GAMESCENES

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: CINEMATIC AND VIDEOGAME ARCHITECTURE MARCH (DEADLINE APRIL 4 2025)

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
22 Gordon Street
London WC1H 0QB
United Kingdom
Hours: Monday-Sunday 7am-10pm,
Saturday-Sunday 9am-6pm

press release

Applications are now open for the 2025 intake of the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch course at the Bartlett School of Architecture, based at UCL’s brand new UCL East campus.

The first programme of its kind in the UK, the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch course teaches students to employ innovative architectural design methods using cinematic, animation and gaming technologies. Students will critically situate their work in relation to new developments in time-based digital media and how they shape our culture, identity and politics.

What is the programme’s focus
Architecture has a long history of acting as an underlying structuring device for both film and videogames. From the construction of film sets to developments in film compositing techniques and innovations in computer graphics, the depiction of space has been a key challenge in arriving at our contemporary media landscape of film and videogames. In turn, the narrative and storytelling power of time-based and interactive media are reshaping not only how architecture is constructed and represented, but also how it is conceived and experienced.

How will the programme be delivered
Taught by internationally renowned experts in cutting-edge digital technologies, the programme is based at UCL’s new campus, UCL East, occupying new state-of-the-art design studio and computation facilities alongside shared specialist media and workshop spaces. The programme is founded on a strong and experimental practice-led studio element, where practical learning is supported by robust theoretical research. Students engage with theoretical concepts through lectures and introductory design projects, supported by digital skills modules.

This cross-disciplinary approach allows students to test ideas and invent new research methods, leading to the production of architectural design projects that are developed and realised through films, video games and hybrid digital-physical environments.

The programme is led by Prof Penelope Haralambidou and Dr Luke Caspar Pearson. Penelope’s teaching and research employ an innovative practice-led methodology that uses, drawing, modelling, digital film and immersive environments to investigate spatial culture. Luke is co-founder of You+Pea, a design research studio working between architecture and videogames that collaborates with cultural and educational institutions alongside industry clients, and is the co-author of Videogame Atlas (Thames & Hudson, 2022).

How will the programme equip people for future careers
Students gain technical skills and explore time-based, storytelling and interactive media as new platforms for engaging with the design and production of space, from the domestic to the urban. Graduates develop advanced skills applicable in the fields of architecture and architectural visualisation, and gain expertise that can form the foundation for careers in immersive environments, film and videogame industries. Through regular visits by academic and industry experts, graduates will  understand how to position and present their work for future careers in many different creative disciplines.

Who should apply
We are looking for applications from graduates and professionals from architecture, but also from other backgrounds – including design, filmmaking, film studies, anthropology, geography, fine art, videogame design, graphic design, animation and computer-generated imagery design – who are interested in studying the relationship between architecture, cinema and videogames, and show evidence of a strong record both academically and/or in practice.

Applications close on April 4, 2025 for applicants requiring a UK visa, and August 29, 2025 for applicants not requiring a UK visa.

LINK: Cinematic and Videogame Architecture 2025 program

CALL FOR PAPERS: ARTS AND GAMES (DEADLINE: DECEMBER 13 2024)

The fields of arts and games are continuously and progressively intersecting, creating hybrids and cultural frames, mutually influencing each other. This is not new; arts have been using games as subject and material for millennia from depictions of athletes in ancient Greek sculpture to Yoko Ono’s All White Chess Set (1966) and from Caravaggio’s Cardsharps (1594) to Harold Hejazi’s game performance series Adventures of Harriharri. Weiqi, or as it is named in the West, Go, was one of the four arts a scholar should master in ancient China. However, games are increasingly recognized as having artistic qualities after the cultural ascendancy of digital games.  

Games as a form of expression, and gaming as a performative practice, hold significant artistic potential. They are used for artistic self-expression, both within recognized art worlds and in alternative and emerging fan-based art practices across different forms of media. These renegade art worlds challenge traditional curatorial practices. Popular triple-A digital games have been placed within artistic discourse and practice, both when existing games are used as platforms for artistic interventions, such as Joseph DeLappe’s dead-in-iraq (2006-2011) or Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam (2016), but also in the aesthetic experience they create without additional modding.  

