GAMESCENES

EVENT: MIKHAIL MAKSIMOV (JULY 28 - AUGUST 10 2023, ONLINE)

The New Game Is Over

video walkthrough (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 10’ 15”, Russia

Created by Mikhail Maksimov

VRAL is delighted to present an artist walkthrough based on Mikhail Maksimov’s latest project, The New Game Is Over, an interactive experience which revolves around a remarkable machine that generates emotions and desires, allowing players to take on the role of a demiurge. In this position of power, players can develop, preserve or even destroy self-sustainable systems. The New Game Is Over is a commentary on the intricate interplay between creation and destruction, growth and decay.

Mikhail Maksimov is a Moscow-based artist and filmmaker whose multimedia practice bridges architecture, technology, and moving image. After receiving degrees in Architecture and Photography, Maksimov began exhibiting experimental films and installations that investigate game aesthetics, 3D graphics, algorithms, and neural networks. His works have been featured internationally at Manifesta 10 (2014), Locarno Film Festival (2018), Hamburg KurzFilmFestival (2019), Riga Biennial (2020), Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Art for the Future Biennale (2022), and DA Z festival in Zurich (2022), among others. Blurring the real and virtual, Maksimov’s practice contemplates emerging technologies and their role in shaping our social environments and collective imagination.

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GAME ART: LAWRENCE LEK'S THETA'S WORLD (2023, ONLINE AND BEIJING, CHINA)

Lawrence Lek, Theta's World, 2023. Digital work. Courtesy of the artist and X Museum. © X Museum.

Lawrence Lek
Theta’s World
X Virtual Incubator
May 27, 2023

press release

As the second edition of its Incubator commissions, X Virtual is delighted to present artist Lawrence Lek's latest project, Theta’s World. Created on X Virtual’s multiplayer online platform, Theta’s World is an experimental video game that explores nonhuman consciousness, virtual cityscapes, and storytelling through video game infrastructure. The work is built upon SimBeijing—a fictional smart city from the artist’s body of work Sinofuturism.

Theta’s World immerses the player into the heart of SimBeijing, a fictional smart city brought into existence as a cradle and testbed for intelligent technologies, devoid of human life. The work sprawls an intricate world comprising three levels, varying in times of a day—from the “Looping City at Dawn,” through the “Lattice City at Twilight,” to the “Vertical City at Midnight.”—each alluding to Theta's dream states and consciousness evolution. Through the first player persona of Theta, a self-driving car dreaming about its life and choices within this city, the player embarks on an odyssey through a multitude of layered and increasingly complex narratives.

Resonating with architect Lebbeus Woods' methodology, Lek designed a cityscape which creates a mirroring effect of time, structure, and form that permeates through each level. Embedded within this urban fabric are scattered fragments of text, each whispering stories that shift and morph with every journey undertaken. The non-linear nature of these narrative threads grants every participant an unparalleled storytelling encounter. By bestowing dreams upon Theta, the consciousness, subjectivity and existence of machine are examined through a lens traditionally unexplored. Centering an AI entity in a world where only non-human life exists prompts us to contemplate the ethical intricacies inherent to such a reality.

The online playable work will culminate in an immersive installation. The physical showcase of Theta’s World will be on view from August 2023 at X Museum in Beijing.

 

Lawrence Lek
Lawrence Lek is a filmmaker, musician, and artist who unifies diverse practices—architecture, gaming, video, music and fiction—into a continuously expanding cinematic universe. Over the last decade, Lek has incorporated vernacular media of his generation, such as video games and computer-generated animation, into site-specific installations and digital environments which he describes as ‘three-dimensional collages of found objects and situations.’ Often featuring interlocking narratives and the recurring figure of the wanderer, his work explores the myth of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence and social change.

Lek studied at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, the Architectural Association, London, and The Cooper Union, New York. Lek recently graduated with a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London. He has exhibited internationally with recent solo exhibitions, including Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); QUAD, Derby (2022–3); ZiWU The Bund, Shanghai (2022); Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, Prague (2019); HeK House of Electronic Arts, Basel (2019); Urbane Künste Ruhr, Essen (2019); and K11 art space, Hong Kong (2018).

X Virtual
Launched by X Museum in 2019, X Virtual is a digital art platform that fuels new artistic 3D spaces in the virtual worlds. X Virtual provides a digital infrastructure—an interoperable network of virtual worlds that stimulates new artistic productions and critical practices. We commission artists to create audio-visual space on X Virtual’s online platform and host online and offline exhibitions and virtual gatherings.

As a museum affiliate initiative dedicated to cultivating virtual worlds, X Virtual aims to foster new thoughts, discourses, and interdisciplinary practices in the light of emerging Web 3.0-centred technologies, including XR, AI, and game engines. Through working with digital creators from diverse backgrounds, we are devoted to building an accessible digital art platform to the fast-evolving Web 3.0 virtual worlds, for everyone.

Credits
Artist: Lawrence Lek
Soundtrack: Kode9 and Lawrence Lek
Writing: Lawrence Lek and Holly Gramazio
Architecture: Andreea Iliescu
Technical support: Pete Jiadong Qiang

LINK: Lawrence Lek's Theta's World

EVENT: BRENT WATANABE (MAY 19 - JUNE 1 20923, ONLINE)

MINE

machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 37’ 06”, United States, 2023

Created by Brent Watanabe

 

The latest work by Brent Watanabe is a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between virtual reality and contemporary culture. Originally conceived as a semi-narrative interactive experience, MINE spans eight mesmerizing episodes, each presenting a different facet of our complex relationship with consumption, waste, the environment, and the digital world. Originally presented on Meta/Facebook's VR platform Horizon Worlds, visitors are invited to journey through a kaleidoscopic array of immersive and fully-realized virtual environments, each revealing a new layer of insight and critique. From the grotesque realities of animal exploitation to the dark allure of gaming, guns, and surveillance, MINE is a bold and unflinching statement on the pressing issues of our time. The original work has been reimagined as a single-channel walk-through video edited by the artist for VRAL. 

Brent Watanabe’s art practice defies categorization, fusing traditional techniques with cutting-edge technology to create installations that are at once visually arresting and intellectually engaging. Drawing on his extensive background in drawing and sculpture, Watanabe uses computer programming and electronics to create kinetic sculptures that are at the forefront of a new wave of digital art. Watanabe’s work has been recognized both nationally and internationally, with his groundbreaking 2016 project, San Andreas Deer Cam, receiving over 800,000 visitors in its first three months alone and being featured in publications such as New York Magazine, the BBC, and WIRED. In addition to his solo work, Watanabe has participated in group shows and screenings around the world, including Through Machine Eyes at the NeMe Arts Center in Limassol, Cyprus, Game Changers at MassArt Art Museum in Boston, and Playmode at the MATT Museum in Lisbon, Portugal. With recent solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as SOIL Art Gallery, McLeod Residency, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Gallery 4Culture, Anchor Art Space, and the Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival, Watanabe continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of digital art. 

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EVENT: ART IN THE AGE OF THE METAVERSE (MARCH 10-12 2023, AMSTERDAM & ONLINE)

Artwork: Kévin Bray. Graphic Design: Clara Lezla.

AGE IN THE AGE OF METAVERSE

International Conference
10 – 12 March 2023
De Balie, Amsterdam & online

Hartwig Art Foundation
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten
Memory Gems

A new technological universe has created new artistic landscapes. During this conference, artists, curators, activists and industry professionals who work at the intersection of contemporary art and digital technologies, will take us deep into the metaverse, a shared space at the nexus of the virtual and the physical that is gaining increased attention as a space for artistic production and experiences. How are we interacting with it, and how can we shape its future direction in a more ethical and collaborative manner?

Through talks, discussions, and presentations, the speakers will share their insights and explore key questions such as: What are the forms of artistic practices at the intersection of the physical and the virtual? How do artists, using these technologies, engage with the ethical, social, and environmental implications? How can we counter big tech in deciding what the metaverse is and can become? And what role do we, as participants, play in shaping the future direction?

The conference will open on Friday at 8 p.m. at De Balie with the Dutch premiere screening of Ian Cheng’s Life after BOB: The Chalice Study, followed by a conversation with Ian Cheng.

