GAMESCENES

EVENT: SEBASTIAN MÖRING AND IDA KATHRINE HAMMELEFF JØRGENSEN (MAY 24 2023, ONLINE)

Sebastian Möring and Ida Kathrine Hammeleff Jørgensen on a trip exploring flight simulators

Wednesday 24 May, 18.00 BST

Screenwalk

Free, online

In this Screen Walk, game scholar turned virtual pilot Sebastian Möring will take his guest Ida Kathrine Hammeleff Jørgensen to the skies in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Throughout their flight from Berlin to Copenhagen, the two researchers will discuss realism and abstraction, models, simulation, and representation in games and game research. This Screen Walk marks the first episode of Möring’s new series A Lift Home – Talking Game Research at 36.000 ft Above Sea Level. (more info here)

Register here

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: I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR: ART AND THE DIGITAL SCREEN (FEBRUARY 12-APRIL 30 2023, FORT WORTH, TEXAS)

Nam June Paik, Video Flag Y, 1985. 84 ten-inch television sets, three Plexiglas cases, fans, LaserDisc players, LaserDiscs, and video tapes. 72 x 144 x 50 inches. JPMorgan Chase Art Collection. © Estate of Nam June Paik.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen
February 12–April 30, 2023

Curated by Alison Hearst 

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
3200 Darnell Street
Fort Worth, Texas 76107 USA

press release

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents the landmark I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, a thematic group exhibition that examines the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. This exhibition surveys more than sixty works by fifty artists over the past five decades. The artists included examine screen culture through a broad range of media such as paintings, sculpture, video games, digital art, augmented reality, and video. Organized by Curator Alison Hearst, I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen will be on view at the Modern February 12 through April 30, 2023.

Screens affect nearly every aspect of life today. Their pervasiveness has bred a 24/7 breaking news cycle, the looming corporate-sponsored virtual-reality “Metaverse,” unlimited accessibility and content, and an ease in how ideas and images are distributed, undoubtably shaping culture in profound ways. This exhibition starts in 1969—the year of the televised Apollo moon landing and the launch of the internet’s prototype, ARPANET—as this was the watershed year where collective connectivity through screens was first mobilized in modern society. This era forged what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan presciently deemed in the 1960s a “global village,” a place where distance is collapsed and people from across the world readily interact. Following this trajectory, contemporary life is hybrid and increasingly mediated through screens. These flat and finite surfaces embody more than what meets the eye—they hold up a mirror to society and contribute to forming meaning in life and mainstream culture.

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen is organized into nine key themes:

liminal space: From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, several artists were working alongside the early major technological developments of the screen: Gretchen Bender, Nancy Burson, Harold Cohen, Vuk Ćosić, Peter Halley, Frederick Hammersley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eduardo Kac, Tatsuo Miyajima, Nam June Paik, Lillian F. Schwartz, and Andy Warhol. These artists’ works are highlighted in this section for their innovative processes.

connectivity: Screens connect us with incredible ease to friends, colleagues, a network of other users and players, apps, news, and streaming services. We share—and are shared with—through screens. As culture courses through society via these means, screens are at the axis of most of our interactions, and these connections are a topic interrogated by many artists, including Cory Arcangel, Liss LaFleur, Eva and Franco Mattes, Cassie McQuater, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, and Wickerham & Lomax.

surveillance: While we find community through technology, we simultaneously become linked to broader systems of data extraction through our devices. Our information is captured for national security purposes, geo-mapping, and corporate surveillance capitalism, where targeted ads are deployed based on purchases and browsing history. Hasan Elahi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Jon Rafman investigate the positive, negative, and humorous aspects of surveillance today.

the repository: Today’s constant stream of data has led to round-the-clock ingestion of content. This informational sphere is made even more accessible via handheld devices. Speaking to a vast and complex array of image and information circulation in the screen age are the artists Morehshin Allahyari, Kahlil Robert Irving, Trevor Paglen, Jason Salavon, Skawennati, and Penelope Umbrico.

digital abstraction: While painters of all genres use technology in their work, artists such as Cory Arcangel, Wade Guyton, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, and John Pomara explore the intersections of the digital screen and formal abstraction. Historically compared to windows and mirrors, the often flat, rectangular format of paintings also acts like a screen in today’s world—a passageway that disrupts the viewer’s physical space or mirrors contemporary life.

