GAMESCENES

EVENT: FILE 2024: QUBIT AI (JULY 3 - AUGUST 25 2024, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL)

FILE 2024: QUBIT AI

July 3 - August 25 2024

Centro Cultural FIESP

Avenida Paulista, 1313 Em frente a estação Trianon-Masp do Metrô

Bela Vista, São Paulo - SP, 01311-200, Brazil

 

In the heart of São Paulo, at the FIESP Cultural Center, the FILE 2024 festival unfurls a groundbreaking intersection of art and technology through its latest exhibition, QUBIT AI: Quantum Computing and Synthetic Artificial Intelligence. Curated by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto, the exhibition, running from July 3rd to August 25th, promises to redefine the boundaries AI-inspired/co-generated digital art.

At the core of QUBIT AI is the revolutionary potential of quantum computing. This avant-garde technology, characterized by quantum superposition and entanglement, introduces novel creative avenues for artists. Barreto and Perissinotto articulate this paradigm shift in their curatorial text, emphasizing that quantum computing heralds an unprecedented frontier for both computer science and the arts.

For the first time, an art exhibition features a fully operational Quantum Computer. This cutting-edge inclusion is complemented by two pioneering Brazilian projects: Quantum Photography by Gabriela Barreto Lemos and Sounding Qubits by Eduardo Reck Miranda. Lemos’ work explores the visual possibilities inherent in quantum phenomena, while Miranda's installation translates the enigmatic behaviors of qubits into an auditory experience.

While quantum computing represents a nascent technological revolution, synthetic artificial intelligence is already reshaping artistic landscapes. Synthetic art, produced through AI in collaboration with human creativity, parallels the radical shifts of early modernity, offering new methods of creation across diverse media.

The exhibition's synthetic art section is divided into four thematic areas: Sound Synthetics, Aesthetic Synthetics, Cinematic Synthetics, and Architectural Synthetics. One of the standout installations, INTERATOR, is a three-dimensional cinema without VR glasses. This immersive experience allows viewers to navigate a space filled with simultaneous synthetic video projections, creating an interactive dialogue between the audience and the art.

Highlighted artists within Sound Synthetics include Dennis Schöneberg, whose works such as Bodydub and Transparenza blend visual and auditory stimuli to craft a multisensory narrative. The Spanish collective Iskarioto's dystopian AI films, paired with AI-generated music, further push the envelope of what synthetic art can achieve.

QUBIT AI’s interactive installations invite visitors to become active participants in the art. Klaus Obermaier's EGO uses the concept of alienation from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to distort the viewer's reflection, examining the tension between reality and symbolism. "The Forgettable Art Machine" places the visitor at the nexus of art and technology, turning each interaction into a personalized masterpiece.

Elizabeth Kolbert's influence is evident in Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1, an AI-driven simulator that allows visitors to create new species within a speculative ecosystem. Marc Vilanova’s Cascade immerses viewers in the hidden frequencies of waterfalls, transforming auditory experiences into a sensory exploration of environmental soundscapes.

Seph Li's Everything Before, Everything After transforms collective touch into a dynamic digital painting, capturing the fluidity of interaction in a visual symphony. Holly Herndon’s AI voice model, Holly+, stars in the music video Jolene, featuring Sam Rolfes, which showcases the capabilities of synthetic performers and their impact on contemporary music.

Complementing QUBIT AI, the FILE LED Show 2024 illuminates Fiesp's facade with innovative creations from USP Visual Arts Course and IED São Paulo students. Under the guidance of Dr. Silvia Laurentiz and Daniel Grizando, these collaborations highlight the interdisciplinary nature of design and the transformative power of university partnerships

QUBIT AI at FILE 2024 is not merely an exhibition; it is a visionary journey into the future of art. By integrating quantum computing and synthetic AI, it challenges and expands our understanding of creativity, inviting us to explore the uncharted territories where art and technology converge.

