GAMESCENES

CALL FOR ARTWORKS

Call for short films – KO(O)RTS 2025

Deadline: 1 May 2025 | Festival: 26–27 September 2025 | Enschede, NL

Sickhouse invites filmmakers, artists, and experimental creators to submit their work for the 2025 edition of KO(O)RTS, our short film festival celebrating bold, poetic, and unconventional storytelling. Whether you’re working in animation, documentary, machinima, fiction, experimental, or hybrid forms, KO(O)RTS welcomes short films that defy boundaries and embrace playfulness, provocation, and pleasure. We’re particularly interested in supporting emerging voices, daring visions, and fresh perspectives from around the world. This year’s edition is presented in collaboration with Concordia and Theatermakerij, expanding the festival’s reach and offering new opportunities for dialogue, visibility, and community.

KO(O)RTS is weird, wicked, and wonderful. Think punk meets trashy unicorns. Think queer, sweaty, alternative cinema. If that speaks to you—send us your work.

Submission guidelines:

• One film per applicant

• Completed within the last 3 years

• Maximum length: 15 minutes

• Submission fee: €5 (to support the selection committee)

👉 Apply via Freeway
📄 More about the festival
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KO(O)RTS is an initiative from Sickhouse and is organised in collaboration with Concordia and Theatermakerij. The three organisations are curating the programs based on an international open call. 

LINK: KO(O)RTS

EVENT: AMIR YATZIV’S PETER IS BACK (APRIL 16-17 2025, BERLIN)

Amir Yatziv’s Peter is Back

16/4/2025 and 17/4/2025, both at 8 pm

Liquid Studio, Wassertorstraße 62 (4th floor)

10969 Berlin Germany

Peter Is Back: A Machine-Performance is a one-hour piece places me in dialogue with an artificially intelligent avatar, inspired by Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story A Report to an Academy—in which a monkey recounts his transformation into a human being. Throughout the show, unexpected dynamics of control and freedom unfold between the aryist the machine, and the audience—moments that speak directly to the anxieties and possibilities of our time.

LINK: Amir Yatziv

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: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV (MARCH 17-23 2025, LOS ANGELES AND ONLINE)

MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV

REBOOT/RESTART/RESET

MARCH 17—23 2025

Los Angeles, California and online

The Milan Machinima Festival MMXXV presents a curated selection of 31 machinima and game videos by 35 artists from 17 countries, including Belarus, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the USA. Spanning nine programs, the festival unfolds online (March 17–23, 2025) and onsite in Los Angeles, California (March 20–21, 2025), showcasing works that challenge storytelling conventions, repurpose game engines as cinematic tools, and interrogate the aesthetics and politics of virtual worlds.

TICKETS

SCHEDULE

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JURORS

INTERVIEWS

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: NATALIE MAXIMOVA (JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 13 2025, ONLINE)

Awaiting Oblivion

digital video, colour, sound, 20’ 23”, 2024, Russia

created by Natalie Maximova

World premiere

vral.org

 

Awaiting Oblivion interrogates the collapse of simulated reality in The Last of Us Part II, uncovering spaces where the boundaries between representation and existence dissolve. As the digital world fractures into glitches and voids, it exposes the instability of meaning, unmasking the illusion of coherence, and confronting observers with absence that lies at the heart of perception. Maximova uses the embedded photo mode functions as a critical apparatus, transforming observation into an active engagement with the ungraspable. The poetic structure of her voice over amplifies the dissonance between digital precision and the fluid, ephemeral quality of ecological and philosophical questions, echoing the tensions between order and chaos in post-humanist discourse.

Natalie Maximova is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer based in London UK. She holds a Master’s degree from the ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne and has also studied at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Maximova’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Now Play This festival, Sickhoes #6 imitate - manipulate – simulate at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Milan Machinima Festival (VRAL), the 6th and 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Balagan!!! in Kühlhaus Berlin and others. Her work has been featured in various publications including Spectator, Il Giornale dell’Arte, Camera Austria, Bird in Flight, Calvert Journal, and Vice among others. She has also contributed to Screen Images In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast, edited by Winfried Gerling, Sebastian Möring and Marco De Mutiis and published by Kulturverlag Kadmos in 2023.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: WORLDGLIMPSING: ROLE PLAY AND THE DESIGN OF ALTERNATE REALITIES (OCTOBER 3 2025 - AUGUST 16 2026, STIOCKHOLM, SWEDEN)

Reinis Hofmanis, Britta Hoyer as Youa the Manwolf, LARP series, 2011. Courtesy of ArkDes. © Reinis Hofmanis

Worldglimpsing
Role Play and the Design of Alternate Realities
October 3, 2025–August 16, 2026

ArkDes
Skeppsholmen
Exercisplan
Stockholm
Sweden

Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am-6pm,
Tuesday and Friday 10am-8pm

 

press release

ArkDes and Nieuwe Instituut are excited to announce Worldglimpsing: two exhibitions that shine light on the ways in which we inhabit our reality through designed worlds.