the posthuman body: In the digital age, technology has become an extension of the body. Posthumanism, a concept arising from science fiction, is the idea that humans will be transformed by technological progress. Depictions of the human body in a media-induced world are far from monolithic, as demonstrated by the artists Caitlin Cherry, Petra Cortright, Huntrezz Janos, Guthrie Lonergan, Carson Lynn, Avery Singer, and Hito Steyerl, who traverse concepts of self and portraiture in the technological era.

automation and the loneliness epidemic: The relationship between man and machine is addressed by Cao Fei and !Mediengruppe Bitnik, specifically the tension of isolation in an increasingly automated world. Set in environments where human labor has been replaced by automation, Cao Fei’s and !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works exemplify the paradoxes of human intimacy in the screen age.

ecology: Electronic debris, such as plastics, batteries, monitors, and phones, fills landfills and off-gasses toxins that contribute to water pollution. Several artists in this exhibition, including American Artist, Alice Bucknell, Simon Denny, Kristin Lucas, Rick Silva, and Elias Sime, demonstrate the complexities of ecology in the digital age.

turning a mirror on ourselves: Holding a mirror to society and ourselves, screens construct reality, molding many of the themes at the forefront of culture today. Through extraordinarily different works, the artists Arthur Jafa and Molly Soda make videos that shine a light on society through the lens of found, vernacular videos already circulating online.

More than 25,000 square feet of gallery space will be devoted to the exhibition, which will include iconic works by prominent national and international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Arthur Jafa, Nam June Paik, Hito Steyerl, and Andy Warhol, as well as several leading artists living in Texas, including Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, and John Pomara. Several new and never-before-seen works by key artists Caitlin Cherry, Simon Denny, Hasan Elahi, and Kahlil Robert Irving will debut in this exhibition. This is the most in-depth show of its kind in the Southwest region and is one of only a few presentations exploring art and digital technology in the past decade at this scale.

Curator Alison Hearst notes, “Artists have long shone a light on the world and the human experience, and the artists in I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen respond to, challenge, and probe new technologies and the cultural conditions these technologies have shaped. Using the screen as a tool and formal device, many of the artists in this exhibition expand the parameters of artmaking through the digital language unique to their generation.”

Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue featuring contributions by Alison Hearst, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Dr. Omar Kholeif, director of collections at Sharjah Art Foundation; Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, Assistant Curator at Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and professor and cyberpsychologist Dr. John Suler. 180 pages, 100+ illustrations; published by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and distributed by DelMonico Books/D.A.P.

There will be an online platform for the exhibition.

Artists in the exhibition:
Morehshin Allahyari, Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Alice Bucknell, Nancy Burson, Caitlin Cherry, Harold Cohen, Petra Cortright, Vuk Ćosić, Simon Denny, Hasan Elahi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Cao Fei, Wade Guyton, Peter Halley, Frederick Hammersley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jacqueline Humphries, Kahlil Robert Irving, Arthur Jafa, Huntrezz Janos, Eduardo Kac, Liss LaFleur, Guthrie Lonergan, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kristin Lucas, Carson Lynn, Eva and Franco Mattes, Cassie McQuater, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Tatsuo Miyajima, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, John Pomara, Jon Rafman, Jason Salavon, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lillian F. Schwartz, Rick Silva, Elias Sime, Avery Singer, Skawennati, Molly Soda, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Penelope Umbrico, Andy Warhol, Wickerham & Lomax

LINK: I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen

EVENT: JORDY VEENSTRA (DECEMBER 19 2022 - JANUARY 5 2023, ONLINE)

ARE3NA

digital video/machinima (2048x858), color, sound, 35’, 2022, The Netherlands

Created by Jordy Veenstra

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

December 19 2022 - January 5 2023

vral.org

 

AR3NA is a visual study of Quake III Arena; its environments and its textures. It is also a complex work of media anthropology: a deeper critical look at more than two-hundred maps in which millions of battles have been fought since 1999. With a production time frame and a duration exceeding those of most experimental machinima, Veenstra’s AR3NA is a meta-commentary on video game play, architecture, space and places.