LINK: FILE 2024: QUIBIT AI

EVENT: CHOOSE YOUR PLAYER. GAME WORLDS FROM DICE TO PIXEL (MAY 17 2024 - APRIL 27 2025, FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, GERMANY)

Choose your Player
LuYang, Arcade Liverpool, FACT Liverpool, 2023 Installation View
© LuYang, Foto / Photo: Rob Battersby

Choose your Player. Game Worlds from Dice to Pixel

17.05.2024 – 27.04.2025

Opening: Thursday, 16.5.2024, 6 pm, free admission

Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen

Seestraße 22, 88045 Friedrichshafen, Germany

 

The exhibition Choose Your Player: Game Worlds from Dice to Pixel at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen in Germany, running from May 17, 2024, to April 27, 2025, focuses on the multifaceted role of games as a cultural and artistic medium. This exhibit showcases the evolution of gaming from simple escapism to a significant force in shaping future societies and emerging communities. By adopting the persona of one of five unique characters, visitors can deeply engage with the gaming world.

The showcase underscores the diversity of human gaming behavior, enhanced by rapid advancements in technology that continually redefine the ways we play. From traditional board and dice games to cutting-edge computer, console, and virtual reality games, the exhibition provides a comprehensive view of the cultural significance of gaming. It examines the narratives and mechanics embedded within games and their reciprocal influence on society. The exhibition also explores the artistic dimensions of gaming, featuring immersive artworks that entertain, critique, and expand viewpoints.

Specifically, the exhibition focuses on four thematic areas, each represented by a major art installation:

• Playgrounds: This segment illustrates how games serve as a versatile platform for experimenting with various skills and perspectives. It encourages visitors to challenge conventional views on identity, nationality, and gender, prompting a reevaluation of human existence. Installation: LuYang - LuYang NetiNeti Arcade

• Power Games: Highlighting the profound social and political commentary within games, this section examines their impact on historical perceptions and the reinforcement or subversion of stereotypes. Games are shown as mirrors and molders of power dynamics, often aligning with or questioning mainstream narratives. Installation: Larry Achiampong - Mama’s Bootleg Fight Club

• Expanded Horizons: Exploration remains a central theme and a pivotal game mechanic across numerous video game genres, with survival games often emphasizing endurance within perilous settings. In these narratives, airships frequently appear as a vital resource for navigating apocalyptic landscapes. Installation: Afrah Shafiq - Where Do the Ants Go?

• New Communities: Beyond mere gameplay, certain video games transform into vibrant hubs for creativity, social gatherings, and even entrepreneurial ventures. These platforms foster innovative ideas about the future and alternative modalities for living and community engagement. Installation: Keiken - Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1 – Omoiyari

Choose your Player
Keiken, Morphogenic Angels, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2023
Installation View
© Keiken

These segments of the exhibition illuminate how video games transcend entertainment, acting as catalysts for cultural reflection and evolution. Each installation not only enhances the thematic exploration but also invites deeper interaction and contemplation from visitors.

LINK: CHOOSE YOUR PLAYER

GAME ART: NICHOLAS ALOISIO-SHEARER'S BIG GAME HUNTING (2017)

Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer and Finn Marchant, Big Game Hunting, Bus Projects, 2017

Big Game Hunting examines the disjuncture between the material and the digital and how this separation has engendered an anxiety of the digital. Through the deconstruction and materialisation of fantasy role-playing video games Big Game Hunting interrogates how video games might shape and reflect human emotion, affect and desire.

Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer is an artist and independent curator currently living in Australia whose practice is concerned with the digital conditions of contemporary life. His practice engages with the cultural functions of imaging technologies and examines how networked cultures make use of the history of representation.

LINK: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

EVENT: VECTOR FESTIVAL 2023: SHADOW WORK (JULY 6-16, TORONTO, CANADA)

Vector Festival 2023: shadow work

July 6–16, 2023

InterAccess
Unit 1
950 Dupont Street
Toronto ON M6H 1Z2
Canada

press release

Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices.

Vector Festival 2023: shadow work, curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi, engages the formal and informal and mundane and arcane ways that classification systems attempt to contain the messy realities of our lives and shape our conditions. Confronting the work that both maintains and disrupts these systems, shadow work presents interventions on labour, the calculability of human life, the ungovernable, the echoes and reverberations of colonization and propositions for new, “life-giving” languages.

