GAMESCENES

NEWS: VRAL IS NOW ON PATREON

We are happy to announce that online platform VRAL is now available through Patreon. Here's the curators' spiel:

We are using Patreon to build a community for all appreciators of machinima and game videos situated at the intersection of video art, experimental cinema, contemporary art, and avant-garde gaming: we believe that Jack Conte's platform is ideally suited for bringing together people sharing the same passions and interests.

Our primary goal is to produce a deeper, broader understanding of machinima as an artform and through Patreon we will make VRAL more sustainable in the long term, provide a compensation to all artists involved while maintaining full creative and curatorial independence from external sources, such as institutions and/or sponsors.

Although our monthly program comprising two VRAL exhibitions accompanied by an-depth interview will remain freely accessible on vral.org, we will significantly expand our critical and curatorial efforts by introducing exclusive, platform-specific content, such as articles, essays, video essays, interviews, and a variety of perks, including discounts for books and special events, such as the Milan Machinima Festival. Currently we offer three subscription options corresponding to different tiers (official, all-access, VIP) priced at 3, 6 and 9 euro per month respectively (sorry we do not accept cryptocurrencies at the moment). The content is in English.

Introduced in April 2020 amidst a global pandemic, VRAL is a uniquely curated game video experience, offering screenings of machinima selected on their cultural relevance, artistic achievement, and innovative style. Often presented only in the context of new media art festivals, film retrospectives, and exhibitions, these works best represent the variety, ingenuity, and creativity of game-based video practices. An online space that provides access to a range of diverse voices supplementing/expanding the Milan Machinima Festival, VRAL celebrates a new generation of digital filmmakers and artists.

So far, we curated two seasons comprising 43 exhibitions overall. In 2021, we published a book collecting all the interviews. The second volume in the series will be available soon and we will share a sneak preview through Patreon.

Finally, VRAL Season 03 dropped May 13 2022 with Felix Klee's My paws are soft, my bones are heavy.

This season will be going more experimental than ever. You have been warned.

The VRAL subscription platform on Patreon is accessible here.

RESOURCE: FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS: ART x METAVERSE BY SERPENTINE R&D PLATFORM

Ask not what the metaverse can do for your art, but ask what your art can do for the metaverse.

Check out Serpentine R&D platform's briefing for more insights.

LINK: FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS: ART x METAVERSE,

 

TOOL & EVENT: GAME ARTS CURATORS KIT

The mighty members of the Game Arts International Assembly have just released the Game Arts Curators Kit, which Ma. Luján Oulton describes as

"a statement of purpose and consultation for curators, producers and institutions that are either working with video games or want to get into the field. Over 25 writers and editors have worked together sharing our experiences of exhibiting games, spanning the practical to the political, the ethical to the esthetic. The Game Arts Curator Kit will have a printed version produced and published by VGAReader and it will also be available in the wiki form open to the community. 

For those interested in knowing more about the project there will be a round table on its creation as a part of Society of Literature, Science and Arts 2021 on October 1st 2021." (Ma. Luján Oulton)

More info about the project can be found here.

LINK: Game Arts Curators Kit

LINK: GAIA 2021

VIDEO: ARTE.TV'S PORTRAIT OF TOTAL REFUSAL (2021)

French-German TV channel ARTE.TV's interview with one of the greatest Game Art collectives of all time, Total Refusal, is a must see. Available both in German and French subtitles, the 16 minutes long documentary features and in-depth conversation at the Werkleitz, the Centre for New Media Arts in the city of Halle, Germany, where they are preparing their next artistic performance. ARTE.TV also hosts Operation Jane Walk (2018), one of Collective's most celebrated works so far. [the video file of Total Refusal's portrayal is also available here sans captions). 

The artist, researcher and filmmakers collective and pseudo-marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) intervenes in current video games and writes papers about games and politics. Since 2018 it has been awarded with 27 prizes (and 11 honorary mentions) like the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Doc, the Contemporary Visual Arts Award of Styria Province and Vimeo Staff Pick Award among others. Total Refusal's films have been presented at more than 130 film and video festivals, including Berlinale (2020), Doc Fortnight at MOMA New York and IDFA Amsterdam (2018) and they been exhibited at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel (2020) and the Ars Electronica Linz (2019).

LINK: Total Refusal

LINK: ARTE.TV, Court Circuit 

TOOLS: ART SPACE

press release

A new platform, Art Space, created at Vidzeme University in Latvia is available as a download here for Windows.

Its purpose is to present the history of artistic styles in modern gaming in an innovative and interactive way. The authors of the game are researcher Ieva Gintere and new media artists Kristaps Biters & Ieva Vīksne (Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Art Academy of Latvia, Liepāja University, Latvia). Art Space is a sophisticated new digital media prototype based on research results into modern art theory. The game can function as a model for similar games in the future that would show the results of artistic research and transfer knowledge gained in research. Art Space reflects the ideas of game theorists who contend that in order to raise curiosity concerning cultural heritage in games, one should invite the player to individually form artifacts or customized characters. This approach can effectively attract people to educational games since creation is a powerful key in eliciting emotions. Objects that the player of Art Space will individually form, are linked to aesthetics, and the game is designed as a story that reveals the historical background of the styles and effects chosen by the player.