Jordy Veenstra is a video editor, motion graphics designer, 2D animator, and experimental filmmaker based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In his practice, Veenstra connects art and narrative with technology and software through the medium of experimental film. His work examines often overlooked social and artistic concerns. His works have been exhibited during the 2020 and 2022 editions of the Milan Machinima Festival and the equally astounding Regression Trilogy was featured as a show on VRAL in 2020.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: IN-GAME PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION (DECEMBER 10 2022, BERLIN, GERMANY)

December 10 2022

12:30 - 13:30 Berlin Time

C/O Berlin

Hardenbergstraße 22–24,

10623 Berlin Germany

Curators turned sports commentators Jon Uriarte and Marco De Mutiis will present artistic projects that have been created using in-game photography. The works address questions of photorealism, simulation, photographic practices in and against video games. Uriarte and De Mutiis ultimately ask the help of the audience to choose what they consider to be the most exciting and best work. Visitors play an important part in the process: they can cast their vote and decide who amongst the artists did it better in in-game photography!

This event is part of Capturing the (Game) World: Over the last two decades a new photographical practice evolved in the realm of the digital: In-Game Photography. Open world computer games are increasingly shipped with an implemented photo mode, users post game snapshots to their social media timelines as a matter of course, and artists present their in-game photo works in museums and galleries.

Capturing the (Game) World is a series of events which invites students, scholars, artists, photographers, hobbyists as well as professionals, gamers as well as non-gamers, theorists as well as practitioners to explore the quickly developing new photography practice called in-game photography. The series offers insightful talks - about the practice, aesthetics, and the history of in-game photography - as well as hands-on workshops to explore photography in games and in-game photographical techniques. 

LINK: In-game photography competition

EVENT: KAMILIA KARD (DECEMBER 2 2022, 9 PM CET, LIVE PERFORMANCE, ONLINE)

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is delighted to announce its first machinima live performance on its brand new Twitch channel. Curated by Gemma Fantacci, the inaugural show is Kamilia Kard’s Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE. Join us tonight Friday December 2 at 9 pm Central European Time (CET)! 

Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE is an online participatory performance created within Toxic Garden, a unique map designed by the artist for Roblox (Roblox Corporation, 2006) in which participants can perform a common dance by donning custom skins that change randomly. A visual commentary on toxic human behaviors, DANCE DANCE DANCE is inspired by the defense mechanisms of poisonous plants. Its development took place during the residency at Lavanderia a Vapore and it involved dancers who contributed in the creation of the choreography. Designed and developed by Kamilia Kard, aka KKlovesU4E. Music of the Performance by Raffaella Bresciani. Sound design of Toxic Garden’s map by Cristina Katja Angeloro.

Kamilia Kard is an artist and scholar based in Milan. Her research explores how hyper-connectivity and new forms of online communication have modified and influenced the perception of the human body, as well as our gestures, feelings and emotions. Her practice spans from digital paintings to websites, from video installations to 3D printed sculptures, from interactive virtual environments and video games to AR facial filters. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, public spaces and online venues. Highlights include: A.dition Gallery, South Korea (2022), Careof, Milan (2021); Marséll, Milan (2021); Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare (2021); Milan Machinima Festival (2021); Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris (2020); Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris (2020); Dimora Artica, Milan (2020); Olomouc Museum of Art (2020); Metronom, Modena (2018, 2019 and 2020); EP7, Paris (2019); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2018); iMAL, Brussels (2018); Digitalive @ REF, Rome (2018); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); Triennale di Milano (2017); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2017); La Quadriennale di Roma (2016); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2015); Hypersalon, Miami (2015); The Wrong Biennial, online (2014); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2013). She is the author of Arte e Social Media. Generatori di sentimenti (Postmedia Books 2022) and the editor of Alpha Plus. An Anthology of Digital Art (Editorial Vortex 2017). She often lectures about her artistic practice and research. She has a Ph.D in Digital Humanities (University of Genova), and she teaches Multimedia Communication and Aesthetics of New Media at Accademia di Brera in Milan, Italy.

To watch the perform, please visit

MMF_VRAL on Twitch

Kamilia Kard

Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE

December 2 2022 at 9 PM CET

free

EVENT: PLAY THE PAST: A GAMING FOCUS (OCTOBER 26 - NOVEMBER 11 2022, BERLIN/ONLINE)

Play the Past: A Gaming Focus

26.10.–6.11.2022 / HAU3, HAU4 (online)

With machina eX and The Mycological Twist

Games create a multitude of worlds. The HAU is bringing together three different game projects that connect the past to the present day. They create scenes where the players playfully learn something both about socio-historical developments as well as make decisions about the course of events on their own or in groups. Games thus become source of inspiration and media for discourse. The experienced game developers from machina eX who have produced at the HAU for many years and the artist duo The Mycological Twist, who combine ecological and social practices with digital culture, will examine the artistic potential of games together with the audience in HAU3. In addition, the games expert Melanie Eilert recommends “Through the Darkest of Times” by the renowned Berlin-based indie studio Paintbucket for those at home, a historical strategy game about the resistance against National Socialism that she subjects to an accessibility test.