The cross-pollination between arts and games is particularly strong right now. Art history has been a constant inspiration for visual and sound design in games, establishing structures of expectation and shaping player experience through points of reference, or by directly utilizing various aesthetics such as, surrealism, renaissance paintings, and medieval illumination. Furthermore, interest in what games can offer art practices has been strengthening. Features such as structured participation, instruction-based performance, 8-bit aesthetics, virtual co-presence, exploration, and simulation have made games a significant part of contemporary media arts. From JODI’s Untitled Game series (1996-2001) to Zach Gage’s Lose/Lose (2009), Harun Farocki’s Serious Games I-IV (2011), or Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s The Lack: I Knew Your Voice before You Spoke (2023), digital games have become medium, topic, and site of artistic practice. Similarly, live action role-playing is used both as a generative engine in visual arts, like in Brody Condon’s Twentyfivefold Manifestations(2008), and as the heart of the performance as in Pihla Lehtinen’s Do Crime (2019) or Signa’s Das 13. Jahr (2023).  

Arts and Games are coming together all kinds of ways. Games are also a way for art museums to show their collections or offer alternative paths to art, with games about art, artists, and art worlds – like Reiner Knizia’s Modern Art (1992). The aesthetics and functions of digital games also allow for idea-historical perspectives. By pointing out the intersections and parallels between experience, design, and reception of digital games and historical phenomena of arts (ranging from painting and literature to theater and architecture) entirely new perspectives on existing works of art can be enabled. 

To play around with all this, the spring seminar of Game Research Lab wants to carve a space for a discussion of artistic approaches to games and ludic approaches to art. We are not looking to discuss if games fit in the arts, but how the multiple fields of games and arts intersect and tickle each other. As always, we encourage interesting interpretations of ‘games’ and ‘arts’.  

With all that in mind, the list of possible topics includes but is not limited to: 

• • (Playing) games as expressive forms 
  • Artistry of games 
  • Games in art 
  • Artistic vibes in games 
  • Art on games 
  • Games as material and/or medium in arts 
  • Curating/exhibiting/presenting game art 
  • Application of theoretical and methodological approaches from the field of art practice and theory 
  • Aesthetics and experience 
  • Curatorial practices/research in relation to games 
  • Diegetic Art in games 
  • Games as art 
  • Artistic appreciation of games 
  • Artistic praxis in games 
  • Games in the cultural heritage sector 

Seminar information 

Arts and Games is the 21st annual spring seminar organised by the Tampere University Game Research Lab. The seminar emphasises work-in-progress submissions, and we strongly encourage submitting late-breaking results, working papers, as well as submissions from graduate and PhD researchers. The purpose of the seminar is to have peer-to-peer discussions and thereby provide support in refining and improving research work in this area. The seminar is organised in collaboration with the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies and Games as Art Center. 

The papers to be presented will be chosen based on extended abstract review. Full papers are distributed prior to the event to all participants, in order to facilitate discussion. There will be two invited expert commentators to provide feedback on the papers. 

The seminar is potentially looking into partnering with a publisher so that the best papers would be invited to be further developed into publication. In the past, we have collaborated with e.g. Analog Game Studies, Games and Culture, Games: Research and Practice, International Journal of Role-Playing, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Simulation & Gaming, and ToDiGRA journals. 

The seminar will be held at Tampere University, Finland, on 26-27 March 2025. The event is free of charge. 

Submission guidelines 

The papers will be selected for presentation based on extended abstracts of 500–1000 words (plus references). Abstracts should be delivered in PDF format. Full paper guidelines will be provided with the notification of acceptance. 

Our aim is that all participants can familiarise themselves with the papers in advance. Therefore, the maximum length for a full paper is 5000 words (plus references). The seminar presentations should encourage discussion, instead of repeating the information presented in the papers. Every paper will be presented for 10 minutes and discussed for 20 minutes. 

Submissions should be sent through this form.

All information will be updated on the seminar website: https://springseminar.org 

Organisers can be contacted at: [email protected]  

Important dates 

• • Abstract deadline: 13 December 2024 
  • Notification of acceptance: 10 January 2025 
  • Full paper deadline: 5 March 2025 
  • Seminar dates: 26-27 March 2025 

 Organising team

Aska Mayer, Mark Maletska, Leland Masek, Jaakko Stenros, Essi Taino, & Heikki Tyni 

LINK: Arts and Games Seminar

PROJECT: THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S GUIDE TO LOS SANTOS

In this video, Marco De Mutiis and Matteo Bittanti introduce The Photographer's Guide to Los Santos, an online companion to the eponymous exhibition which took place in the context of Fotofestival Lenzburg between May 22 and June 23 2024 in Lenzburg, Switzerland.

