GAMESCENES

PROJECT: IMGAME (2022-2025)

Launched in 2022 and funded by the Creative Europe Programme, ImGame is a research-based digital platform that combines immersive aesthetics with serious gaming to foster public engagement with contemporary art. Developed by a consortium of academic, artistic, and municipal partners across Latvia, Hungary, and Greece, the project seeks to fill a critical gap in art education by creating a virtual environment where users can explore the conceptual foundations, historical antecedents, and intertextual dimensions of new media art.

At the core of ImGame is an innovative VR experience designed to introduce audiences—especially those outside traditional art institutions—to the aesthetic strategies of contemporary digital art. Rather than offering a linear history or didactic overview, ImGame immerses the user in a spatialised environment that privileges exploration, affective engagement, and playful interaction. Viewers navigate an abstract virtual world shaped by the logics of game design, where they encounter artworks and theoretical references embedded within dynamic spatial cues.

In this environment, the concept of immersion is not simply technological, but aesthetic and psychological. ImGame defines immersion as the temporary suspension of the real-world frame in favour of a constructed, affectively resonant digital experience. Comparable to the absorption one might feel while reading a compelling novel, this form of immersion is used to model how contemporary art invites contemplation, critical distance, and presence all at once.

The project has yielded not only a functional prototype—accessible via imgame.va.lv—but also significant theoretical output. Two major research articles have been published: ImGame Project: a Comprehensive Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Gaming (2024) and ImGame: An Immersive Educational Environment to Teach Contemporary Art (2024), presented at international conferences including CSEDU (Angers), AIEEE (Valmiera), and UNLOCK. Collectively, these publications articulate a theoretical framework for immersive aesthetics, while also advancing discourse around serious art games as a pedagogical tool.

The project also supported the development of three emerging digital artists—Alvis Misjuns (Latvia), Kristóf Szabó (Hungary), and Vasilis Georgakopoulos (Greece)—whose works were integrated into the platform. This component reflects ImGame’s commitment to not only presenting but also producing contemporary digital culture.

Technically, ImGame introduces a novel node-based shader workflow built with A-Frame, allowing young creators to design multi-platform interactive experiences without advanced coding skills. This lowers the barrier of entry for creative technologists, making the project both educational and empowering.

By collecting and analysing current new media practices in Latvia, Greece, and Hungary, the research component of ImGame has also generated a comparative cultural map of immersive aesthetics across different European contexts. From ancient mythologies to theories of the sublime, the project ties together a diverse array of cultural reference points to offer users a richly contextualised encounter with digital art.

ImGame is not just a serious game or a VR prototype; it is a model for how interactive systems can be used to think with, about, and through contemporary art. It demonstrates that gaming can serve not only as entertainment, but as a medium for aesthetic education, critical reflection, and public access to complex cultural ideas.

LINK: ImGame (Special thanks to Ieva Gintere)

OPEN CALL FOR DIGITAL ART COMMISSIONS: PEREZ ART MUSEUM, FLORIDA (DEADLINE: JUNE 30 2025)

press release

(MIAMI, FL — April 30, 2025) — Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is thrilled to announce its inaugural open call for digital art commissions from the crossroads of the Americas. The museum’s first-of-its-kind program offers financial support to produce experimental digital artwork across South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora. Selected artists may be awarded between $1,000–$15,000 during an estimated 12-month period, expanding and advancing the museum’s presentation, study, and interpretation of international contemporary digital art.

The open call for digital art commissions launches on April 30, 2025. The application deadline is June 30, 2025, at 11:59pm PST.

The open call fosters the creation of innovative digital artworks that reflect PAMM's unique position at the crossroads of the Americas, bolstering artistic representation and reproduction within these regions. The open call aims to expand scholarship and engagement with digital art, advancing the museum’s mission to lead in the presentation, study, and interpretation of international contemporary digital art.

“This open call seeks to bolster new media practices across PAMM’s purview and reroute the history of digital art beyond what is typically shown in museums and galleries,” said Jay Mollica, PAMM senior director of digital engagement. "The economic, artistic, and scholarship opportunities built into the open call are vital for our digital arts ecosystem to thrive across South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora,” said Lauren Monzón, program manager of digital engagement.

Applicants can submit proposals for original projects in any production phase, including pre- to post-production. Successful digital art proposals will use the internet and digital processes to conceptually and practically shape their projects, including many disciplines spanning video art, film, augmented reality, net art, 3-D sculpture, video games, virtual reality, generative art, as well as forms yet to be discovered.

There is no fee for the museum’s open call for digital art commissions. Proposals must be submitted electronically through PAMM’s application portal here.

Learn more about the open call, applicant eligibility, evaluation criteria, and how to apply by clicking here.

EVENT: RADICAL SOFTWARE: WOMEN, ART & COMPUTING 1960-1991 (FEBRUARY 28 - MAY 25 2025, VIENNA, AUSTRIA)

Dara Birnbaum, Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, 1980, © Courtesy Dara Birnbaum und / and Eletrconic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Radical Software
Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991
February 28–May 25, 2025

Exhibition opening: February 27, 7pm

Symposium: February 28, 9am–6pm

kunsthallewien.at

Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien

press release

Kunsthalle Wien presents a major new exhibition examining the pioneering role of women in digital art. Organised in collaboration with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 brings together over one hundred works by fifty artists including painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts.

A principally analogue exhibition about digital art, Radical Software focuses on the decades that preceded the rise of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of digital information and images that ensued, shaping artistic production and visual culture in the following decades. The exhibition is titled after the magazine that Beryl Korot started with fellow artists Phyllis (Gershuny) Segura and Ira Schneider in 1970. They adopted the term software (as opposed to hardware) as a metaphor and powerful tool for social change. The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial model and mission to serve as “an evolving handbook of technology,” decentralising access to information, predated the World Wide Web by two decades.

Beginning with works from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition spans a period from the first years of integrated circuit computing to the “microcomputer revolution,” which led to the birth of personal computing in the 1980s. The first works date from a time in which artists, poets, writers and filmmakers experimented with mainframe and minicomputers alongside mathematicians, scientists and engineers to produce and exhibit the first computer-generated images and texts. During these three decades the computer migrated from the laboratory to private, domestic space. Yet with each retelling of this history, the significant engagement of women with the technology has been largely overlooked. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, this exhibition documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on women.

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 also engages with contemporary questions of how technology interfaces with issues of identity and equality. The exhibition follows a renewed interest in the post-internet discourse of cyberfeminism, which highlights the role that women played in the creation of new digital technologies and engages critically with the entanglement of technology and power structures.

Artists: Rebecca Allen (b. 1953, Detroit), Elena Asins (b. 1940, Madrid–d. 2015, Navarra), Colette Stuebe Bangert (b. 1934, Columbus) & Charles Jeffries Bangert (b. 1938, Fargo–d. 2019, Lawrence), Gretchen Bender (b. 1951, Seaford, Delaware–d. 2004, New York City), Gudrun Bielz (b. 1954, Linz) & Ruth Schnell (b. 1956, Feldkirch), Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946, New York City), Inge Borchardt (b. 1935, Szczecin, formerly Stettin), Barbara Buckner (b. 1950, Chicago), Doris Chase (b. 1923–d. 2008, Seattle), Analívia Cordeiro (b. 1954, São Paulo), Betty Danon (b. 1927, Istanbul–d. 2002, Milan), Hanne Darboven (b. 1941, Munich–d. 2009, Hamburg), Bia Davou (b. 1932–d. 1996, Athens), Agnes Denes (b. 1938, Budapest), VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Linz), Anna Bella Geiger (1933, Rio de Janeiro), Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Bad Oldesloe), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b. 1965, Strasbourg), Lily Greenham (b. 1924, Vienna–d. 2001, London), Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem), Barbara Hammer (b. 1939, Los Angeles–d. 2019, New York City), Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland), Grace C. Hertlein (b. 1924, Chicago–d. 2015, Chico), Channa Horwitz (b. 1932–d. 2013, Los Angeles), Irma Hünerfauth (b. 1907, Donaueschingen–d. 1998, Kreuth), Charlotte Johannesson (b. 1943, Malmö), Alison Knowles (b. 1933, New York City), Beryl Korot (b. 1945, New York City), Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad), Ruth Leavitt (b. 1944, St. Paul, Minnesota–d. 2025, Baltimore), Liliane Lijn (b. 1939, New York), Vera Molnár (b. 1924, Budapest–d. 2023, Paris), Monique Nahas (b. 1940, Paris) & Hervé Huitric (b. 1945, Paris), Katherine Nash (b. 1910–1982, Minneapolis), Sonya Rapoport (b. 1923, Brookline–d. 2015, Berkeley), Deborah Remington (b. 1930, Haddonfield–d. 2010, Moorestown), Sylvia Roubaud (b. 1941, Munich), Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923, Toronto–d. 2015, Hampton Bays), Lillian Schwartz (b. 1927, Cincinnati, Ohio–d. 2024, New York City), Sonia Sheridan (b. 1925, Newark–d. 2021, Hanover), Nina Sobell (b. 1947, Patchogue), Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena), Tamiko Thiel (b. 1957, Oakland), Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952, Schwerte), Joan Truckenbrod (b. 1945, Greensboro), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp), Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942, Stockholm)