HAU4 is the digital stage of HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

LINK: Play the Past

EVENT: IN-GAME PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP WITH ROC HERMS (SEPTEMBER 11 2022, ONLINE)

Workshop: In-game photography with Roc Herms

10:30am - 4 pm Sunday 11 September 2022 BST

Organized by The Photographer's Gallery in London

Learn how to take great photographs inside video games in this online workshop with exhibiting artist Roc Herms

What is in-game photography? How can photography document the interactions that happen in online games and digital realms?

Description

Enjoy a one-day workshop with How to Win at Photography exhibiting artist Roc Herms. We’ll start with a theoretical introduction to in-game photography and quickly move on to a series of practical activities and exercises. Using Roblox to play with composition, colour and perspective, develop a new portfolio of images while also socialising with other players and engaging with more traditional concepts of photography. By the end of the session, participants will have co-produced a digital publication of the day's experiences.

This workshop is suitable for photographers, artists and others interested in photography's relationship to game worlds, as well as those interested in exploring new approaches to landscape and portrait photography.

This event is part of How to Win at Photography, an exhibition currently on display at The Photographer's Gallery.

Schedule

10.30 Introduction (on Zoom)
10.35 Presentation on in-game photography/on-line games/multiverses
11.30 Dive into Roblox: Playing different online games to learn the mechanics of in-game photography
12.30 Break
13.00 Roblox photoshoot activities and exercises
13.30 Roblox in-game photoshoot
15.00 Design of the publication (group exercise)
16.00 Workshop end

Details on how to access the workshop will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place.

Biography

In 1978 Gary Thurek and his assistant Carl Gartley sent the first mass email with advertising purposes, reaching 393 users at the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (called the ARPANET), unaware that they just sent the first example of what would later be known as SPAM. That same year, over 9000 kilometers away, Roc Herms was born in Spain. 28 years later he discovers photography as a tool to learn, and he manages to combine it with his interest in the Internet, video games and parallel realities: showing his passion for technology and the need to take a step further in photographic practice. Postcards From Home and “ ”, his two long term projects published in book form, try to shed some light on the life we live inside the computer. “Hacer Pantallazo” is an intimate diary made with screenshots, a capture process that he ends up understanding as the ultimate step on photography’s digitalisation. His work has been exhibited in “From Here On”, Centre d’Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona and “Photography 2.0”, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid both curated by Joan Fontcuberta, as well as in the Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands; Platine Festival, Germany; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Hammer Museum, USA; CCCB, Barcelona and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France.

LINK: In-game photography workshop

LINK: Roc Herms

EVENT: ARTIST TALK: BUILDING UTOPIAS WITH DANIELLE UDOGARANYA AND DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY (SEPTEMBER 14 2022, ONLINE)

Wednesday 14 Sep 2022 at 6:30pm (UK time)

Price: £5, £3 concession & members

Location: Zoom and (optionally) Roblox

An event curated by The Photographers Gallery, London

In this livestreamed, in-game event, Twitch streamer and How to Win at Photography artist Danielle Udogaranya joins video game and digital artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, as the two discuss virtual worlds while playing co-operative worldbuilding games. Moderated by Nimco Kulmiye Hussein.

The talk can be accessed via Zoom and Roblox. Roblox is a free-to-play game that can be accessed via Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Xbox One. An invite link to both the Zoom call and the game server will be sent out prior to the event.

Note: To watch and listen to the talk, only Zoom is required. To join the talk in-game, Roblox can be used in addition to Zoom.

Danielle Udogaranya, – known on Twitch as Ebonix – is a London-based digital artist, content curator and online streamer, known for the custom content she creates for The Sims 4. Her "modded" Sims are on display within How to Win at Photography: Image-Making as Play.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a digital artist focused on creating virtual archives for the Black trans experience. Through digital environments  the artist ''centres'' the body, exploring identity, community, and Black trans history.

Nimco Kulmiye Hussein is a curator and writer, working at the intersection of research, culture, and art. Their praxis draws from postcolonial and queer-feminist perspectives, focusing actively on participatory practices that bring people together through critical, timely and meaningful narratives.