The Photographer’s Guide to Los Santos is several things at once.

Firstly, it’s a curated archive and expanding resource center documenting the most significant artistic projects created with Grand Theft Auto V in the past decade.

Secondly, it an educational project, introducing students to virtual photography practices through a thematic overview and a series of hands-on exercises.

Thirdly, as an "how to guide", it provides a series of manuals intended to photography and media arts students interested in experimenting with the game.

This online resource currently collects nine projects created by international artists working with Grand Theft Auto V, that is, 2girls1comp, Alan Butler, Raphael Brunk, COLL.EO, Mattia Dagani Rio, Elizabeth Desintaputri, Claire Hentschker, Mascha Negri, and Georgie Roxby Smith, which were all featured in the very first themed exhibition.

The repository is expected to expand substantially over the next few months.

In this video, the curators discuss the nine notable works currently featured in the online archive.

Explore the The Photographer's Guide to Los Santos

EVENT: IT'S NOT A GAME OVER, IT'S A FINISSAGE (JUNE 22 2024, LENZBURG, SWITZERLAND)

It's not a game over, it's a finissage

Saturday June 22 at 11.00 AM

Dammweg 19

4 & 5 Etage

5600 Lenzburg

Switzerland

Join Marco De Mutiis and Matteo Bittanti on Saturday, June 22 at 11 AM to celebrate the conclusion of The Photographer's Guide to Los Santos exhibition at Photofestival Lenzburg.

But don't mistake this for another run-of-the-mill, self-congratulatory gathering fueled by endless prosecco. The curators will unveil a groundbreaking platform dedicated to in-game photography, ensuring the exhibition lives on indefinitely. Like PFAs and other forever chemicals, we're here to stay.

LINK: The Photographer's Guide to Los Santos

NEWS: GAMESPLAYARTS IS THE NEW FACE OF KILLSCREEN (LOS ANGELES)

After fifteen years of serving as a renowned editorial platform, Killscreen is transitioning into Gameplayarts, a vibrant arts organization dedicated to the exploration and expansion of game-based arts and culture. The change marks a significant shift from Killscreen’s original role as an editorial entity to becoming a leader in game-centered education and curation.

The evolution of Killscreen into Gameplayarts is not just a change in name but also a strategic repositioning. “The transition has been as intentional as time, space, and resources have allowed,” said Jamin Warren, the founder of Killscreen, who also noted personal milestones such as becoming a parent as part of the journey. The mission, however, remains unchanged: to demonstrate the cultural and artistic significance of video games.

Gameplayarts aims to enrich the creative practices of its community through a comprehensive array of offerings. These include classes, workshops, and exhibitions specifically tailored to integrate game-making into broader artistic endeavors. The initiative seeks to foster a new understanding and appreciation of video games beyond traditional gameplay, positioning them as pivotal components of contemporary art.

Located in Los Angeles - the global capital of image production - Gameplayarts plans to activate its project space with innovative installations, such as Alice Bucknell’s recent exhibition, The Alluvials, which we will review shortly, and Jenna Caravello's Easy Ultra Fine. This move is part of a broader strategy to secure additional support through arts funding, private contributions, and public memberships, ensuring the sustainability and growth of the newly formed organization.

Meanwhile, Killscreen's legacy will continue to live on digitally. The website killscreen.com will still host all long-form editorial content and interviews, along with maintaining an archive of past articles. However, all educational content related to classes or workshops will be redirected to the Gameplayarts platform.