Through a hybrid online and in-person program of exhibitions, performances, screenings, and workshops, this 10-day festival invites artists and audiences to come together as we navigate the systems uninformed of our humanity.

Details will continue to be announced at vectorfestival.org

Program highlights

shadow work
Flagship Exhibition, July 6–August 5, 2023
Curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi

Through AR, VR, solar power, and immersive projection, shadow workexplores classification systems in contrast with the messy reality of our lives.

Worldbuilding towards...
Game Jam, July 7–16, 2023
Curated by Bracy Appeikumoh

This participatory game jam encourages game makers to create worlds radically different from our current realities, ones that foster care, compassion, and community. Together, we’ll ask (and work to answer): what world would you like to live in?

Anthropo-digitalism
Multi-site exhibition, July 6–July 16, 2023
Curated by keiko Hart

How does the digital (re)animate our environments? How do we imprint our humanness upon the digital, and how does digitalness imprint upon us humans? Ruminate on your human/digital reflections with the anthropomorphic inventions of Marisa Fulper-Estrada, Jon McCurley, Kristin McWharter, Lorna Mills, Sunny Nestler, and Seth Scriver.

a language of bodies
Screening, July 12, 2023    
Curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa

This screening brings together artists who are each transcending sealed forms and exploding the classification systems which govern “bodies”. By engaging physical bodies, bodies of water, and bodies of knowledge, these artists are working in the spaces between, celebrating the undefined and uncontrollable.

ponyHAUS performance
Performance, July 14, 2023
Curated by ponyHAUS

In true hybrid fashion, you're invited to a night of moving in and out of screen-based worlds. Contrast and draw parallels between our IRL and URL lives, supported by a selection of experimental music performances.

A Very Human Screening
Screening, July 15, 2023
Curated by Insomniac Film Festival

Go outside! Touch Grass! Logging off has become harder and harder to do. Our jobs, our social lives and our societal infrastructures have all moved online. Our identities, our bodies even, are shaped by the internet. So what now? Do we fight harder for our three-dimensional lives, or do we submit to the digital one we have? Joining us in pondering these questions with Insomniac in the genuine, outdoor, real life world.

Festival After Party
July 16, 2023
Details TBA, stay tuned.

Workshop series

SinkInSync: Creating Interactive VR with Brainwave Data
Online via Zoom, July 8
Facilitated by Tiange Wang and Xin Feng

Explore creating interactive and responsive VR environments leveraging brainwave data using Unity3D, Muse Headband, and Oculus VR Headset (Muse Headband or the VR Headset not required to participate). Upon completion of the workshop, participants will have created a 3D environment with dynamic visual elements responsive to data, and obtained the knowledge to independently implement neurofeedback VR experiences with commercially-available tools.

Tiling into AI
In-person, July 9
Facilitated by Blaine Cambell and Mohamed Somani

Patterning is an accessible activity regardless of age and skill that has deep roots across cultures. It is also a way for people to connect in verbal and non-verbal ways—in the moment of the activity but also across geographies and time. Join us in a freeform pattern making workshop where participants create individual or group patterns using various coloured cut geometric mat board shapes. These creations will be augmented by an AI model which will insert a collaborative “buffer” to connect our creations and create a cohesive, continuous pattern.

Utopics
In-person, July 13
Facilitated by Geoffrey Pugen

In this workshop Geoffry Pugen will demonstrate how to create a labyrinth as a 3d asset and export a rendered video walk through of the scene. Using Unreal engine 5.1 and Blender 3.5

Making a Solar-Server: DIY Web Design & Eco Media Art
In-person, July 22
Facilitated by Imogen Clendinning

Learn about DIY Internet technology and solar-powered media with one of Vector Festival 2023’s exhibiting artists. Participants will be led through the creation of a static HTML web server hosted on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and a live demonstration on powering a microcomputer using solar energy.

Registration, more details, and updates with workshops soon to be announced. More programming announcements to come!

Keep in touch with us at @interaccessto on Instagram and at vectorfestival.org
If you have any questions about the Vector Festival or our programming, please email [email protected].

LINK: Vector Festival 2023

EVENT: MACHINE VIOLENCE (MAY 5 - 31 2023, NEW YORK)

MILTOS MANETAS, RGB, 1998, oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in 101.6 x 121.9 cm (MM0001)

 

Machine Violence
May 5 - 31, 2023
Opening reception Friday, May 5
6 - 8pm  Postmasters 4 Bond Street, 10012, NYC

press release

Featured artists: Chando Ao, Damjansi, Huntrezz Janos, Gracelee Lawrence, Miltos Manetas, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw,Eddo Stern

Postmasters 5.0 is a moving target - our next exhibition will occupy a spectacular ground floor space on Bond Street in downtown Manhattan.

Machine Violence is a show for this moment, a visually stunning exhibition of topical relevance. It will bring together works in all media from software to painting.  Several historic projects by digital pioneers (McCoys, Matteses, Manetas) will be presented alongside current works of the new generation (Huntrezz, Damjanski).

Machine violence invariably fosters fear and disruption on an individual or societal scale. As artworks in this exhibition attest, it is left to humans - artists, in this case - to redirect, subvert, and/or transcend the literal narrative.

Fitting the current moment of intense uncertainty along the art-technology axis, this show can potentially triangulate two significant museum exhibitions currently on view in New York: Signals at MoMA and Refigured at The Whitney Museum.

The exhibition location, a former carpentry shop with skylights, brick walls and a 20 foot-tall ceiling, will be cleaned but otherwise left “as is” - raw - freeing the artists’ projections, screens, sculptures, prints and paintings from the homogeneity of a white box. Art can survive anywhere. Joining a salient history of co-opting raw spaces for art: Gavin Brown's Harlem space, Triple Candie, The Project, Sculpture Center - we will continue this countering flow at the moment of extreme showroom effect.

The exhibition centerpiece will be Horror Chase (2002) by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, who have worked collaboratively since early 2000 (Kevin McCoy is also widely recognized for creating the first art NFT in 2014). Newly remastered into 4K, Horror Chase is based on the climactic chase sequence from the film Evil Dead 2 re-enacted on a custom stage set. Each shot is digitized individually and processed by a custom computer program that selects clips randomly. The chase becomes a continuously variable incarnation of an endless - and futile - escape attempt. The images are projected on a cinematic scale, and the computer hardware is installed in a black briefcase which forms a part of the installation. Given the recent explosion of interest in generative art, the McCoy's piece may be one of the earliest examples of algorithmically created cinematic footage - a software/hardware combination of object and projection.

EVA AND FRANCO MATTES, Freedom, 2010, single-channel video(color, sound), monitor, inflatable mattress, cables, media player(optional), dimensions variable; running time: 8:56 mins, edition of 3 (#2/3), (EFM072)

 

Eva and Franco Mattes are the notorious Italian artist's team working with internet and digital media since the late 1990s. One of their most iconic works, Biennale.PY, Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine (2001-2003) is an aesthetically alluring, customized computer encased in plexiglass, with all parts exposed. It only has two software programs installed:  the virus that the artists made in 2001 for the Venice Biennale, and the "Norton Utilities" antivirus patch. The computer is in a perpetual mode of being infected, then disinfected, then rebooted; a machine locked forever in a fight between good and evil.

EDDO STERN, Vietnam Romance, 2003 digital video, NFT Time 19:09 (ES0018)

 

MILTOS MANETAS, Flames, 1997, digital video file, machinima, NFT, time 23:49, Edition of 3 (MM0002)

 

There will be three early key works of machinima in the show: Miltos Manetas’ Flames (1997) of Lara Croft committing suicide; Eddo Stern’s masterwork Vietnam Romance (2003) where key war scenes are recreated through video games like Grand Theft Auto and MASH; and Eva and Franco Mattes’ Freedom (2010), a haunting montage of death scenes from iconic first-person shooter games.

 

Damjanski will present his app, Bye, Bye Camera (2020), the AI-powered camera for the post-human era, which automatically removes people from any picture someone takes. The tool digitally detects and erases body shapes, but keeps human traces like shadows. The app will be shown along with photographic prints of Post Human Dog (2020),  his pandemic-time series of dogs with no owners.Gracelee Lawrence will present two large scale, 3D-printed sculptures of fragmented, battered bodies.

 

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw  are making a lamp, a huge, functioning, fruit flies - killing zapper encased in plexiglass.

 

Chando Ao’s kinetic sculpture in the show will be a computer driven chair/cradle for grownups that belies its mean and ominous torture device look, to soothingly rock the sitter.

 

Huntrezz Janos will show - as AR - two Instagram filters that recast the user as armored, warrior-like characters and a related 3-D printed sculpture.

 

Also on view will be Miltos Manetas still life paintings of computer components from 1998-2010. A mid-show performance is planned where Manetas will, via WhatsApp and a local assistant, paint a still life remotely from Bogotá.

 

LINK: MACHINE VIOLENCE

CALL FOR ENTRIES: FILE 2023 (DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15 2023)

 

One of the most exciting digital arts festivals in the world, FILE - Electronic Language International Festival has recently launched its 2023. After a three years hiatus, FILE is back in grand style. Applications will be open from December 19th to February 15th.

 

The 22nd Edition of the Electronic Language International Festival will take place at the FIESP Cultural Center, in São Paulo, from July 5th to August 27th 2023. The selected projects will also be able to collaborate in parallel events in different states of Brazil, also taking place in 2023. The submission is free of charge.

FILE 2023 focuses on four  categories: Electronic Sound, Interactive Art, Digital Language (including video games and machinima, VR and AR) and Educational.

Click here for more information about the submission process. (Thank you Clarissa!)

EVENT: MARTINA MENEGON (SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 13 2022, ONLINE)

when you are close to me I shiver

video recording of live simulation

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 7’ 47”, 2020, Italy

Created by Martina Menegon

Sound design by Alexander Martinz

Introduced by Luca Miranda

vral.org

when you are close to me I shiver is an algorithmically controlled live simulation, hereby presented as a video recording, that is, a real-time generated virtual experience that takes place in a version of the future in which humans, out of desperation, gather in masses on the last remaining piece of land. Inspired by the walrus scene in the documentary Our Planet narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, the project proposes a scenario encompassing ongoing environmental and personal crises. The video depicts a desolated island populated by 3D-scanned clones of the artist herself. Through these perceivable avatars, the artist creates a new identity that arises out of plurality, proprioceptively renegotiating the fragility of both the physical and the virtual self and its realities.

Martina Menegon (Italy, 1988) is an artist working predominantly with Interactive and Extended Reality Art. In her works, Martina creates intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its phygital corporeality. She experiments with the uncanny and the grotesque, the self and the body and the dialogue between physical and virtual realities, to create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature.

WATCH NOW

EVENT: YALOO AND SIAN FAN MY GARDEN, MY SANCTUARY (JULY 21 - OCTOBER 9 2022, LIVERPOOL)

View of My Garden, My Sanctuary, FACT Liverpool, UK, 2022. Photo: Rob Battersby.

Yaloo and Sian Fan
My Garden, My Sanctuary
July 21–October 9, 2022

Curated by Carrie Chan

FACT Liverpool
88 Wood Street
Liverpool L1 4DQ
UK
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm

press release

FACT launches the summer exhibition My Garden, My Sanctuary: a collection of new, immersive artworks by Yaloo and Sian Fan—two artists using creative technology to tell stories of ancestry and self-discovery in a hyperconnected world.

Presented by FACT’s 2022 Curator-in-Residence, Carrie Chan, My Garden, My Sanctuary immerses visitors in playful, watery worlds. From anime and K-pop, to lotus flowers and seaweed, artists Yaloo (South Korea) and Sian Fan (UK) weave commodified symbols of east Asia throughout their work to reclaim their cultural identities, and remix their coming-of-age stories. The new commissions transform the galleries, taking shape as large-scale animated installations and interactive gaming environments.

