GAMESCENES

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)

EVENT: PLAYMODE (SEPTEMBER 11 2019 - FEBRUARY 17 2020, LISBON, PORTUGAL)

PLAYMODE

 

11 September 2019 - 17 February 2020

Curated by Filipe Pais and Patrícia Gouveia

MAAT

Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology

Av. Brasília, Central Tejo

1300-598 Lisboa

Open from 11 AM to 7 PM

Closed on Tuesdays

The artists understood early on the transformative power of play, and began integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of game and play mechanisms themselves. The exhibition Playmode offers a reflection on these aspects and on the era of ludification that contemporary societies are now experiencing, bringing together pieces by several artists, such as Brad Downey, Gabriel Orozco and Ana Vieira, who incorporate the theme while exploring new ways of seeing, participating and transforming the world, using gaming in a critical light.

Participating artists:

The Pixel Hunt, Pippin Barr, Aram Bartholl, /////////fur//// art entertainment interface, Gabriel Orozco, Priscila Fernandes, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Mary Flanagan, Harun Farocki, Molleindustria, Bill Viola and USC Game Innovation Lab, Samuel Bianchini, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lucas Pope, Joseph DeLappe, Brent Watanabe, Filipe Vilas-Boas, Shimabuku, Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales, David Shrigley, André Gonçalves, Isamu Noguchi, Ana Vieira, Miltos Manetas, David OReilly, Brad Downey, Dunne & Raby with Michael Anastassiades, Os Espacialistas, CADA.

LINK: PLAYMODE

EVENT: SERIOUS GAMES (AUGUST 2 - NOVEMBER 2 2019, SHANGHAI, CHINA)

SERIOUS GAMES

August 2 2019 - November 2, 2019

How Art Museum

O 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road

Shanghai, China

Artists: Alexis Mailles, Feng Chen, Harun Farocki, Jon Rafman, Kent Sheely, Andrew Luk, Lawrence Lek, Matthieu Cherubini, Payne Zhu, Peter Nelson, Wu Chi-Yu

Curated by Fu Liaoliao

Serious Games will present works and projects of both artists and game designers, casting light on the historical development of video games as a form and image, the tension between the mechanism of eSport competition and players from a bio-political point of view, as well as the critiques of spatial politics, historical truth, and future conflicts within the context of video games. Moreover, the exhibition is not limited to present the works directly related to video games, and it also attempts to extend the boundaries of people's notions of game by showcasing works from different perspectives.

The exhibition is accompanied by several events, including various panels, such as "Serious Games: Radical Field inside and out of Virtuality" (August 2), featuring Dr. Jiang Yuhui (Professor of philosophy, East China Normal University), Feng Chen (Artist), Payne Zhu (Artist), Wu Chi-Yu (Artist) and moderated by Fu Liaoliao (Curator of HOW Art Museum). Below is the full description:

As an ancient form of human activity, games have been undergoing drastic changes under the development of science and technology. Until the era of video games, its unprecedented connection with daily life has opened up new possibilities for cognitive space, images and life forms. It has even launched challenges to the present and future way of people's existence. The panel discussion starts from this radical field inside and out of virtuality.

LINK: Serious Games

EVENT: BRENTON ALEXANDER SMITH'S I FEEL LIKE A NERVOUS WRECK (APRIL 1-30 2019, ONLINE)

Brenton Alexander Smith

I feel like a nervous wreck

Closed on Monday gallery 

April 1-30 2019

Closed on Monday Is an online gallery that is experienced like a video game. It is a 3D space that the ‘player’ can move around in to experience the works. You can visit the gallery right now at closedonmondaygallery.com. Brenton Alexander Smith's exhibition I feel like a nervous wreck is showing in the gallery until the end of the month, and will likely be accessible in the archive section of the website afterwards. Here, his crashforms have been extracted from the environment of BeamNg.drive and placed into the new context of this gallery. These crashforms begin to move as you approach them, returning an element of interactivity to how they are experienced. 

LINK: Brenton Alexander Smith

OPEN CALL: GAME ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSEMBLY (DEADLINE: FEB 28 2019)

The Game Arts International Assembly (GAIA) is an annual in-person event that provides a chance for people in the game arts organizing and curation community to discuss their challenges and share information. The first one is in November 2019 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the second is planned for 2020 in Toronto, Canada.

This edition assembly hosts are Luján Oulton director of Game on! El arte en juego (Buenos Aires) and Jim Munroe, co-founder of Hand Eye Society (Toronto) and GAIN. The confirmed key notes are Lorenzo Pilia from A MAZE./Talk and Play (Berlin) and Marie Foulston from Wild Rumpus and the V&A Museum (London). We will be announcing three more international keynotes from established guests later in the year.

This edition will host a maximum of 20 participants. There will be 5 keynotes and up to 15 participants will be selected by the Assembly hosts.

GAIA will consist of:
- Three days of personal talks, playful events, and roundtables;
- local arts experts from outside the games community sharing their knowledge;
- interactive and playful sessions generating ideas to address big issue problems;
- bonding/integration activities designed for the participants, including visits to local game developers studios, to museums and to local cultural venues and activities.