Confirmed speakers include Morehshin Allahyari, Black Swan, Ian Cheng, Barbara Cueto, Ali Eslami, The Hmm, Trevor McFedries, Micaela Mantegna, Moving Castle (Arthur Roeing Baer+GVN), Marina Otero Verzier, Chao Tayiana, Shuruq Tramontini, and Veronica So. Further confirmed participants will be continuously added.

LINK: ART IN THE AGE OF THE METAVERSE

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!)

CALL FOR ARTWORKS: HOPS AHEAD: THE ART OF ALTERNATE HISTORIES, PRESENTS, AND FUTURES (DEADLINE: JULY 31 2022)

The International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) has released the 2022 Art Exhibition's call for work.

It's available here.

This year's curators are Clara Fernández-Vara and Nick Montfort, and the deadline is July 31.

This year's theme is "Hops Ahead: The Art of Alternate Histories, Presents, and Futures." It is inspired by the 60th anniversary of Julio Cortázar's novel Rayuela (in English, Hopscotch), which connected a well-known game with the novel in February 1963, inviting readers to encounter the text in more than one order. We welcome submissions that explore the potential of interactive narrative to envision alternate and future realities in the following themes

• Alternate histories, presents, and futures
•  Social connection and disconnection
• Cultural universals and differences
• Working across languages
• Playful words and languages

Artworks are welcome in (at least) the following forms and formats:

• Browser-based interactive digital art
• Electronic literature
• Parser-based interactive fiction
• Narrative-driven games
• Twine games/"Twines"
• Visual novels
• HTML5 narratives / games
• Bitsy games
• Art installations
• AR, VR, and XR works

 

LINK: Hops Ahead: The Art of Alternate Histories, Presents, and Futures

EVENT: SLIP.STREAM.SLIP RESISTANCE AND VELOCITY IN GAME ENGINE CULTURE (JUNE 24 - SEPTEMBER 18 2022, MANCHESTER, UK)

Slip.Stream.Slip

Curated by Valentino Catricalà

From 24 June 2022, 10am – 4pm

MODAL gallery, SODA, New School of Digital Arts

Manchester Metropolitan University

School of Digital Arts (SODA),
14 Higher Chatham Street,
Manchester,
M15 6ED

Featuring nine international artists, our inaugural exhibition celebrates game engine culture and how our relationship to images, sounds and interactivity has been transformed by technologies such as the Unity and Unreal engines.

The inaugural exhibition at Modal gallery focuses on game engine culture and the shift toward gamification as a model for understanding our lived experiences. Slippage between real life and simulated worlds has reinforced a lexicon of competition, changing our relationship to social interaction, media production, and time and space.

The game engine sits behind processes that go beyond creative production into healthcare and manufacturing, cementing its place as the central authoring tool of our time. Slip.Stream.Slip explores the tensions and contested spaces that open up when the micro politics of everyday living meet complex, simulated worlds.

Featured artists: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Auriea Harvey, Cécile B. Evans, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela, Joshua Citarella, Juan Cortés, Lu Yang, Rachel Maclean, and DIS.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Liminal Lands

Lu Yang, DOKU Digital Alaya

Read more here

LINK: Slip.Stream.Slip (all images courtesy of SODA/MODAL)

LINK: Modal Gallery

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

GAME ART: JACOLBY SATTERWHITE'S DAWN (IN PROGRESS)

Jacolby Satterwhite, En Plen Air Vassalage, 2015

"Jacolby Satterwhite’s Dawn will be a multi-layered exploratory video game that begins in a physical exhibition of objects, expands to digitally interactive geolocations across physical sites in Cleveland, and will ultimately be universally accessible from any location via the internet. Created using the coding language #C Sharp and software including Maya3D and Unity, the project may be accessed and played via multiple platforms, including virtual reality headsets, smartphone and tablet devices, and web browsers. The physical exhibition will materialize the game through two virtual reality films and interactive ephemera associated with the landscape and architecture of Dawn’s expansive universe. Following the aesthetic, narrative and conceptual threads built in the artist’s previous chapters of his Birds in Paradise series and The Matriarch’s Rhapsody, Dawn draws on a mesmerizing visual vocabulary inspired by Satterwhite’s personal history, queer culture, African folklore, pop culture, and environmental catastrophe. This omnipresent installation experience marks Satterwhite’s most ambitious and first interactive project to date." (Source: ViaFund)

Jacolby Satterwhite is an American contemporary artist who works with video, performance, 3D animation, fibers, drawing and printmaking, currently based in New York City, NY. To learn more about Satterwhite, watch this episode of Art21.