Art Space functions in the intersection of educational games, serious games, and art games. The game has several tasks. It incorporates and explains the artistic codes of modern art, and functions as an informative platform for the player. It is intended to marry the activities of the general public of players with the heritage of modern art and its historical keys.

Art Space is innovative since there are no research-based games of modern aesthetics that incorporate the historical context of digital art and transfer the knowledge of contemporary art to players in a systematic and comprehensive way. Art Space is an educational instrument with the aim of capturing specific knowledge from contemporary art that is otherwise difficult to transfer to the general public.

The project will develop knowledge of modern artifacts and their appreciation as well as awareness of cultural capital. The strategy of knowledge transfer in the project will develop the audience’s ability to evaluate the artifacts and cultivate their aesthetic taste. The project expects that by expanding a society’s collective consciousness people will be able to better coexist with artistic styles which are a natural part of contemporary culture.

Prototype of the virtual environment (Windows version) is available here

For additional information, please contact 

Ieva Gintere
Dr.art., Researcher, Assistant Professor
Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Cēsu iela 4, Valmiera, LV 4201, Latvia 

This project was supported by a grant from the European Regional Development Fund project “Leveraging ICT product innovations by enhancing codes of modern art” No. 1.1.1.2/VIAA/1/16/106 within the Activity 1.1.1.2 “Post-doctoral Research Aid”.

EVENT: BLEND&BLEED: ON TRANSREALITY AND PERVASIVE PLAY, LUCA SCHOOL OF ARTS (JULY 2021)

BLEND&BLEED: ON TRANSREALITY AND PERVASIVE PLAY

ORGANIZED BY LUCA SCHOOL OF ARTS, July 2021

“Transreality” describes the blending of physical and virtual space, and “pervasive games” are said to blur the boundaries between game and life. In live action role-playing (LARP) terminology, “bleed” refers to a gray zone somewhere between fiction and reality, where the border between player and character becomes transparent.

The online symposium “Blend&Bleed” was committed to showing the fragility of that boundary and to understanding collective dynamics in the construction of real and fictive worlds. Hosted by the Inter-Actions research unit of LUCA School of the Arts C-Mine, it linked to their research on the hybridization of performance and online gaming. The workshops and conversations conjured synergies among the fields of game design, performance, LARP, and media theory. With a strong focus on interactive formats, “Blend&Bleed” presented playful experiments around digital presence as well as the psychological, social, and political implications of distance. It looked at the critical use or abuse of game-like structures to sketch the world we live in—now reconfigured as “Gamespace.”

The virtual and the imaginary share a perceptual lightness in that they do not seem bound to earth or material facts, and yet they have hard, physical consequences. While consensual reality seems increasingly fractured and the appetite for appealing fictions and alternative facts is apparent in contemporary media and politics, we need not mourn the loss of a “common world” that sustains itself by satisfying hegemonic norms of “order.” Taking the underlying theory of multiple worlds as a point of departure, the symposium offered exercises in collective worlding." (Carina Erdmann)

McKenzie Wark (she/her) is a writer and scholar based in New York and born 1961 in Newcastle, Australia. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, media art, and the Situationist International. She is the author of Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2007), A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), and The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso, 2013), among others.

Her latest writing includes Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019), which describes a new ruling class that gains its power through the ownership and control of information; Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotext(e), 2020), a new genre for another gender and an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self; and Sensoria (Verso, 2020), a transdisciplinary survey of the key thinkers and ideas that are rebuilding the world in the shadow of the Anthropocene. In 2019, she was awarded the Thoma Prize for writing on digital art. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Omsk Social Club is a “futuristically political” (i.e., unrealistic) immersive action group. Omsk proposes contents and makings as forms of post-political entertainment in an attempt to shadow-play politics until the game ruptures the surface we now know as Life. In the field, this is called “Bleed.”

Omsk Social Club forks traditional methods of live action role-play (LARP) through immersive installations and into real game play (RGP) to induce states that could potentially be fiction or a yet-unlived reality. Everything is unique and unrehearsed: Omsk works closely with networks of viewers, and the living installations they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences, and political phenomena. This allows the works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern culture alongside the participants’ unique personal experiences. In the past, Omsk Social Club’s RPG immersive environments have introduced landscapes and topics such as otherkin, rave culture, survivalism, catfishing, desire&sacrifice, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies, and decentralized cryptocurrency. They have exhibited across Europe in various institutions, galleries, theaters, and off-sites. In 2021, they will cocurate the 7th Athens Biennale with Larry Ossei-Mensah.

LINK: Transreality

RESOURCE: HOW TO WIN AT PHOTOGRAPHY ONLINE SUPPLEMENT

Fotomuseum Winterthur new exhibition How to Win at Photography's online supplement is not a replica of the in situ exhibition, but rather an archive of information related to all-things-playful-image-making.

