GAMESCENES

EVENT: PETRA SZEMÁN OPENINGS !!! (29 JULY – 12 AUGUST 2023, LEICESTER, ENGLAND)

Petra Szemán
Openings !!!
29 July – 12 August 2023
Opening Night, Friday 28th July
Two Queens
2 Queen Street
Leicester
LE1 1QW

press release

Inhabiting the interstitial zones of anime credit sequences, video game loading screens and regional train journeys, Openings !!! (2022) intensifies the gaps between the layers of animated imagery in an attempt to grasp the kinds of experience that may lie beyond human perceptual boundaries. The video follows the protagonist ‘Yourself’ as they ride local trains through intermedial landscapes. From this uniquely conceived and drafted kinetic viewpoint, fragments of different worlds segue into view, signalling perceptual ruptures that seemingly force subjectivity outside of itself, into strange new relationships of interdependency and intoxication with the moving image. Part of the artist’s ongoing exploration of the radical potential of animation and fandom, Openings !!! rejects its own filmic boundaries, surrendering instead to the free play of a multi-planar and ultimately elusive meta-worldview.

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.

The exhibition will be supported by an Artist Talk and Artist Development Workshop.

Details for the Artist Development Workshop on Sunday 6th August can be found here.

This project is made possible by public funding from The National Lottery through Arts Council England.

LINK: Petra Szemán's Openings !!!

LINK: Petra Szemán

EVENT: CALUM RODGER (JANUARY 20 - FEBRUARY 09 2023, ONLINE)

ROCK, STAR, NORTH

Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 23’ 05”, 2016-2022, Scotland

Created by Calum Rodger

January 20 - February 09 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

In 2016, inspired by Basho, William Wordsworth and Nan Shepherd, Glasgow-based poet Calum Rodger undertook a poetic odyssey inside San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto V’s hyper-real replica of California. In 2017, he chronicled his journey in a 20-minute performance poem titled Rock, Star, North, which premiered at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh in May of that year. In 2021, the poem achieved its final form: a machinipoem, composed entirely of footage from the game, alongside an all-new reading and updated text, which we are now presenting as part of VRAL S03.

Calum Rodger is a Glasgow-based poet working in print, performance and digital forms. He was Scottish National Slam Champion 2019 and holds a Doctorate in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow. In the last few years, he has worked extensively at the intersection of poetry and gaming.

WATCH NOW 

EVENT: YUCEF MERHI: OPEN (SEPTEMBER 2 - NOVEMBER 2021, MIAMI)

Yucef Merhi: OPEN

On view Sept. 2 – Nov. 20 2021

The Bonnier Gallery

3408 NW 7th Avenue

Miami, Florida33127

Yucef Merhi is the Nam June Paik of Game Art. OPEN is his unmissable retrospective at the The Bonnier Gallery in Miami.

full press release

"The Bonnier Gallery is pleased to announce Yucef Merhi's upcoming solo exhibition "OPEN" will be on view from September 2nd - November 20th, 2021. Throughout his 30+ year journey, Merhi's work has remained front and center in the current thinking about art and technology. Opening up a panoramic view of Merhi’s inner worlds, the upcoming exhibition consists of works from five different series that capture the far-reaching consequence of Merhi's orbit around contemporary culture and map out his creative diaspora.

In 1985, when pioneer digital artist Yucef Merhi was only eight years old and growing up in Caracas, he reverse-engineered his ATARI 2600 and turned it into a programmable computer. He used the Atari Video Computer System to produce generative videos based in language instructions. A leading art critic at the time saw this and proclaimed: “What you have created here, Yucef, will be considered a work of art in years to come.” Decades later, Merhi’s seminal creations would be exhibited at the New Museum in New York and would travel all over the world in international exhibitions, celebrated as the first works of art crafted from a videogame console. Watch a video that demonstrates one of these original 1985 works. One year later, at the age of nine, Merhi figured out how to calibrate the atomic clock of Venezuela, and the National Ministry of Defense commended him for achieving this breakthrough.

From data hacking as protest art against totalitarianism and police brutality, to his new vision called Retrocycling that rescues obsolete tech devices from landfills . . . from perfecting a universal language as new source code for planetary awakening, to digital interventions that make poems come alive . . . throughout his 30+ year journey, the artist’s work has remained front and center in the current thinking about art, and especially digital art. Opening up a panoramic view of Merhi’s inner worlds, the new show Yucef Merhi: Open at The Bonnier Gallery captures the far-reaching consequence of his orbit around contemporary culture. For the viewer experiencing Merhi’s art, this often results in mind-expanding encounters with language.

The gallery show presents 15 works, from five different series that map out his creative diaspora. The show ushers in the eagerly anticipated return of Miami’s Art Basel season, and opens on September 2 at the Bonnier Gallery in Allapattah, Miami’s burgeoning art district. “This new show will allow people to experience digital art that is of substance, as opposed to the speculative NFTs that seem to dominate that conversation,” says Grant Bonnier, the curator of this show and owner of the Gallery. “Yucef Merhi has packed the equivalent of several lifetimes leading up to this critical mid-career point of his trajectory,” adds Bonnier. “Merhi is poised at the leading edge of the technology and art.” Yucef Merhi has produced bodies of work that engage a wide spectrum including poetry, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, sound, virtual reality, hacking, and retro video games. By ensuring that his works always connect with the warmth of human engagement through language, Merhi’s momentum continues ahead of the curve."

