GAMESCENES

EVENT: SEA CHANGE (FEBRUARY 15 - AUGUST 18 2024, MIAMI, FLORIDA)

Sea Change

February 15 - August 18 2024

1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL 33132

United States

Rick Silva and Nicolas Sassoon. Signals 4, 2023. HD color video with sound. 6 min. Courtesy the artist

Sea Change at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is an immersive exhibition navigating accelerating transformations across climate, culture, and time. The featured works flow between aqueous warnings, poetic meditations on human nature, and futuristic reinterpretations of the technologies reshaping life as we know it. Each offering provides a unique vantage on the deepening interconnectedness of tech and the natural world.

The selection features multilayered virtual beings from LaTurbo Avedon, Eva Papamargariti, and Fabiola Larios; playful interspecies antics in Lorna Mills’ animated GIF collages; surreal animalistic metamorphosis by Cassie McQuater; mesmerizing generative landscapes by Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Harvey Moon, Rick Silva and Nicolas Sassoon; Rodell Warner’s shimmering 3D archive of endangered aquatic plant species; and Leo Castañeda’s imagined domain of sentient Mangroves.

Sea Change weaves together artificial intelligence, simulation, and identity to illuminate our precarious position amidst imminent seismic societal, cultural, and existential shifts. Spanning generative art, animated GIFs, video games, 3D experimental films and virtual reality, the stylistically diverse survey offers a vivid sample of how artists critically and creatively engage technology today.

The interactive format enables viewers to fluidly toggle between works in an immersive contemporary art experience. By showcasing simulations, gaming, and online art, Sea Change sparks vital dialogue around power, tech, and imagery in the 21st century.

LINK: Sea Change

EVENT: HUI WAI-KEUNG (FEBRUARY 16 - 29 2024, ONLINE)

Parallel V

digital video, single-channel-projection, color, sound, 26’ 14”, 2023, Hong Kong

Created by Hui Wai-Keung

World premiere

 

Conceived by Hui Wai-Keung as a tribute to Harun Farocki, Parallel V is a continuation of his seminal Parallel I-IV series investigating the operational logic of computer games. The point of departure for Hui is a statement by the late German director on the computer-controller characters’ tendency to repeat the same actions over and over again: “This tragedy revealed the limitations of human freedom of action”. Hui discovered that all NPCs seem trapped in a time-space bond with the player, a relationship of ontological dependence. NPCs live life-like existences; repetitions are inevitable in their simulated lives. And yet, Hui suggests, the algorithmic bounds of games are not absolute, and NPCs still encounter contingencies. Thus, both NPCs and human beings might be better off following Friedrich Nietzsche’s admonition, embracing rather than rejecting repetition.

Hui Wai-Keung is a Hong Kong-born cross-disciplinary artist currently pursuing a PhD in Art Creation and Theory at Tainan National University of the Arts in Taiwan. Hui received his MFA from the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong and studied at the Hong Kong Art School. In recent years he has focused especially on game art and algorithmic art, exploring visual possibilities in digital hyperspace. Hui has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Finland, Italy and the USA. Hui has completed artist residencies in Germany, Finland, South Korea, and Japan. Currently based in Taiwan, Hui continues to exhibit and conduct research into narrative, algorithms, possibility, contingency, reenactment, and history.

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EVENT: CHRIS KERICH (OCTOBER 27 - NOVEMBER 9 2023, ONLINE)

THREE IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS

digital video, color, sound, 2022, 11’ 14”, United States

Created by Chris Kerich

October 27 - November 9 2023

vral.org

 

A speculative digital art project that probes the underlying logic and limitations of procedural world generation Three Impossible Worlds was developed with/in the popular video game Minecraft. The artist began by conceptualizing a series of thought experiments: worlds deemed “impossible” within Minecraft’s existing generative framework. By subverting the game’s expected parameters, Three Impossible Worlds surfaces latent politics and ingrained assumptions coded into procedural systems. 