Across 2025 and 2027, Worldglimpsing invites you to envision and embody alternate ways of nurturing our identities, our communities, and the planet at large. From live action role play (LARP) and game design to film, animation and avatarism, the exhibition explores social and artistic approaches that are guiding us to other possible futures—today.

Engage with sophisticated worlding efforts that marshal the potential of empathy through speculation and serious play. Outlining an emerging creative field that blends visual art, design, architecture, performance, fashion and more, this participatory exhibition highlights forms of creativity that foreground role play and the design of alternate worlds as civic and political acts. Worldglimpsing introduces you to a series of extraordinary experiments—human, machine, and otherwise—at the bleeding edge of contemporary culture.

At the heart of the exhibitions: Our Brood
Conceived and created by OMSK Social Club, Our Brood is an expansive and embodied RGP (“Real Game Play”) experience. Combining immersive role play with AI interaction, it explores themes of motherhood and care in the context of ecological and technological crises. Here, the power of play becomes a tool to navigate complex contemporary scenarios. Envision alternate futures of yourself—and the worlds that you design.

OMSK Social Club is a stewarded practice of collective storytelling. It involves a specific immersive improvised methodology, which they coined in 2017 as “Real Game Play”, encompassing collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, they harvest media relics such as films, scripts, and large-scale video installations invoking states and gateways that could potentially be fiction or an as-of-yet unlived reality. The living installations that they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences, and cautionary tales.

Worldglimpsing: Role Play and the Design of Alternate Realities is a collaboration between two national museums with a shared focus on investigating an expanded field of design. The first chapter of the exhibition, hosted by ArkDes in Stockholm, will open on October 3, 2025. The second chapter, hosted by the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, will open in Autumn 2026.

LINK: Worldglimpsing: Role Play and the Design of Alternate Realities

LINK: OMSK Social Club 

EVENT: ONE TETHERED BIRD (JANUARY 17 - FEBRUARY 21 2025, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON STATE)

Brent Watanabe: One Tethered Bird

The Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish

1077 Lenora Street

Seattle, WA 98121

Jan 17th - Feb 21 2025

 

Brent Watanabe's upcoming solo show at The Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish will include work covering the past two decades, including his Grand Theft Auto interventions (San Andreas Deer Cam, Community Cam, Possessions), several computer controlled installations, MINE VR, his Animal Crossing intervention, and the two new works.

 

Brent Watanabe, San Andreas Community Cam, 2017, studies for computer-controlled installation, Modified version of Grand Theft Auto V

 

Brent Watanabe, Possessions, 2018-19, animation, animation, modified version of Grand Theft Auto V

 

Brent Watanabe, Animal Crossing: All Mine, 2020, video game intervention in Animal Crossing: New Horizon

 

Stay tuned for more news about this monumental exhibition!

 

Brent Watanabe’s art practice defies categorization, fusing traditional techniques with cutting-edge technology to create installations that are at once visually arresting and intellectually engaging. Drawing on his extensive background in drawing and sculpture, Watanabe uses computer programming and electronics to create kinetic sculptures that are at the forefront of a new wave of digital art. Watanabe’s work has been recognized both nationally and internationally, with his groundbreaking 2016 project, San Andreas Deer Cam, receiving over 800,000 visitors in its first three months alone and being featured in publications such as New York Magazine, the BBC, and WIRED. In addition to his solo work, Watanabe has participated in group shows and screenings around the world, including Through Machine Eyes at the NeMe Arts Center in Limassol, Cyprus, Game Changers at MassArt Art Museum in Boston, and Playmode at the MATT Museum in Lisbon, Portugal. With recent solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as SOIL Art Gallery, McLeod Residency, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Gallery 4Culture, Anchor Art Space, and the Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival, Watanabe continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of digital art. 