This edition assembly hosts are Luján Oulton director of Game on! El arte en juego (Buenos Aires) and Jim Munroe, co-founder of Hand Eye Society (Toronto) and GAIN. The confirmed key notes are Lorenzo Pilia from A MAZE./Talk and Play (Berlin) and Marie Foulston from Wild Rumpus and the V&A Museum (London). We will be announcing three more international keynotes from established guests later in the year.

Apply here

Deadline is midnight, February 28th 2019.

Accepted applicants will receive free admission to the Assembly and all its activities, as well as a pass to the GAME ON festival prior to GAIA running from 22-30 November at San Martín Cultural Center.

 

LINK: Game Arts International Assembly (English and Spanish)

EVENT: RAINBOW ARCADE – A QUEER HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES 1985-2018 (DEC 14 2018 – MAY 13 2019, BERLIN, GERMANY)

RAINBOW ARCADE – a queer history of video games 1985-2018

Curated by Sarah Rudolph (herzteile.org), Jan Schnorrenberg (Schwules Museum) and Dr. Adrienne Shaw (Temple University, LGBTQ Game Archive).

Dec 14 2018 – May 13 2019.

Schwules Museum
Lützowstraße 73
10785 Berlin

Description

For the first time worldwide, the queer history of video games will be explored in a major exhibition: RAINBOW ARCADE will open at Schwules Museum Berlin in December 2018 and features a wide variety of exhibits spanning over 30 years of media history, including playable titles, concept drawings, modifications written by fans themselves and documentations of online communities. The exhibition will be taking stock of contemporary pop cultural questions of representation, stereotypical and discriminatory narratives in entertainment media, and our cultural memory. For the first time, research by the LGBTQ Game Archive will be presented in a museum.

It is remarkable that while video games have become a natural part of our contemporary culture, almost every new release that doesn’t portray LGBTIQ* people and the realities of life in a negative way is quickly celebrated as groundbreaking or discredited as sudden ideological politicization. Yet there are a few examples of mainstream titles from the 1990s featuring relatively sensible coming-out storylines and same-sex marriage & flirting options. RAINBOW ARCADEasks not only how social discourses and developments have been reflected in video games and if there has been any major progress in regards of LGBTIQ* representation in entertainment media. In addition, the exhibition explores issues regarding our digital memory and the unique challenges posed by digital culture to archives and institutions and the archival absence of contemporary queer media history. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive supporting programme with international developers, artists and researchers. A crowdfunding campaign to fund the catalog can be found here.

The exhibition features an entire section dedicated to Robert Yang's games, Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World, Brianna Lei’s dating game about chaotic bisexual teens, Butterfly Soupand Dietrich Squinkifer’s Dominique Pamplemousse among others. The Guardian has published a detailed walkthrough.

LINK: QUEER ARCADE

EVENT: PARALLEL WORLDS 2019 (FRIDAY 25 2019, LONDON, UK)

Parallel Worlds 2019 – A Conference on Videogame Design and Culture
Friday 25 January 2015, 10:30 -17:30
Victoria and Albert Museum, London Tickets
£35 full price, £30 concessions, £15 student

Parallel Worlds, the V&A’s conference dedicated to videogame design and culture, will be back for more critical conversations on Friday 25 January 2019, in conjunction with the V&A’s headline autumn exhibition Videogames: Design / Play / Disrupt. This day long international conference brings together talks from leading game designers, artists, engineers and thinkers on the design of videogames and playful immersive worlds.

Speakers include Chris Kujawski, Principal Designer of the Xbox Adaptive Controller; Amanda Johnston-Batt from Framestore’s rides team and independent game designer Jenny Jiao Hsia, whose work features in ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’. You can find out more about our stellar speaker line up below, with more to be announced before the big day alongside a full schedule.

The event will continue into the evening with a Friday Late looking at the future of videogame design and culture where you’ll be able to get hands on with a host of arcades, workshops and demonstrations across the Museum. To see the full list of speakers, click the link below. 

LINK: Parallel Worlds 2019 – A Conference on Videogame Design and Culture (Poster Artwork by Yuk Fun)

GAME ART: DAVID OREILLY'S EYE OF THE DREAM (2018)

EYE OF THE DREAM by DAVID OREILLY

26.09.2018, 16: 00-21: 00 (opening)
27.09.-04.10.2018 
11: 00-15: 00 & 16: 00-21: 00

Mobile Dome 
Mariannenplatz, Berlin, Germany

music BEN LUKAS BOYSEN & SEBASTIAN PLANO
programming DAMIEN QUARTZ & EZRA HANSON WHITE
Sound Design EDUARDO ORTIZFRAU
narration: ALAN WATTS
Idea & curatorial consulting STEPHAN SCHWINGELER

Schedule 2018

September 26-October 4th - Berlin, Mariannenplatz (The New Infinity)
October 13-15 - Los Angeles (David Lynch's Festival of Disruption)
October 25-27 - Hamburg Planetarium (The New Infinity)

The creation of the universe in less than two hours - the new interactive work of artist and game designer David OReilly takes us on a journey through billions of years of history from the moment before the Big Bang through the evolution of life to our modern world. The result is a multi-layered experience that oscillates between dramatic and meditative, abstract and familiar, chaotic and orderly. Real-time simulation is driven by a series of interconnected systems inspired by musical compositional processes. Always moving and producing infinite variations, they create complex and evolving shapes and structures - each moment unique and unrepeatable.