Read more about Gameplayarts

RESOURCE: PUZZLE GAMES AND ABSTRACT ART (ARTREVIEW)

In the latest issue of ArtReview, Dawn Chan draws intriguing parallels between Jonathan Blow's award-winning video game The Witness and the abstract art of Heilmann, Whitney, and LeWitt, focusing on their shared approach to silent instruction and discovery. She highlights how both media - digital games and painting - employ non-verbal communication to engage their audiences, requiring them to decipher a visual language to uncover deeper meanings and experience personal revelations. The video game mirrors abstract art in its use of grid-based designs and spatial systems, framing both as a form of symbolic gameplay that necessitates active participation and interpretation. This perspective redefines the audience or player as an active participant, blurring the lines between playing a game and engaging with art. Among the interesting points raised by Chan, this one - about the role of the gamer - truly stands out:

Read more

Also by Chan: a review of Bill Viola's The Night Journey for ArtForum (2018)

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: MASTER IN ALGORITHMIC AND NETWORKED PHOTOGRAPHY

Master’s Degree in Algorithmic and Networked Photography

Degre issued by UVic-UCC

Directed by Jon Uriarte, Marco De Mutiis

ECTS credits: 60

Language: English

September – June 2024

ELISAVA

La Rambla 30-32

08002 Barcelona

Spain

The photographic image has been radically transformed by its recent digital and networked developments. The impact and relevance of photography today lies not only in its representational layer, but beyond the visual surface of the image. Its invisible algorithmic and networked properties turned traditional photography into an assemblage of intertwined apparatuses, agents and media. Contemporary forms of digital images capture, circulation and consumption have been redefining the role of the photographic as an expanded and exciting field of visual culture in constant mutation. From AI generated images and computer-generated imagery to screenshotting, from CGI to Photoshop, from VR to in-game photography, practices of image-making and modes of experiencing visual art have created a vast and rich territory, explored by contemporary artists, photographers, curators, researchers, technologists and designers.

The Master in Algorithmic and Networked Images offers an uncompromising investigation into the world of chronically digital images and terminally online visual culture. Through a series of lectures and workshops from some of the most relevant and inspiring actors in the field, this one-year master programme combines a sharply curated scholarly foundation with an intense practical education. Creative, conceptual and critical, the programme provides you with theoretical and practical knowledge of post-photography, AI images, networked images, machine vision and synthetic imaging. It invites participants to reflect upon the social, political and economic implications of different technological imaging systems. Simultaneously, the programme encourages you to experiment and create with hardware and software, as well as appropriating and misusing media platforms through artistic and alternative forms of image-making.

Read more

ARTICLE: BITSY, THE SMALL GAME REVOLUTION (ARTNEWS)

An exhibition and online jam celebrate the game engine tool’s ambitiously modest aesthetics

Imagine a video game. Think of what that game might look like, how it might play, how long it might take to fully play through, how dense its content might be, how rich its world might be rendered. And now, strip away all of that. Remove any hi-fi graphics, pare down the game play to the most basic 2D movement and single-button interaction, scale it way back. Does it still feel like a video game? (Nicholas O'Brien)

LINK: ARTNEWS

RESOURCE: CURA. 41: NEW WORLD AGENCY™

CURA. 41

New World Agency™

Fall-Winter 2023-2024

press release

Through an extensive investigation of the new searches and work productions of international artists, the brand new CURA. 41, New World Agency™ raises questions related to the ability of art and artists to have a transformative role as regards the apparent irreversibility of the events that impact our present. In a shift between fiction and reality, New World Agency™ explores, with a transgenerational gaze, the artists who foresaw the building of new possible worlds and new modes of agency for alternative futures. Not only AI, CGI, videogames and virtual reality, but also highly advanced analog tools, animatronics, and mechanical devices are able to forge the imaginative, creative and narrative space of artists, founding new realities, in which mythology, ghosts, topoi, fables, childhood memories, technology, pop culture and magic intertwine, in the comprehensive illusion to be in different places and in part of it.

“A World is a super-organism you can believe in…Worlding is the art of an individual creating a World” —Ian Cheng.