It will grow, so keep an eye on it.

LINK: How to Win at Photography Online Supplement

EVENT: BLEND & BLEED. AN ONLINE SYMPOSIUM ON TRANSREALITY AND PERVASIVE PLAY (MARCH 20 - MAY 30 2021, ONLINE)

Carina Erdmann,  a researcher at LUCA, research unit 'Inter-Actions' in Brussels, is the catalyst behind this phenomenal series of online symposia:

 

"This is an invitation to conspire.

The series of online workshops conjures synergies between the fields of performance, LARP, game design and media theory. The common inquiry will be the phenomenon of 'bleed', wherein the boundaries between fiction and reality, the virtual and physical world dissolve.

The symposium is hosted by the Inter-Actions department of LUCA school of Arts and links to their research on the hybridization of online gaming and performance. What can games teach us about the ways we construct worlds collectively?

We invite you to partake in a series of playful experiments around digital presence, embodiment and relationality. Reflecting on the psychological, social and political implications of distance we will explore virtual commoning practices and 'conspiratorial bleed'."

(Carina Erdmann)

Carina Erdmann, we have become used to magic, 2020.

 

Schedule

Day 1 March 20 2021

The workshop Hotel Bardo by Omsk Social Club sends you on a journey to explore

reality-making systems and what we can do to control our own narratives. McKenzie Wark talks about Early Transition as LARPing, how being a trans woman can feel like role play through the gaze of others and metaphorical bleed sometimes avoids literal bleeding.

Day 2 - March 28 2021

Magical Materialism: World Factory is a world-building workshop by Trakal that takes its cues from Psychoanalysis and a post-socialist perspective of Andrey Platonov's concept of the "literature factory“.

Day 3 – April 3 2021

The Interactions Group transdisciplinary thought band invites you to The Wonder Machine, an experiment in emergence at the level of collective intuition. Reed Berkowitz gives a workshop on guided apophenia and how to create your own conspiracy theories.

Day 4 – April 10 2021

In the workshop ‘The Dive’ by Nina Essendrop and Rozan van Klaveren we create a collective tale about the dying of nature and a path towards our inner worlds and wilds through LARP methods.

Day 5 - April 7 2021

Francis Patrick Brady and Rilla Khaled let you explore possible futures through the card game DOHL and speculative play methods framed by the worlding of a fictional conference: The Congress of Future Love & Connection

Day 6 – April 23 2021

In her workshop Erotic Sociability, Isabel Lewis shares ideas around sociality and embodiment through the metaphor of the "unambitious stripper". The performative lecture Vaporized, dispersed, made particulate by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė collages folkloric narratives, landscape -natural or constructed- and molecular entanglements.

Day 7 – May 1, 5, 8 2021

Theatre as Laboratory: Experimentation with Non-Human Partners in Expanding Dramaturgies is a three part workshop developed by Rebecca Rouse and Carl von Winckelmann letting you experiment with technologies and other non-human entities through the frameworks of partnership and play.

Day 8 – May 9 2021

In And what about those who prefer not to appear? Simon Asencio and Martina Leeker explore different modes of presence to reflect on publicness and anonymity as well as hyper-affirmative performing on topics of digital culture as a critique.

Day 9 – May 14 2021

Susan Ploetz and Ju Row-Farr share experiences in building speculative worlds, letting you explore somatic telepathy within the fictional institute PSY-SOMA-TEK and by discussing 2097: We Made Ourselves Over a project that worked with diverse communities to develop a journey into an imagined future.

Day 10 – May 23 2021

In the Prediction Error workshop by Brody Condon we perform as a predictive coding model and simulate delusion formation in the brain introduced by neuroscientist Philip Corlett. With Hito Steyerl we move to predictive neural networks of machines and the hallucinations they create.

Day 11 – May 30 2021

The LARP Accomplices bleed by Carina Erdmann and Nick Koppenhagen is based on the 1909 novella “The Machine Stops” and atmospheres found in cinematic fragments. It lets players view their own situation through the lens of historic visions of the future.

Sometimes we need fiction to show who we truly are.

 

All sessions are free and open for participation. Places are limited.

Full program

Registration

University page

Download the brochure (PDF)

RESOURCE: ARTFORUM ON IN-GAME PHOTOGRAPHY

Essential piece on art, video games and photography by Gideon Jacobs on the February 2021 issue of ARTFORUM. A key passage:

But it’s possible that a better approach to the issue removes technology from the equation entirely. Instead of Hershel, we might refer to the pragmatic definition offered by legendary MoMA curator John Szarkowski: “One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing.” In-game photography is certainly pointing, it’s just pointing that occurs in places that we don’t yet deem as weighty and consequential as our tangible reality.

LINK: ARTFORUM

RESOURCE: PAOLO PEDERCINI'S ON THE FLASH GAMES ECOSYSTEM

A phenomenal talk (cum transcript) by Paolo Pedercini aka Molleindustria about Apple's decision to kill Flash (spoiler: platform capitalism).

Here's an excerpt:

LINK: Paolo Pedercini's Gone in a flash