Combining ancient Korean traditions and beliefs with family histories, Yaloo presents a mystical installation environment. Birthday Garden (2022) begins with a temple-like gateway, leading visitors into an underwater seaweed garden and giant, animated sheet mask. The work explores the challenge of shaping self-identity and cultural stories against the commercial context of Korean culture within global media.

As part of FACT’s work around how young people craft and embody digital identities, Yaloo expands on the themes in her work to include young people’s views and critique of popular culture and social media. A series of conversations with members from the University of Liverpool’s K-pop Society, and a group of young people from Liverpool, will result in a K-pop inspired dance, public performance and a podcast documenting their creative process.

Sian Fan, Lotus Root, 2022

Sian Fan combines imagery found in anime and fantasy video games with commercialised depictions of East-Asia. In her new commission Lotus Root (2022), Sian presents an anime fantasy video game set in a sanctuary of lotus flowers and lily pads. Hyper-real avatars are nestled within the space, inspired by the characters from anime series Sailor Moon and video games Final Fantasy and Grandia. Deity (2022) is a shrine to the virtual self. Multi-angle ‘mirrors’ wrapped in root-like sculptures present a digital performance, combining motion capture and physical movement. An avatar of the artist responds to audience interaction, revealing the connection with our virtual selves. The immersive installations challenge romanticised ideas of East-Asian culture and standards of femininity found in gaming and animation.

Sian Fan, Deity, 2022

Established in 2019, FACT’s annual residency programme invites curators to develop their ideas and research into a major exhibition and public programme of events. Carrie Chan, 2022 Curator-in-Residence at FACT, said: “The exhibition has been curated to feel like a rite of passage: a journey where visitors encounter two artists whose works reflect on their own identities and cultural heritage within a technology-driven, alternative world. My residency at FACT has enabled me to explore diverse curatorial approaches in narrating stories on ancestry, identities and belonging, and has given me the opportunity to bring two acclaimed digital media artists to Liverpool – a city with a strong history of Asian immigrants and diaspora.”

My Garden, My Sanctuary forms part of Radical Ancestry, FACT’s current year-long programme. Maitreyi Maheshwari, Head of Programme at FACT, said: “From ‘alternative museums’ of artworks that question how science and technology have shaped our understanding of the past, to the ways in which the stories and songs we inherit help define key moments in our lives, the Radical Ancestry programme is an exploration of our changing sense of self. This exhibition continues our journey from the past into a present in which the artists playfully remix symbols from their familial heritage with pop cultural references, creating new possibilities and hybrid identities. Carrie has introduced us to ambitious new artists whose outlooks and practices convey the energy and the difficulties in trying to forge a new way of being.”

My Garden, My Sanctuary is now open at FACT until October 9, 2022. The exhibition will be accompanied by a public programme of family friendly events including food-based workshops, curator tours, a talk exploring stereotypes and representation in gaming, and artist performances.

LINK: Yaloo And Sian Fan My Garden, My Sanctuary

EVENT: GAME UP (JUNE 1-26 2022, BERLIN, GERMANY)

Elaine Hoey, A Blind Eye, 2021

GAME UP

Open: June 1 - 26 (Preview: 18:00 - 21:00, Thursday June 2)

Wednesdays – Fridays 13:00 - 19:0

Saturdays & Sundays June 11:00 - 19:00 

Free entrance

transmediale studio

Gerichtstrasse 35

13347 Berlin

Germany

 

This is a killer exhibition. Highly recommended. (MB)

 

press release

GAME UP seeks to get under the skin of our increasingly digital planet as a springboard to new thinking and new action through the work of  artists, Alan Butler, Elaine Hoey, Conor McGarrigle, Rosa Menkman,  David OReilly and Paper Rad/Cory Arcangel. GAME UP is a reckoning, a rear mirror view and a look at the future of our hyper-connected world.  