LINK: Jacolby Satterwhite

EVENT: PLAYER OF BEINGS (DECEMBER 12 2020 - MARCH 28 2021, SHANGHAI)

Player of Beings
December 12, 2020–March 28, 2021

Curator: Qiu Zhijie, Chen Baoyang

Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum
No.436 East Yonghe Road, Jing'an District
200072 Shanghai
China
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm

T +86 21 5690 0009
[email protected]
mcam.io

press release

Human beings have learned to play games through chasing each other before learned to walk upright. After mastering the use of tools, we transformed the simplest cube into a most extensive form of game. For a brief while, the relationship between game and human diverged from the evolution of tools and technology, and turned towards constructing a training field of thoughts on game boards. In stead of chasing each other, people started chasing the glory of victory, and then, what else?

“The player controls the CRT beam by adjusting the knobs, which change the trajectory of the beam spot on the display screen, representing artillery shell. The plastic targets overlaid on the screen represent objects such as airplanes. The player fires the beam spot arcing towards the airplanes within a time limit. If the CRT beam hits one of the target coordinates, then it defocuses, representing the explosion of the airplane.”
—Cathode-ray tube amusement device 1947

When the earliest video game, the cathode-ray tube amusement device, was first invented, computers were still at a stage of reading punched tapes; while the knobs and the CRT beams already provided us the archaic interactive framework consisted of a display screen and an input device. The Magnavox Odyssey released in 1972 first brought video games into people’s living rooms from giant mainframes in the engine rooms. Five years later, the Macintosh born in the garage and the Atari 2600 which released the same year initiated a never ending rivalry in the gaming industry between “Console vs. PC”. And since then, video game has become a part of our lives.

Before examining the relationship between game, human and society, it is essential to first look at the gaming interface which progressed along with the evolution of technology. From the cathode-ray tube amusement device, to Pong, and to the epic wars, people seem to be obsessed with accurately representing our world on a two-dimensional screen. The common pixels have now been advanced with real-time ray tracing through 3D computer graphics. From one-dimensional knob and button, two-dimensional mouse and joystick, to three-dimensional motion sensor, the evolution of these interactive devices reflects a persistent desire to shorten the gap between reality and the game world.

Unravelling game among various systems of coordinates, we fantasize the unknown and revisit historical scenes; we exercises our tactics and strategies, yet sometimes further triggers our anxiety and stress. Beneath the flickering light of the screens, game has become a bridge, connecting people with each other and everything else. Activating traditional culture through the lens of new technology, game carries us to break the boundary of time. From the abstract dimension of time to the vast territory of land, game enables us to gain attention to social connections that often being overlooked, and cultivates our compassion. Dream pursuers who left their hometown get to make new friends in game, catch up with the old ones and re-encounter their motherlands. Aside from victory and defeat, players learn to perceive the world and become aware of themselves through the sheer pleasure of gaming, and game then gradually becomes a way of healing.

Festured artists: aaajiao; Cao Fei; Chen Houwen, Cui Yecheng, Qi Zihang, Liu Jinxing, Liao Ziling, and Wu Jingyi; Ding Nan, Lei Jianhao, and Qu Mingfei; Feng Mengbo; Jeffrey SHAW; JODI; Lu Fei, Sun Hao, and Zhu Qia; Lu Yang; Peng Jiayuan, Wang Changcheng, and Wang Mengyao; Zheng Guogu

Producer: Li Songjian, Ling Feifei
Organizer: Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), Ming Yuan Group
Co-organizer: CAFA lnstitute of Sci-Tech Arts
Supporter: Tencent Games, Tencent TGC
Venue: No. 436, East Yonghe Rd, Jing’an District, Shanghai

LINK: Player of Beings