Atari Ex Machina, 2007

Atari 2600, cartridge, keyboard, TV

72 x 24 x 24 in. / 182.9 x 61 x 61 cm

Copyright The Artist

Photo: The Artist

 

 

Atari Poetry VI, 2006

Atari 2600, Atari cartridge, TV

39 x 16 x 16 in. / 99.1 x 40.6 x 40.6 cm

Copyright The Artist

Photo: The Artist

 

 

Compassion, 2020

5 CRT TVs, 5 Atari 2600 game consoles, custom Atari cartridges, directional sound system

80 x 60 x 70 in.

Copyright Yucef Merhi

Photo: Zachary Balber

 

Among Yucef Merhi's most powerful works is Mission Taliban 2.0 (2002), a 20 year old VR computer game which, for some reasons, feels so incredibly fresh.

 

 

LINK: Yucef Merhi: Open

LINK: Yucef Merhi

EVENT: PIETRO BABINA'S GAMING (SEPTEMBER 7, 2019, FORLÌ, ITALY, 2019)

CRISALIDE XXVI
GAMING
DA RIVISTA 7

SABATO | 7 | SETTEMBRE

ORE 22 c/o Teatro Félix Guattari - via Orto del Fuoco, 3 - Forlì, Italy
---
testo: Pietro Babina Flavio de Marco
Voce e sonorizzazione: Pietro Babina

Lettura sonorizzata di Rivista 7. Una lettura (non integrale) dell’ultimo numero pubblicato. Ad ogni presentazione una diversa modalità. La Super Dittatura ha creato un videogame, il cui utilizzo è obbligatorio, per trasformare tutti gli abitanti della terra (nessuno escluso) in artisti, decretando la definitiva banalizzazione del concetto di artista. Rivista ha la natura del dono, quel dono tabù la cui gratuità definisce il tentativo di fuga (disperata) dal sistema avvilente della mercificazione capillare dell’atto artistico.

The Super Dictatorship has created a video game, the use of which is mandatory, to transform all the inhabitants of the earth (no one excluded) into artists, and thus imposing the definitive trivialization of the concept of artist. Rivista is imbued with gift culture, that taboo gift whose gratuitousness defines the attempt to escape (desperately) from the disheartening system of the systematic commodification of the artistic gesture. [reading]

INTRODUCTION

LINK: Pietro Babina

Game Art: Aram Bartholl's dash clash rush crush smash crash (2017)

Aram Bartholl's appoem*, "dash clash rush crush smash crash", has post-futurist echoes and data mining aspirations. ("crush", pictured above). Each word comprising the poem refers to titles of games listed in the Google PlayStore. 

LINK: Aram Bartholl

* poetry created with/within an app store. 

Links: Game Art around the web

- Keith Stuart talks to Jason Nelson:

"Operating somewhere in between all of those is digital poet and artist Jason Nelson. Born in Oklahoma but now based on the East coast of Australia, Nelson has been producing thought-provoking and anger-baiting interactive works for years, the best known examples being Flash-based titles Game, Game, Game And Again Game and its sequel, I made this. You play this. We are Enemies.

Recently, he has produced two new, and typically messy, strange and unsettling works, Six-Sided Strange and Scrape Scraperteeth, the latter commissioned by the San Francisco Gallery of Modern Art. They bear all of Nelson's trademarks – seemingly stream-of-consciousness text clips, hectic presentation and guarded messaging – and they push at the boundaries of what can be called a game." (Keith Stuart, The Guardian, Sept 13 2011)

- Keith Stuart talks to painter John Clar:

Jon Car, "Sense of Detachment", oilon canvas, 2010

"For 15 years John Clark worked as an artist in the video games industry, rising to the position of Art Director at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and working on leading titles like Killzone and Little Big Planet. But before his lengthy stint in the interactive entertainment industry, he'd studied at Oxford University's Ruskin school of Fine Art and Drawing, later moving to Scotland to help found the Glasgow Sculpture Studios and to lecture at Grey's School of Art in Aberdeen.

In early 2010, he quit games and went back to painting, earlier this year appearing in BBC2's 'Show Me The Monet' series. Interested in the jostling relationships that exist between competing men in corporate environments, his paintings revolve around bizarre office bust-ups and futile workplace aggression. He says his style was once described by a visitor to his studio as, "a mixture of Goya, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and Muybridge." (Keith Stuart, The Guardian, Sept 13 2011)

- Tetris installation controlled by DDR Mats.

Color Kinetic LEDs in laser cut acrylic tubes set in chip-board matrix. Credit Leah Alpert & Russell Cohen. Hardware Design Credit Andrew Carlson.

 

 

More Game Art Links Around The Web: 09/01/2011, 08/28/2011

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti

GAME ART: Myfanwy Ashmore's "Gameboy Poetry" (2010)

 

"1) TTC not a Haiku – a mobile poem that isn't quite a haiku which constains a scrollable TTC map & poem on a Nintendo Ds. 2) .exe - a mobile poem for the Nintendo DS exploring the relationship between scribbling while waiting, writing and executing scripts/programming. 3) Dear Sirs – a mobile poem - a workplace related resignation poem and marking of time using mesostics and numeric references to embed secret locative information within the poem on a Nintendo DS 4) 10 watts left – a mobile poem on the Nintendo DS that requires the participant to tap the touch screen to reveal the discussion a parallel discourse about literal energy consumption and creative energy and burnout.

These works are all interactive game like poetry that exploit the relationship between the user, the hardware, the physicality of the user and the interface. Through visuals, text and interaction the poems circumvent and explore poetic/textual conventions and human empathy in a technological context." (Myfanwy Ashmor)

Link: Myfanwy Ashmore

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti