GAMESCENES

GAME ART: ALAN BUTLER'S THE WEEK(2020)

A new project by Alan Butler mixes Marx and video games starting tomorrow, June 20 2020, on Twitch . Think David Harvey does PlayStation. There will be 19 episodes, each with a duration of around 2 hours. Upon completion, the whole series will be available as a 40 hour stream. Get the Karl Marx Snapchat Lens here. As Butler writes:

The Week (2020) is a streaming series that distributes a public domain audiobook version of Capital by Karl Marx. While taking the form of a 'Let's Play' video game stream, where viewers can listen to the book while staring at video games that simulate work and jobs. The video takes from forms of game streaming, but also other modes of content consumption such as podcasting, ASMR and sleep tapes.

Alan Butler is an Irish artist whose practice focuses on the inner-workings of the internet, the effects of new media technologies, and the politics of appropriation. In 2009, he received a MFA from LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore and in 2004 completed his BA of Fine Arts from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He is represented by Green On Red Gallery in Dublin, Ireland.

LINK: Alan Butler

Event: It doesn't take long to find new targets (7-16th December 2017, London)

It doesn’t take long to find new targets

 

Private view: 7th December, 6-9pm
8th - 16th December 2017
The Take Courage Gallery

388 New Cross Rd, London SE14 6TY

Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight

An exhibition examining the constructed worlds that we choose to inhabit online, the power of video games as an interactive medium, the heteronormative face of stereotypical video gaming and the aesthetics and ideas associated with machinima based art practices, commemorating the third issue of the isthisit? magazine.

Featured artists:

Marc Blazel
Elliott Burns
Joseph DeLappe
Jon Haddock
Stelios Ilchouk
Claire L.Evans
Eva and Franco Mattes
Oliver Payne
Liv Preston
Michael Pybus
Stefan Schwarzer
Georgie Roxby Smith
Viktor Timofeev
Willem Weisman
Mathew Zefeldt

 

 

isthisit? issue 3 includes contributions from

Aaron McCarthy, Alan Butler, Alexandra Ehrlich Speiser, Anastasia Semenoff, Andy Nizinskyj, Aram Bartholl, Benjamin Warner, Bertie Irons, Brent Watanabe, Calum Bowden, Christina Smiros, Claire L. Evans, Dani Ploeger, David Blandy, David OReilly, Duncan Herd, Ellie Power, Emily Godden & Audit Chaos, Eva and Franco Mattes, Felix Treadwell, Fengyi Zhu, Gabriel Junqueira, Gabrielle Noel, Georgie Roxby Smith, Georgina Tyson, Gerhard Mantz, Harun Farocki, Henry Driver, Ian Cheng, Ian Malhotra, Isa Magalhaes, Jason Rohrer, Jon Haddock, Joscha Steffens, Joseph DeLappe, Kara Gut, Kasem Kydd, Katy Roseland, Klara Vincent-Novotna, Lawrence Lek, Lee Boötes, Liv Preston, Lucas Glenn, Marta Strazicic, Mathew Zefeldt, Matteo Bittanti, Max Colson, Mélanie Courtinat, Michael Pybus, Miyö Van Stenis, Ololade Adeniyi, Pete Jiadong Qiang, Petra Szemán, PucciSethCnxion, Raúl Berrueco, Roc Herms, Sandra Araújo, Second Front, Sian Fan, Silvia Dal Dosso, Stacey Davidson, Stefan Schwarzer, Tea Strazicic, Theo Triantafyllidis, Thomson and Craighead, Todd Deutsch, Tom Kobialka, Valentin Dommanget, Viktor Timofeev, Will Kendrick, Willem Weismann, fleuryfontaine, tissue.hunter, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Olly Bharat, Oliver Payne, Elliott Burns, Kent Sheely, Frances Kelly, Mathias Jansson, Motsonian, Samuel Capps, Sid and Jim, Hannah Nussbaum, Nora Silva and Ped.Moreira

 

LINK: It doesn’t take long to find new targets

Journal: Video Game Art Reader

press release

Video Game Art Reader Launch Party
Sunday, November 5th, 11:30am-1:30pm
VGA Gallery, 2418 W Bloomingdale Ave #102, Chicago, Illinois

This November, Video Game Art Gallery will release the inaugural issue of VGA Reader.

The VGA Reader is a peer-reviewed journal for video game audiences and video game practitioners interested in the history, theory, and criticism of video games, explored through the lens of art history and visual culture. Its primary aim is to facilitate conversation and exploration of video game art, documenting and disseminating discourse about the far-reaching influence of video games on history, society, and culture. View the original Call for Papers here and Guidelines here.

The VGA Reader launch party is November 5th, 2017 at 11:30 am at VGA Gallery. A discussion with Editor in Chief Tiffany Funk and Managing Editor Mick Reed will be followed by a light brunch and champagne.  Hard copies of VGAR’s inaugural issue will be available for purchase during the event. The event is free and open to the public (RSVP here).   

VGA is thrilled to be able to further its educative mission by contributing to what we see as an emerging and vital field of scholarship. The journal aims to be conversant across disciplinary boundaries, as well as across the theory-practice divide, and so includes scholarship, artists’ statements, review essays, and works of art from a range of scholars, developers, and scholar-practitioners.

VGA Reader is helmed by Editor in Chief Tiffany Funk and Managing Editor Michael Reed. Its editorial board comprises artists, scholars, and game-makers affiliated with DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the School of the Art Institute Chicago. View the editorial board here.

According to Funk, the issue celebrates video game culture as inclusive and global, bringing together an international and professionally diverse cadre of “good games and good art” advocates: art historians, literary theorists, educators, museum curators, designers, artists, and programmers.

The Reader will be available in both print ($25) and digital versions ($5). Print copies of the journal will be available through the VGA website and onsite at the gallery. The digital version will be sold exclusively on the VGA website beginning November 5.

Event: Ghost Arcade/La Galeria De Fantasmas (Mexico (2017, ongoing)

The Ghost Arcade is a collaborative exhibition project between Skot Deeming, a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, curator and scholar, whose work spans the spectrum of new media practice from broadcast media to computational art, experimental videogames, and game art; Dominique Pelletier, a multidisciplinary translation and media scholar, and the Museo del Juguete Antiguo Mexicano (The Museum of Ancient Toys). Over the latter portion of the summer, eight artists - Arturo Cruz Pinon (Artuur), Frida Escobar ( Pasto Pasto), Daniel Buchsbaum, Fher Val, Michael Brandon Aguilar Teran, Gabriel Galacia (Mr. Lemonade), Bili Bala and Aline Herrera will be exploring the halls and alleyways of Mexico City’s markets and plazas - drawing from its street art and game cultures as inspiration to build custom arcade cabinets using found materials. The full exhibition will open on August 24th. 

You can follow the developing project by clicking here.

LINK: La Galeria De Fantasmas/Ghost Arcade (Photo by The Ghost Arcade team)

Game Art: Harrison Kinsley's Charles (2017)

"Our AI friend here, Charles, is a convolutional neural network that learns to drive through deep learning. At the moment, Charles learns and takes all actions based on single frames at a time, and bases his decisions on just pixel data. Charles only sees exactly what you see. In time, I intend to give Charles some short-term memory to hopefully improve his driving." (Harrison Kinsley)

 

Stills from Harrison Kinsley's Charles streaming live on Twitch.tv

LINK: Harrison Kinsley

Game Art: Simon de Diesbach's "OccultUS" (2014)

From Swiss artist Simon de Diesbach comes a new project based on VR technology, OccultUS:

"OccultUs is an installation that exploits the potential of the Occulus Rift technology and offers an absorbing virtual reality display. It immerses the user in a sensory experience that mixes two distinct realities: the palpable, steady and concrete world, overlapping another virtual reality, simulated in three dimensions like a video game. " (Simon de Diesbach)

The project is currently under development at Fragment studios (Matter, Computer Orchestra).

LINK: Simon de Diesbach

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti

Game Art: "Tate Worlds: Art Reimagined for Minecraft" (2014-ongoing)

Andr Derain, The Pool of London, 1906, Oil on canvas

Remember the Second Life art craze of the mid-Zeroes? A decade later, we're experiencing the same phenomenon, but after the demise of Linden Lab's virtual world, Minecraft has become the new playground of choice for artistic re-enactments. This time, The Tate Museum has teamed up with the formerly independent company Mojang to create Tate Worlds, a series of virtual environments based on specific artworks. The game, which allows players to create their own three dimensional spaces, will use the paintings and sculptures, called "maps", as the main inspiration to generate a series of activities that relate to the main themes of the artwork. The first two maps, available to download free at Tate's website, are based on André Derain’s 1906 The Pool of London, and Christopher Nevinson’s 1920 The Soul of the Soulless City. Both maps focus on the theme of urban life.

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, The Soul of the Soulless City ('New York - an Abstraction'),  1920, Oil on canvas

Six additional "maps" will be released in 2015 based on works by John Singer Sargent (Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885-6), Peter Blake (The Toy Shop, 1962), John Martin (The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1822) and Cornelia Parker (Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991).

 

How does Tate Worlds differ from filmic "adaptations" of famous paintings, .e.g The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, 2011)? Is the idea of "animating" paintings through digital games an abomination or an "exciting opportunity" for "enlightenment and endless discovery"?

Here are my suggestions for the next Minecraft "maps". Let's re-imagine...

Salvador Dali's The Enigma of William Tell

Gustave Courbet's L'origine du Monde

Otto Dix' The Trench Warfare

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola aka Balthus's The Guitar Lesson

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes's The Disasters of War

LINK: Tate Worlds

Submited by Matteo Bittanti (via The New York Times)

Game Art: Yen Chen Chang's "Guitar Hero" (2014)

Not quite Game Art, but genius, nonetheless. Guitar Hero is a "wearable musical device which is sort of in between a guitar and a keyboard. It translates  finger gestures into signals and play out different notes." Developed by Yen Chen Chang as his graduation project for the Design Products course at London's RCA, Guitar Hero was inspired by Activision's music games, but it takes the very concept of playing much further. A video of Chang performing with Guitar Hero can be seen here (Dezeen). 

LINK: Yen Chen Chang

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (Images: Courtesy of Yen Chen Chang)

PROJECT: "Interconnections. Revisiting the Future" (under development)

 

"Our project utilizes an immersive 3D virtual environment to unfold the sights, sounds, personal memories and lessons of the 1964/65 New York World's Fair. From the engineering marvel of the Unisphere to the whimsical Belgian Village, we are in the midst of developing 3D recreations of each pavilion/structure found at the Fair. We are very excited to announce the project received a National Science Foundation - Informal Science Education grant to explore the use of the 3D multi-user virtual enviroment of the 1964/65 World's Fair as an educational tool to expand the understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics" (Synthetic Reality Lab, University of Central Florida)

Link: Interconnection: Revisiting the Future

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti

Celia Pearce's Ludica

 

"Ludica is a game design/art collective devoted to developing innovative concepts that explore the potential of games to express women’s narratives, aesthetics, culture and play.
Integral to this objective is to create a female-friendly ethos that supports and encourages a range of departures from the male cultures of game-making that dominate both computer game production and contemporary game art. We are not interested in producing “games for girls,” but seek to develop games that address a diverse range of alternative audiences and contexts through inventing and promoting both new game genres and new modes of game-making.

Our modus operandi is pro-active, rather than re-active. Since we are, by definition, outsiders, we revel in our outsider status and leverage it to support our cause.

Ludica was formed in 2005 in Los Angeles by Celia Pearce, Jacki Morie, Tracy Fullerton and Janine Fron.

Our activities include:

 

•Creating publications that support a more balanced view of both game design and culture, and women’s contributions to computer science.

•Developing new, female-friendly work methodologies, tools and techniques for game-making.

•Creating a prolific and diverse range of innovative games, game concepts, game interventions, and commentary (through publication).

•Disseminating our projects and philosophies to the general public, the game studies community and industry, the new media arts community, and practicing and aspiring female game designers through a variety of tactics.

•Organizing events where we can share our individual work and the work of other women game artists/designers, as well as conducting workshops and brainstorming sessions to develop new work and methods collectively.

•Mentoring and encouraging young female gamers, aspiring designers and students, from K-12 through college, through workshops and participations in our projects, to develop their own unique vision for the future of game culture." (Ludica)

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