2020 at 6 pm UK time / 7 pm CET (on Zoom)
Free event.

Join artist Alan Butler in a live-streamed online expedition 

Alan Butler will lead a tour of the game environment of Grand Theft Auto V, focusing on topics of representation and simulation as well as the role of the in-game photographer. Viewers will be able to follow the artist in his critical analysis of the game logics, and their social, political, and economic implications.

Screen Walks is a new series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Details on how to access the talk will be confirmed upon registration. 

 

Biography

Alan Butler is a visual artist and lecturer, focusing on the material and philosophical implications that digital environments and new media technologies pose to the evolution of visual culture, politics, ecologies and social structures. Since 2005, part of this practice has involved an exploration of video game worlds, and their potential to act as 'real' spaces of creativity beyond traditional game-play. Significant works in this series include: 'Down and Out in Los Santos', a quasi-documentary photography series about homelessness and poverty in the video game Grand Theft Auto V; 'Virtual Cyanotype Botany', a series that uses the 19th century photo-chemical process to document plant-life from video games of the last 45 years; and 'On Exactitude in Science' a two-screen feature film comprising Godfrey Reggio's 'Koyaanisqatsi' and Butler's shot-for-shot remake 'KoyanisGTAV', which was produced entirely in Grand Theft Auto V. Since 2017, his works have been featured in galleries and museums across the globe, including: The Akron Museum, USA; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, England; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; C/O Berlin, Germany; ZKM, Karlsruhe Germany; Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017, France; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; Transfer Gallery, New York City, USA; FACT, Liverpool, England; Kasteel Wijlre, The Netherlands; Lismore Castle, Ireland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Perth International Film Festival 2019, Australia; Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography, Switzerland; Espace Multimédia Gantner, France.

LINK: Screen walk with Alan Butler

LINK: Screen walks

PROJECT: PAOLO PEDERCINI'S ONLINE MUSEUM OF MULTIPLAYER ART (ONLINE)

As always, Paolo Pedercini is ahead of the curve. oMOMA is a playful lo-fi multiplayer online gallery of art installations. Unmissable. 

LINK: oMOMA (screenshots by Paolo Pedercini)

EVENT: SYSTEM LINK: VIDEO GAME AS MEMOIR (JANUARY 24 - APRIL 25 2020, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS)

Jenny Jiao Hsia, Consume Me, 2018

System Link: Video Game as Memoir

Curated by Brice Puls
January 24 - April 25, 2020

Opening Reception Friday, January 24 2020, 6-9pm

VGA Gallery
2418 W Bloomingdale #101
Chicago, IL 60647

Video games have historically been a product catered to the player. A focus on engagement, replayability, and general entertainment value has guided design strategies that create impersonal pieces, appealing to the widest range of players possible. While film, music, writing, and other media have historically been vehicles of memoir and personal storytelling, games often maintain a trajectory as products of their audience and not their creator. The voices of the individual artists have recently begun to break through the standards of generalization in the medium, creating stories where players are able to experience the emotional perspectives of the creator. In doing so memoir games reveal that assumptions about the general audience skew toward specific perspectives, and exclude others. This exhibition seeks to highlight those works, exploring how a range of game makers and artists have translated their personal experiences into the interactive context. Each work is designed to allow the player to understand, empathize with, and connect to other lived realities, using the participatory advantages of video games to express a story as no other medium can. The different projects showcased in this exhibition offer different answers to the question “What happens when you let the player of games into your story?”

LINK: System Link: Video Game as Memoir

EVENT: GAME CHANGERS: VIDEO GAMES & CONTEMPORARY ART (FEBRUARY 22 - APRIL 19 2020, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS)

Juan Obando, Pro Revolution Soccer, 2019

Game Changers: Video Games & Contemporary Art

February 22 to April 19 2020 Free entry

MassArt Museum (MAAM)
Sandra & David Bakalar Gallery
Free and open to the public

621 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115 United States

 

Curated by Darci Hanna, this group exhibition explores artists working at the confluence of contemporary art and video games. Whether highlighting under-explored narratives, pushing technological boundaries, or imagining alternative worlds through game aesthetics, the artists featured in Game Changers are discovering new possibilities for what game-related art can be and do.