CURA. 41 presents 4+1 covers with works’ premiere by: Diego Marcon introduced by Travis Diehl; Mark Leckey presented by a long mixtape of undead voices created by Charlie Fox; Cécile B. Evans presented by Asma Barchiche; plus a cover story and an insert by trans woman artist and activist Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), photographed by Myles Loftin. Anticipating the special cover coming out in December, Jordan Wolfson, in conversation with Caroline Busta and Lil Internet, reveals the production and what goes on behind the scenes of his third animatronic sculpture. Essays, interviews, and projects include an introductory text by Ian Cheng; a focus on the pioneering work of the American artist Mike Kelley, presented by the double gaze of the curator of La Bourse in Paris, Jean-Marie Gallais, and the artist, raised in his myth, Matt Copson; a conversation between Agnieszka Kurant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, investigating the evolution of culture and also “the relationship between predicting the future and how this is impacting the actual future”; new narratives, articulated in the visual essay conceived by Helen Marten. Furthermore, we present the new film and corpus of work by Martine Syms, introduced by the British curator Ben Broome; a special section curated by Countersubject that introduces us to the work of the multi-disciplinary art collective Bernadette Corporation; Anna Uddenberg’s totemic sculptures, presented by David Andrew Tasman; a photo shoot commissioned to the New York-based fashion duo of artists and activists Women’s History Museum which is introduced by a conversation with Ada O’Higgins. The New Now section also features the work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, with a text by Wong Binghao (Bing), of Gabriel Massan, investigated by Tamar Clarke-Brown, and Alice Bucknell in conversation with Sarah Johanna Theurer. The Portraits’ section features the work of Pete Jiadong Qiang with a text by Tadej Vindiš; Shuang Li with a text by Lina Martin-Chan; Gray Wielebinski presented by Francesca Gavin; Omsk Social Club with a text by Estelle Hoy; Ndayé Kouagou presented by Madeleine Planeix-Crocker.

Publishers and Editors in Chief: Ilaria Marotta, Andrea Baccin.

CURA. 41 will be available from mid-October 2023.

LINK: CURA. 41

EVENT: THE SEASHORE OF ENDLESS WORLDS (NOVEMBER 1 - 19 2023, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND)

 

The Seashore of Endless Worlds – Art & jeux de société

 

Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland

exhibition: from 1st to 19 novembre 2023

online symposium: 20, 21 November

 

featured artists: 0x Salon, Ahmed Isam Aldin, David Blandy, Joshua Citarella, Crude Futures, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Simon Denny, Andreas Dobler, Giulia Essyad, Axelle Grégoire, Half Earth Socialism, Olivia Hernaïz, Rok Kranjc, Paul Loubet, Finn Massie, Constanza Mendoza, Cullen Miller, Moving Castle, Nicolas Nova, OMSK Social Club, Sara Rutz, Kirill Savchenkov, Sammy Stein, Trickster-p, Ilaria Vinci, Elsa Werth, Paulo Wirz

 

press release

 

The Seashore of Endless Worlds considers games as a decisive global and current phenomenon, and calls for societal issues to be put into play by exploring the current conditions, arising from game theory and gamification, of widespread and planetary crises. Beyond mere entertainment and distraction, we see games as a process capable of probing and understanding the world. Not only do games make up a major part of the cultural industry and generate popular aesthetics, they are also now recognised for their powers of simulation, training and generating physical, social, economic and political realities. Between movement and constraint, participation and subjection, identity and avatar, the deployment and mutual redefinition of these terms is open to research by artists, collectives and researchers. The participants are working on different ways of using games to make present-day situations and issues tangible: diversity, the economy, the environment, geopolitics, digitisation, etc. Their games are a dynamic way of exposing and rethinking the rules and shared goals that shape society.

 

As the title suggests, in reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s poem about children playing on the shore, play conjures up potential spaces where the imaginary and the real inform each other as creativity, solidarity and care. Games accompany the fundamentally trans-human process of hominisation, reinscribing the existing in extension with its outsides through which it invents itself - materials, technical objects, more than human… Rather than constituting a category of defined objects or fixed, universal and timeless features specific to all cultures, games enable them to evolve through realities that they both describe and shape.

 

While games support the construction of worlds as sets of relationships and systems of rules - more or less arbitrary, contingent and changing - they are also set in motion by processes that open them up (room for maneuver) or even go beyond them (off-games, hidden rules) and put in tension as world-engine and meta-games. What games are being played? Who produces the rules? Are the players being played? At the intersection of materialism and speculation, instruments of power but also engines of emancipation, they allow us to expose and question logics and rationalities that have become increasingly polemical and deterministic, and proceed from eminently aesthetic questions and resolutions.

 

FTW, Christian Bili & Samuel Wagen-Magnon, 2 October 2023

 

Click the image below to access a set of resources related to the exhibition

 

 

LINK: The Seashore of Endless Worlds (special thanks to Christian Bili)