Chris Kerich is a programmer and artist living and working in Lethbridge, Alberta. Kerich is interested in systems, constrained art, information, critical science studies, and video games. Chris is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge. He received his doctorate from the program in Film and Digital Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he has received a Master of Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 and a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. Kerich’s creative endeavors have garnered international recognition and have been featured in retrospectives and events like the Milan Machinima Festival (2021, 2019, Milan, Italy) and Vector Festival (2018, Toronto, Canada).

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EVENT: FIRAS SHEHADEH (SEPTEMBER 7 - 21 2023, ONLINE)

Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Rehearsal

Single-channel video (color, sound, narrator: Mamusu Kallon), 14’ 19”, 2023, Palestine

Created by Firas Shehadeh

Originally commissioned by Singapore Art Museum

 

Part of Shehadeh’s ongoing research into video games and Palestinian youth culture, Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Rehearsal combines found-footage of Twitch streamers and custom game mods for Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games, 2013). Unpacking video game mods as a form of contemporary archive — and therefore digitizing historic and contemporary architectural sites in addition to seemingly ubiquitous objects — the artwork proposes Los Santos, a virtual replica of Los Angeles, as the biblical “land of milk and honey”.

Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist and researcher exploring issues of identity, meaning, and aesthetics in the digital age. Currently based in Vienna, his interdisciplinary practice engages with post-colonial effects, technology, and history through the lens of worldbuilding and internet culture. Shehadeh holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he is currently a PhD candidate. His education also includes studies in conceptual art, video, and architecture in Vienna, Barcelona, and Amman. Investigating topics like colonial legacies, memory, and belonging, Shehadeh creates speculative narratives that reveal unseen structures and realities. His research-focused practice utilizes and subverts the visual languages of new media, examining how technology transforms society’s relationship with knowledge and power. His work, which has been exhibited internationally, offers a critical perspective on the role of the internet and digital imaging in shaping contemporary identities, histories, and ways of world-making.

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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: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXIII (MARCH 19 - 26 2023, MILAN AND ONLINE)

MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXIII

Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent

March 19 - 26 2023, Milan and online

Special screening on March 25 2023 at the

Museo Interattivo del Cinema

Viale Fulvio Testi 121 20162 Milano

Curated by Matteo Bittanti

 

The sixth edition of the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL features a diverse selection of 19 machinima and game videos from 23 artists representing 12 countries.

“Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent” (NANI) is how Kate Crawford— research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research — describes artificial intelligence in her award-winning book Atlas of AI (2021). According to Crawford, “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.”

Likewise, the new edition of the Milan Machinima Festival will address the growing influence of artificial intelligence on storytelling and visual narrative, but also the rhetoric surrounding this technique

This year the festival features two distinct sections: NEITHER INTELLIGENT NOR ARTIFICIAL (March 25 2023, in-person) and MACHINIMA IN THE AGE OF AI (March 19-26 2023, online), featuring 9 programs overall.

Experience the best of machinima and game videos through our curated programs:

NEITHER INTELLIGENT NOR ARTIFICIAL (Museum of Interactive Cinema, Milan, March 25 2023): NEITHER INTELLIGENT NOR ARTIFICIAL, THE POLITICS OF GAMING, DYSTOPIA and a selection of works from MADE IN ITALY and THE NEO AVANT-GARDE which will be presented exclusively on site, specifically

• LUCAS AZEMAR, LIFE ON EARTH, 2019

• SOREN THILO FUNDER, GAME ENGINES (Orange Bulletproof Kids) (2021)

• TOTAL REFUSAL, HARDLY WORKING, 2022

• BEN NICHOLSON, THE TONIC OF BATTERSEA PARK, 2023

• ANDREA GATOPOLOUS, HAPPY NEW YEAR, JIM, 2022

• KENT SHEELY, WELCOME BACK, 2022

• CHRISTIAN WRIGHT, BODY LANGUAGE, 2022

• STANISLAW PETRUK, THE REMNANTS, 2022

MACHINIMA IN THE AGE OF AI (March 19-26 2023, online): MADE IN ITALY, THE NEO AVANT-GARDE, COUNTER-NARRATIVES, and UTOPIA.

Featured artists: Babak Ahteshamipour, Lucas Azémar, Martin Bell, Marc Coverdale, Iain Douglas, Søren Thilo Funder, Andrea Gatopoulos, Nicholas Gebbe, Luca Giacomelli, Manuel Ghidini, Kara Güt, Ben Nicholson, Stanislaw Petruk, Kent Sheely, Brenton Alexander Smith, Colin Stagner, Nanut Thanapornrapee, Total Refusal, Rhett Tsai, and Christian Wright.

The festival’s poster was designed by Jordy Veenstra, one of the most talented artists working with machinima today. “The initial keywords given to me were NPC and AI”, said the Dutch artist and filmmaker. “In tandem with this year’s theme, my first thoughts were: pseudo-intelligence, digitization, dehumanization, empty shells, algorithms, compulsory movement and/or execution — as in NPC speech and movement —, the contrast between real/fabricated and the visualization of code.“

Consistently with this premise, Veenstra used AI-based tools to generate the artwork. As he explains: “The work was created with the Dall-E AI provided by OpenAI and in my eyes ideally captures this idea. White experimental, dehumanized masses looking like NPCs, with truly absurd poses; just standing there, surrounded by experimental ‘white’ code blobs; simply looking around restlessly and waiting for someone, anyone, to give a quest to, to be useful and to have their code finally executed. To have their own quest completed.”

The full program and schedule are available here

Tickets can be purchased here

LINK: MMF MMXXIII

EVENT: ALTERNATE PRESENCE (FEBRUARY 23 - APRIL 1 2023, LONDON)

Petra Szemán, David Blandy, Alternate Presence

23rd February – 1st April 2023

Seventeen Gallery

270-276 Kingsland Road

London E8 4DG

 

Still from Petra Szemán, Monomyth: gaiden / Master of two worlds, 2020
Single channel video with sound

Master of Two Worlds (2020) is the 4th and final installment of the Monomyth: gaiden tetralogy. Through an analysis of the position of the protagonist after having undertaken a grand journey through animated worlds, the video starts undoing the constraints of the narrative structure of the monomyth and calls for a lateral approach to storytelling. The Monomyth: gaiden project on the whole centers the space between the layers that make up our complex image-worlds, the holes in the digital landscape. By pushing these small gaps into focus, you can take up an ongoing ontological position, and rethink what constitutes a self or a mode of experience, Deborah Levitt puts it succinctly in her book The Animatic Apparatus: questioning ‘where images end and bodies begin, where truth or the real might reside, or on what side of this vestigial division between spectator and screen we find “life”.’

Still from David Blandy, Androids Dream, 2022
Single channel HD video with sound

In Androids Dream (2022), Blandy deconstructs the cyberpunk aesthetic first prototyped by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and which has continued to be repeated and become ever more ossified. Formed of multiple simulacra, the work involves Unreal Engine assets, uses Kojima’s Snatcher - itself a replay of Blade Runner in videogame form - and even deploys an algorithmic mimesis of the artist's own voice. Breaking down the aesthetic form, the film in turn breaks down, repeats, refracts, and goes into reverse.

Commissioned by Petra Szemán for On Animatics for Saturday Morning Animation Club

LINK: Alternate Presence at Seventeen

LINK: Petra Széman

LINK: David Blandy

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.

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EVENT: ALIX DESAUBLIAUX (OCTOBER 28 - NOVEMBER 10 2022, ONLINE)

 

L’AUTRE MONSTRE (THE OTHER MONSTER)

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 48’ 26”, 2021, France (in French with English subtitles)

Created by Alix Desaubliaux

October 28 - November 10 2022

vral.org

 

L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster) is an experimental film created with/in Monster Hunter World (Capcom, 2018). A contemplative immersion in a fantasy universe, this machinima examines the affective nature of playing. The artist appropriated a popular Japanese RPG and hunting game to explore ecological issues related to the ongoing capitalist exploitation of nature, which are intimately linked to the affective positions of the players. This singular relationship is punctuated by questions about the ontology of the creatures that inhabit the world, their language and communication style, and the system of representation that informs their appearance and behavior. Part documentary, part visual poem, and part conceptual walk-through, The Other Monster was produced using in-game assets, environments, and 3D images generated by an application. From the Anjanath to the Deviljho and the Pukei-Pukei, from the director’s point of view to the players’ experiences with Serid and Unbot, accompanied by their palicos, the monster becomes a metaphor for Otherness: a tool to question one’s relationship to the Other and to the world as a whole.

French artist Alix Desaubliaux and has been an active member of the Vivarium workshop since January 2021. In addition to her artistic practice, she explores performative and experimental formats via online encounters with the collective 3G, featuring Annie Abrahams, Pascale Barret, and Alice Lenay. She is also involved with the research group WMAN, comprising six artists and curators working with video games. Desaubliaux teaches in several art schools including ENSAD Nancy, ESACM Clermont-Ferrand, ENSBA Lyon, ESAM Caen, ESBAN Nîmes, where she organizes workshops, interventions, conferences, and seminars. Her work has been presented in several exhibitions, events, and festivals including Jeune Création Fair in 2015 at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery; Digital Arts Biennial at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Domaine Pommery; Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète and Glassbox, among others. She lives and works in Rennes.

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EVENT: FILE. ELECTRONIC LANGUAGE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2022 (JULY 13 - AUGUST 14 2022, SAO PAULO, BRAZIL)

FILE: Electronic language international festival 2022 SUPERCRIATIVIDADE

July 13th to August 14th, 2022
Edifício Banco do Brasil /Torre Matarazzo
Av.Paulista, 1230, Bela Vista, São Paulo/SP

 The theme of the amazing Brazilian festival is SUPERCREATIVITY, which is described by the organizers and founders of FILE, Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto, as

Creativity overcomes obstacles and builds new realities. In each moment, as said in Philosophy, art lies confined in the cloister of its time. From time to time, however, creativity produces gaps that enable art to break through into new realms. And it’s almost a norm to say that creativity is an exclusive property of art.
Creativity is not limited to the arts. It also takes place in all disciplines of Culture. Thus, in the aesthetic sense, it ceases to be creativity and becomes Supercreativity: the sum of all creative engines that permeate and connect to our culture. In economics, we see it emerge in Joseph Schumpeter’s “destructive creativity” and Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive theory”. In mathematics, we see it in the creation of Alan Turing’s universal machine, in John von Neumann’s autonomous cells and in Claude Shannon’s logic electronic circuits. They created, along with many other creative geniuses, the intelligent machines that originated Artificial Intelligence. Supercreativity, however, is not a property of Artificial Intelligence, but its very inventor. Supercreativity, teaming with Artificial Intelligence or not, is and will be the main condition to the world’s development in all its nuances.

This year's program features an insane amount of terrific projects, including (but not limited to):

Lu Yang – The Great Adventure of Material World (China)

Jon Rafman – Disasters Under the Sun (Canada)

Leo Castaneda – Levels and Bosses – (United States, Colombia)

Save MeOh - Save Generosa (France)

Glasz DeCuir You Have NO CHOICE. Yes I saw an angel (Spain)

and many more...

Of huge interest for this space is a special program entitled

ANIMA+GAMES 2022 – Augmented Reality
FILE ANIMA+GAMES 2022

Featured artist: Raquel Meyers (Spain)

Conception: Ricardo Barreto

Curatorship: Clarissa Oliveira

Design: Estúdio Quadradão

Guest artist and performer Raquel Meyers talks about using obsolete technologies to create real-time animation, storytelling and 8-bit aesthetics.

Featuring works by

Melodie Mousset – HanaHana AR  (France, Switzerland)

Theo Triantafyllidis – Genius Loci AR(Greece)

Amanita Design – Samorost 3 (Czech Republic)

Dinosaur Polo Club – Mini Metro (United States)

Giant Squid – The Pathless (United States)

Joel McDonald – Prune (United States)

Ludopium Studio – Vectronom (Germany)

and many more...

LINK: FILE 2022