 

Nyamakop, Semblance, 2018

Featured artists

Cao Fei, Paloma Dawkins, Tracy Fullerton, Dan Hernandez, Nyamakop, Juan Obando, Momo Pixel, Skawennati, Brent Watanabe

LINK: Game Changers

EVENT: FEEDBACK LOOPS (DECEMBER 7, 2019 - MARCH 22 2020, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA)

 

Feedback Loops

Curated by Miriam Kelly

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 

111 Sturt Street
Southbank VIC 3006
Melbourne, Australia

ACCA's new exhibition includes work from Lu Wang, a Chinese-born artist whose work incorporates games, VR, animation and live performance. For Feedback Loops, Lu Yang has developed a video game titled The Great Adventure of Material World. Users control a character named Material World Knight through a virtual universe, a digital space influenced by the aesthetics of anime, Buddhist art, consumer culture, arcade games, and science fiction. Can't wait

ACCA’s exhibition Feedback Loops presents six immersive installations that explore the material and digital worlds of our past, present and speculative futures. Populated by characters and conceptualisations that are at once real and fictive, and inherently performative, the works of participating artists are informed by aesthetics of the internet and the ethics of new materialist philosophies, presenting a kaleidoscopic positioning of familiar and unfamiliar references.

Mythology, spirituality and philosophy are mashed together with personal and collective narratives, popular culture and art history, in visual, aural and spatial configurations that simultaneously confront and confound. Belonging to a generation born in the 1980s, the participating artists have an everyday approach to new media and computational thinking, from gaming software and CGI to the ripping and rehashing of internet content, that sits seamlessly alongside live performance and material practices of sculpture, textiles, drawing and painting.

In the simplest sense, a feedback loop is a process of systems analysis, whereby outputs and their past impacts are taken into consideration in the present to affect the nature of future outputs. Traditionally the feedback loop has a binary structure: where negative feedback maintains an equilibrium; while the positive is characterised by amplification, and the possibility of entropy and collapse. The term ‘feedback loop’ is used in diverse frameworks, from sciences of biology, climate and computing, to the fields of sound engineering, product development and human psychology. As a phrase, it also evokes ideas of the echo, reiteration and re-articulation, as well as an understanding of time, knowledge and cultural production as cyclical and generative.

Curated by Miriam Kelly, Feedback Loops comprises new commissions and presentations of recent works by Madison Bycroft, Tianzhuo Chen, Lu Yang, Sahej Rahal, Justin Shoulder and Zadie Xa. The works of participating artists register these dynamics in circuitous disruptions of linear approaches to narrative, time, space, value and power, along with their considerations of empathy – towards both humans and non-human forms. The works and worlds presented in Feedback Loops are spectacular and theatrical; in equal measure unsettling, absurd, fantastical and joyous, offering high-energy hits, as well as sites of reprieve.

LINK: Feedback Loops (all images courtesy of ACCA)

NEWS: GARAGE DIGITAL (ONLINE)

Exciting news from Russia:

"Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is launching Garage Digital, a new experimental program and online platform. The launch will be accompanied by a grant competition for artists who work with digital technology.

Bringing together artists, scientists, programmers, and art historians, Garage Digital aims to explore and support the new languages of visual culture that are emerging under the influence of advanced technologies and new media on everyday life and on artistic and research practices.

Today, when mobile and broadband Internet have become familiar elements of urban life just like electricity and water supply, the traditional museum has lost its monopoly as a store of meaningful imagery. Every owner of a smartphone connected to the Internet can access an unlimited amount of content. Big data analysis organizes web searching and creates a feeling of total availability and interconnection, while algorithms help to solve complex tasks. It has become possible to approach the world as a full-fledged source of visuality, flowing from the real environment to the screens of digital devices. This means that today reality develops in close proximity to and under the influence of the digital realm, sometimes almost completely merging with it. Akin to scrolling through a news feed, the new form of perceiving information blurs the boundaries of the real and the virtual, reforms our sense of space and time, and thus questions the goals and values of the traditional museum.

Garage Digital accumulates the experience of studying contemporary born-digital art as the product of a new type of thinking and living through everyday reality. Along with digital art proper, the program focuses on the latest technological advancements—code, neural networks, big data analysis, game engines and computer graphics, 3D printing, and other new production modes—that can operate simultaneously as the artwork’s material, medium, and means of production.

Anton Belov: «The Garage Digital team, together with artists and experts, is redefining the role of cultural institutions and means of creating and exhibiting works of art. Launched in 2019, this program is focused on digital reality, but that does not mean we are choosing between online and offline presence. For Garage they are of equal importance. In essence, the Garage Digital platform is a space within the Museum, with its own exhibition and education programs».

The online platform features artworks and research projects created for Garage Digital, multimedia material on digital art and culture, information on grants and a schedule of offline events. Born-digital artworks and research projects created in collaboration with or supported by Garage are published in Projects and integrated into a data feed interface, replicating the continuous flow of visual images and ideas produced by contemporary reality.

One of the key goals of the program is to systematize knowledge on digital art and technogenic reality. The platform offers access to documentary videos and theoretical research on themes covered by the program, such as Game Studies, which focuses on the study of video games and computer simulations as an artistic medium.

Garage Digital’s program of offline events, which take place in the Museum as well as off-site, aims to develop a community of digital and new technology artists, allow for the exchange of experience, and support professional networks. Garage Digital also includes a grant program for artists who work with new technology, with each season addressing a particular aspect of artistic practice within the digital environment.

Garage Digital is like a virus infiltrating the Museum’s programs. It implies collaboration with the exhibition and education departments and participants in the Field Research program, as well as offline interventions into the Museum’s public spaces. By its launch, the platform will feature new projects and digital artworks created for the exhibition The Coming World.

LINK: Garage Digital

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

EVENT: INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS: EXPLORATIONS IN ART AND PLAY (OCTOBER 2 2019 - JANUARY 31, 2020, DAVIS, CALIFORNIA)

Steven Paul Judd, Invaders, 2018

Indigenous Futurisms: Explorations in Art and Play

Gorman Museum at University of California, Davis

Oct 2, 2019 - Jan 31, 2020

One Shields Ave., Davis, California

Open Mon-Fri, noon-5 p.m., and Sun 2-5 p.m.

Admission is free.

Website: gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu.

Indigenous Futurisms brings together graphics, comics, SF, and video games  to create a provocative space of engagement and thought about Indigenous futures and possibilities. The gaming section was curated by Ashlee Bird, a graduate student of Native American Studies at UC Davis, who writes:

The content and graphics involved with Native American and Indigenous representation in these genres are fraught with embedded stereotypes and in some cases, these depictions are viewed as deeply offensive and racist. Native American artists and game designers actively engage with these concerns by creating new spaces, environments and platforms for the expression of visual sovereignty. Games and artwork are created, mediated and informed from rich cultural foundations alongside technical media expertise.

Video game inspired art on display includes an enormous vinyl inkjet print created by interdisciplinary artist Sonny Assu which reimagines the original Nintendo Entertainment System controller and replaces the original directional pad with a copper, an indigenous shield shape that for Northwest coast tribes indicates status and wealth. The piece is exhibited as large inkjet on paper. 

Sonny Assu, Nuła̱mał Entertainment System, 2017, exhibition Copy: Inkjet on paper, 36 x 26 inches

Assu has previously made modified cabinet arcades such as Wreck-Consiliation! (2017) and Broken Treaties (2017) which both display a video of  Clayfighter (made by Brendan Tang) as a 81 second loop. The coin-op machines were exhibited in the context of the Ready Player Two exhibition at the Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, British Columbia between 25.05.17 - 03.09.17.

Sonny Assu, Wreck-Consiliation!, 2017 a, Maple, copper leaf, paint and video, 24w x 33.5d x 66.25 inches

Sonny Assu, Broken Treaties, 2017, Maple, copper leaf, paint, 73.75x25x28.25 inches

Nathan Powless-Lynes, Hold My Mand!, interactive game, 2019

Indigenous Futurisms also features interactive games playable with Xbox One controllers within the gallery space, including Nathan Powless Lynes's Hold My Hand!, a dual character puzzle platformer where the characters hold hands to help each other overcome obstacles.

Maize Longboat, Ray Caplin, Mehrdad Dehdashti, Beatrix Moersch, Terra Nova, interactive game, 2019

Created by Maize Longboat, Ray Caplin, Mehrdad Dehdashti, Beatrix Moersch, Terra/Nova is a split-screen side-scroller starring an elder land-keep and a youthful inventor. The characters must perform actions in their respective worlds in order to accomplish the game's ultimate goal. Lastly, visitors can experience Full of Birds, an interactive art gallery which immerses the viewer in a colorful, vibrant "natural" world.

LINK: Indigenous Futurism (All images and videos courtesy of the Artists)