What are the rules of engagement in this electronic superhighway and who is policing them?  What of our digital shadow and its instantaneous monetisation? How are race and gender played out in the digital space? By turning the technology on itself, the artists in GAME UP create ways to consider and expose this hidden world. The viewer is brought deep into virtuality by means of narratives and experiences that question and confront the digital contract.

Conor McGarrigle, practicing artist and lecturer in Fine Art in the Technological University, Dublin, reminds us in his Electronic Superhighway (2022) of the richness of historical material, even in the short decades since the internet was founded and early ‘70s telemental art.

Artist and  lecturer in Fine Art at The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Elaine Hoey’s walk-in VR installation/performance brings the viewer awkwardly face to face with an Oracle far removed from its Delphic forebearer who might predict a different kind of future.

Alan Butler represented Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021, as a founding member of the collective of artists and architects, Annex. GAME UP presents Alan Butler’s 20 minute video Mondo Cane (2018), a journey through a sumptuous John Berger-like sequence of images and sounds mined from Grand Theft Auto.

Rosa Menkman is an artist, lecturer and pioneer of glitch art. Her work Glitch Studies Manifesto promises hope for what glitch might offer by suggesting disintegration might democratize society.

LA-based David OReilly works with animation, Augmented Reality and gaming. For GAME UP, the artist presents 4004 (2021), a free-standing resin monolith in which an Intel microchip - The Intel 4004 originally released by Intel Corporation in 1971 – has been preserved, resembling a factice out-of-place. The sculpture also exists as an NFT.

Chiptuner Paper Rad and video and game artist Cory Arcangel’s work, Super Mario Movie (2005), is a 15-minute movie programmed onto a Mario Brothers cartridge, in which we see the plumber evolving in a chaotic, corrupt and glitchy world.

 This exhibition is supported by Culture Ireland and curated by Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, with assistance from transmediale Festival of Art and Digital Culture, Berlin.

LINK: GAME UP

EVENT: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXII NOW LIVE (MARCH 21-27 2022, ONLINE AND IN SITU)

MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXII

EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE FOR EVERYTHING TO STAY THE SAME

March 21-27 2022

Milan, Italy and online

 

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXII returns with a hybrid format —both online and in situ screenings — after a long disruption in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. The festival program is now online: 25 works of machinima and game video created by 21 artists representing 9 countries are featured in two distinct sections — EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE (March 26 2022, IRL) and FOR EVERYTHING TO STAY THE SAME (March 21-27 2022, online) — for a total of 11 programs.

Below is a breakdown of all the features:

EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE (Museum of Interactive Cinema, Milan, March 26 2022): MACHINEMA (MACHINE CINEMA), BRAND NEW YOU ARE RETRO, and MADE IN ITALY

FOR EVERYTHING TO STAY THE SAME (March 21-27 2022, online): THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE AI, BAD TALES, SONG TO SONG, GAME VIDEO ESSAY, IDENTITIES/INTIMACIES, HISTORIES/HERSTORIES, NO DRAMA, PLEASE, and GAME OVER PRESENTS: THIS IS NOT A GAME.

Artist line-up: Lorenzo Antei (Italy), Nicolas Bailleul (France), David Blandy (England), Beatrice Carpina (Italy), Sam Crane (England), Federica di Pietrantonio (Italy), Marie Foulston and The Grannies (England/Australia), Jamie Janković (England), Steffanie Padilla (United States), Juan Poyuan (Taipei), Giulio Piacentini (Italy), Kelly Rabbachin (Italy), Phil Rice (United States), Sjors Rigters (The Netherlands), Sara Sadik (France), Paolo Santagostino (Italy), Jordy Veenstra (The Netherlands), Cris Ubermann (France), Arne Vogelgesang (Germany), and Mathias Wolff (Germany).

This year the curators are unlocking the online various features gradually, like levels of a video game. The online section comprises seven back-to-back features and one special screening.

The first two — THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE AI — featuring works by Phil Rice (US) and Beatrice Carpina (IT) — and SONG TO SONG - featuring machinima by Paolo Santagostino (IT) and Lorenzo Antei (IT) are now available.

For more updates, keep an eye on the festival's Twitter account.    

LINK: MMF MMXXII