LINK: Building Utopias

EVENT: ULTRA UNREAL (JULY 22 - OCTOBER 2 2022, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA)

Lu Yang, installation view, Ultra Unreal, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022. Image courtesy and © the artist. Photograph: Alex Davies

Ultra Unreal
New myths for new worlds
July 22–October 2 2022

Curated by Anna Davis

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Circular Quay West
140 George Street
Sydney NSW 2000
Australia
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–5pm,
Wednesday 10am–9pm

press release

Ultra Unreal at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) features the works of six artists and collectives. Club Ate (Sydney), Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic (Bangkok & New York), Lawrence Lek (London), Lu Yang (Shanghai), and Saeborg (Tokyo) create worlds that blend myth and reality, simulating more-than-human futures, evolving belief systems and fluid frameworks of being.

The fantastical worlds created by these artists are grounded in personal experience and politics. Populated by hybrid creatures and genderfluid beings, their worlds are spread across physical and virtual spaces at the MCA.

Ultra Unreal reflects on the relevance of mythmaking and its role in navigating complex realities of the present. Drawing inspiration from Ning Ken’s theory of the ultra-unreal, it examines how mythologies can be used to reveal hidden histories and reorientate visions of the future.

Works by Club Ate and Saeborg have emerged from the politics of the dancefloor, embodying the vitalities of underground and LGBTQIA+ nightclub communities. Works by Arunanondchai and Gvojic, Lek, and Lu, similarly pulse with late-night energy and investigate ideas that include Sinofuturism, reincarnation, empathy and nonhuman consciousness.

Curator Anna Davis says, “The artists and collectives in Ultra Unreal ask questions about belief and technology, empathy and consciousness. In our complex present, thinking critically about the worlds we want to create and inhabit is more important than ever before.”

Lawrence Lek, Geomancer, 2017. Installation view, Ultra Unreal, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2022. Dingle-channel video, HD, colour, sound. Image courtesy and © the artist. Photograph: Anna Kučera

Exhibition highlights include:
Club Ate’s new video, sound and textile installation Ang Idol Ko / You are My Idol (2022) draws on Filipinx mythologies and club cultures to evoke queer, trans and animist idols for today. The installation combines ancestral figures from the Buwaya (crocodile) and Kinnari (bird) mythologies, and draws on historical accounts of the Babaylan; queer and trans shamans in the Philippines who act as intermediaries between visible and invisible worlds.

The brightly coloured rural world in Saeborg’s installation Slaughterhouse (2021–22) masks a darker commentary on gender roles and stereotypes in Japan. Using the role of livestock as an analogy for society’s treatment and expectations of women, Saeborg aims to highlight issues of gender-based power and control in human and nonhuman lives. Slaughterhouse began as a series of costumes and performances for the Tokyo nightclub Department H.

Lu Yang creates virtual environments to contemplate the nature of consciousness, suffering, death, and rebirth. “I imagine my worlds to be open-ended, non-binary and multi-dimensional” says Lu, whose digital worlds are populated with genderless avatars. Lu has been working on his latest avatar DOKU for several years. In this new series of works, DOKU appears in six different environments, each representing one of the six realms of rebirth and existence in Buddhist cosmology.

Exhibited for the first time in Australia, No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2018) is from a series of works Korakrit Arunanondchai has been developing for the past decade. This fifth episode examines unseen forces shaping our reality, and relationships between humans and more-than-human beings in the context of contemporary Thai mythology. Made in collaboration with Alex Gvojic, the immersive installation features Tosh Basco as the Naga, a recurring character inspired by a mythical serpent and anarchic spirit that can take human form.

Named after a fictional drug for forgetting sorrow in ancient Greek mythology, Lawrence Lek’s series Nepenthe explores connections between memory, virtual worlds, and environments geared towards healing. Nepenthe AR is a new augmented reality (AR) project commissioned by the MCA Australia that invites visitors to discover a series of restorative worlds on each level of the Museum. Nepenthe AR (2022) was inspired by the phenomenon known as the “doorway effect”; when people forget why they have walked into a room as they enter it.

The exhibition includes daily screenings of Lu Yang’s Delusional Mandala (2015) and DOKU—Documentary (2020); Lawrence Lek’s Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD)(2016), and Saeborg’s Pigpen Movie (2016).

LINK: Ultra Unreal

LINK: John McDonald's review of the exhibition