Video courtesy of Berlin Art Link, produced by Anna Russ, filmed by Peter Cairns, and edited by Lena Kocutar.

Images courtesy of David OReilly.

First presented at Berliner Festspiel 2018.

LINK: Eye of the Dream

EVENT: KEITA TAKAHASHI: ZOOMING OUT (JANUARY 24 - JULY 14 2019, SAVANNAH, GEORGIA)

Keita Takahashi: Zooming Out

Curated by Harry DeLorme, Senior Curator of Education

January 24 - July 14 2019

Telfairs Museum

207 W. York St.
Savannah, GA 31401, USA

Telfairs Museum is hosting a major retrospective on Keita Takahashi between January 24 through July 14, 2019. Curated by Harry DeLorme and subtitled Zooming Out, this first-ever museum survey exhibition of the legendary Japanese video game designer’s work is organized in conjunction with the museum’s annual PULSE Art + Technology Festival. So far there have been a relatively scarce number of exhibitions focusing on single designers (Jason Rohrer comes to mind), which makes Zooming Out even more compelling.

Keita Takahashi, Wild Rumpus and Venus Patrol, Tenya Wanya Teens, 2013

Initially trained as an artist, Takahashi received a degree in Fine Art and Sculpture from Musashino Art University in Tokyo. At the beginning of his professional career, he was hired as a design artist at Namco, where he became the lead developer of Katamari Damacy, a now-iconic game that won awards, spawned sequels, influenced popular culture beyond the game world, and was one of the first video games acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition highlights Takahashi’s outside-the-box approach to game development, game mechanics, aesthetics, and music. Included will be playable versions of all of Takahashi’s major games, such as the original Katamari Damacy and its newly remastered edition, KatamariDamacyREROLL, We Love Katamari, Noby Noby Boy, and the eagerly awaited Wattam (Developer: Funomena, Publisher: Annapurna Interactive). In addition to his major game releases, the exhibition includes several of his independent games and collaborative installations, including Tenya Wanya Teens, operated with two 16-button controllers, and a reimagined, immersive take on the classic game PAC-MAN (with Clement Shimizu and Babycastles). The artist’s early sculpture work, animations, and playground designs will also be on view.

Keita Takahashi and Adam Saltsman, Alphabet, 2013

Image: Wattam, 2018, Publisher: Annapurna Interactive, Developer: Funomena

Woorld, 2016, Augmented Reality Game, Developer: Funomena

LINK: Telfair Museums

EVENT: COMPUTER GRRRLS! (OCTOBER 27-FEBRUARY 24 2019, DORTMUND, GERMANY)

COMPUTER GRRRLS!

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

27 October 2018 – 24 February 2019, HMKV at the Dortmunder U, Level 3

Opening: Friday, October 26th at 7pm

Curated by Dr. Inke Arns e Marie Lechner

The exhibition is dedicated to Nathalie Magnan (1956-2016).

The exhibition Computer Grrrls brings together more than 20 international artistic positions that negotiate the relationship between gender and technology in past and present. Computer Grlz deals with the complex link between women and technology –  from the first human computers to the current revival of cyber-feminist movements. A comprehensive timeline covers these developments from the 18th century to the present. Invited are artists, hackers, makers and researchers who are working on how to think differently about technology: by questioning the gender bias in big data and Artificial Intelligence, promoting an open and diversified Internet, and designing utopian technologies.

Participating artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Manetta Berends, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Nadja Buttendorf, Elisabeth Caravella, Jennifer Chan, Aleksandra Domanovic, Louise Drulhe, Darsha Hewitt, Lauren Huret, Hyphen-Labs, Dasha Ilina, Mary Maggic, Caroline Martel, Lauren Moffatt, Simone C. Niquille, Jenny Odell, Elisa Giardina Papa, Tabita Rezaire, Erica Scourti, Suzanne Treister, Lu Yang

The exhibition will be on view at HMKV until 24 February 2019, and will then travel further to Paris and Eindhoven in the Spring/Summer of 2019.

HMKV, Dortmund, DE (27 Oct 2018 - 24 Feb 2019) 
La Gaité Lyrique, Paris, FR (13 March - 14 July 2019) 
MU, Eindhoven, NL (August - September 2019)

An exhibition by HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), Dortmund (DE) in co-production with La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (FR)

The exhibition is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Main funder HMKV: Dortmunder U – Center for Art and Creativity. Partner: MU Eindhoven (NL)

LINK: COMPUTER GRRRLS!