 

Read an interview about MINE VR

 

Read an interview about Animal Crossing: All Mine

 

LINK: Brent Watanabe

 

LINK: The Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish

EVENT: MALITZIN CORTÉS (CNDSD) AND IVÁN ABREU (OCTOBER 1 - 10 2024, ONLINE)

AUTOCONSTRUCCIÓN

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 13’ 52”, 2024, Mexico

created by Malitzin Cortés (CNDSD) and Iván Abreu

vral.org

 

Originally conceived and performed as a live-coded audiovisual concert and real-time video game animation, Autoconstrucción was collaboratively created by Malitzin Cortés (CNDSD) and Iván Abreu. The project, executed through algorithms and unfolding across four distinct chapters, was performed in Mexico City (2022), Madrid (2023), Utrecht (2023), and Shanghai (2023). The segment presented on VRAL features a generated version of episode 2, entitled Floating City - Floating Population. This episode explores the concept of a transient population inhabiting cities, with AI creating hybrid architectural facades that reflect the empty character of many peripheral cities during the day.

Malitzin Cortés (CNDSD) is a renowned musician, live coder, and creative technologist. Her multifaceted work encompasses live coding, live cinema, installation art, virtual reality, creative coding, sound design, experimental music, and sound art. In 2020, she was awarded the Latin American Prize for Virtual Reality “Realmix” for her immersive piece “Hyper_D.” Malitzin is currently a workshop instructor in live coding with functional programming using Tidal Cycles on the educational platform of CMMAS. She has showcased her work at prominent venues and events including the Multimedia Center, Alameda Art Laboratory, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Digital Cultural Center, Medialab Prado, Spain Cultural Center, CMMAS, Vorspiel, Spektrum Berlin, Transpiksel, Aural, Transmediale Berlin, ISEA, CYLAND MediaArtLab Saint Petersburg, ADAF, Ars Electronica, Currents, as well as MUTEK in Mexico, Montreal, and Japan. CNDSD’s soundscapes are crafted for experimental environments, characterized by granular landscapes, algorithmic vocal experiments, hypnotic noise improvisations, live coding, and asymmetric patterns, pushing the boundaries of musical and sonic exploration. Cortés lives and works in Mexico City.

Iván Abreu is an esteemed audiovisual artist and creative technologist based in Mexico City. His interdisciplinary practice spans a diverse array of media, including digital graphics, photography, electronic devices, software development, music and sound experimentation, expanded film and video, and industrial design. Abreu's innovative work has garnered numerous accolades and support from prestigious institutions. These include the Prix Ars Electronica (2012, Linz, Austria), the CINTAS Foundation Award in Visual Arts (2011-12, New York/Miami), and the ZKM Production and Research Residence – Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (2021). He has also been supported by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts, through the National System of Art Creators (2012-2014, 2017-2019, and 2022-2025, Mexico). Abreu's audiovisual creations have been showcased at prominent international festivals dedicated to sound art, experimental music, and media art. His work has been featured at the International Conference of Live Coding in Madrid, Aural, Transmediale Berlin, MUTEK in Mexico and Montreal, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), and the Asia Culture Center in Korea.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: NINA DAVIES’S GLITCH GUISERS (AUGUST 23 2024, LONDON)

Nina Davies: Glitch Guisers

04:00pm - 07:30pm, Fri 23 Aug 2024

The Photographers' Gallery

16-18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW, United Kingdom

 

London's The Photographers Gallery is hosting a free outdoor performance by Nina Davies, titled Glitch Guisers, in the streets of Soho Photography Quarter. This event builds on the fictional narrative from Davies’ film, Never Let Them Know Your Next Move, which will be screened on the Gallery's third floor throughout the evening.

Glitch Guisers features five dancers engaging in 'glitch guising' as they move through the streets to a central point where they will freeze, evoking the 2016 viral Mannequin Challenge. This performance reflects the film’s themes, where protagonists discuss the automation of labor. Workers at a distribution center reclaim agency by performing glitch-like movements, confusing the system and allowing themselves a break. Click here to learn more about Davis' practice.

Coinciding with the performance is a presentation of Nina Davies’ For An Imaginary Page. Glitch Guisers will take place on the hour from 4pm to 7pm in Soho Photography Quarter. Attendees are encouraged to film the performances and share the content online to celebrate the artist's work.

Additionally, Never Let Them Know Your Next Move will be screened on a continuous loop on the Gallery's third floor. The film is 10 minutes long. All exhibitions in the Gallery are free to enter until 8pm as part of the Friday Lates program.

Nina Davies (b. 1991) is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture. She questions how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed.

LINK: Nina Davies

LINK: Glitch Guisers