Symposium: Radical Software: On the first day of the exhibition, 28 February 2025, Kunsthalle Wien and TU Wien will host a symposium bringing together highly distinguished female researchers from the fields of art and science including Gerti Kappel, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Margit Rosen, Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Ina Wagner and artists Gudrun Bielz, Inge Borchardt, Anna Bella Geiger, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liliane Lijn, Sylvia Roubaud, Ruth Schnell, Nina Sobell, Tamiko Thiel and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven.

Exhibition publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication including essays by Tina Rivers Ryan, Margit Rosen and the exhibition’s curator, Michelle Cotton. Co-published with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, it features over 200 illustrations, a timeline and twenty-seven new interviews with artists from the exhibition.

Kunsthalle Wien is financed by the Magistratsabteilung Kultur der Stadt Wien (MA 7). The artistic programme is also supported by the members and patrons of the Kunsthalle Wien Club. The exhibition and symposium are made possible through the generous support of Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

LINK: Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 

Previously

EVENT: ONE TETHERED BIRD (JANUARY 17 - FEBRUARY 21 2025, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON STATE)

Brent Watanabe: One Tethered Bird

The Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish

1077 Lenora Street

Seattle, WA 98121

Jan 17th - Feb 21 2025

 

Brent Watanabe's upcoming solo show at The Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish will include work covering the past two decades, including his Grand Theft Auto interventions (San Andreas Deer Cam, Community Cam, Possessions), several computer controlled installations, MINE VR, his Animal Crossing intervention, and the two new works.

 

Brent Watanabe, San Andreas Community Cam, 2017, studies for computer-controlled installation, Modified version of Grand Theft Auto V

 

Brent Watanabe, Possessions, 2018-19, animation, animation, modified version of Grand Theft Auto V

 

Brent Watanabe, Animal Crossing: All Mine, 2020, video game intervention in Animal Crossing: New Horizon

 

Stay tuned for more news about this monumental exhibition!

 

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. 

 

Read an interview about MINE VR

 

Read an interview about Animal Crossing: All Mine

 

LINK: Brent Watanabe

 

LINK: The Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish

GAME ART: MIKHAIL MAKSIMOV’S FLYOVER VR (2024)

Mikhail Maksimov’s FlyOver is a VR experience that merges meditative gameplay with a deeply existential narrative. By transforming players’ hands into wings, the game invites participants on a tranquil journey through surreal landscapes, including serene swamps and dreamlike vistas where reality and imagination blur. The journey is marked by discovery: abandoned VHS tape recorders, placed in the heart of a swamp, beckon the player to engage. By inserting old VHS tapes into these machines, players unlock cryptic movies that weave a narrative of memory, mortality, and transcendence.

Are they fragments of forgotten lives? Echoes of alternate realities? Or glimpses into a subconscious? At its core, FlyOver is a “game of overcoming death,” exploring the liminal space between life and the afterlife, where transgression becomes key. This sense of transition - what Maksimov describes as meeting oneself in a dream - captures the enigmatic beauty of FlyOver.

Mikhail Maksimov engages with the conceptual interplay between digital media and reality, employing advanced techniques such as simulations and 3D animation to interrogate potential alternative realities. His practice, grounded in the framework of ‘transmedia storytelling,’ traverses multiple platforms, including film, installation art, and mobile applications. Through these media, Maksimov rigorously examines and critiques ideological and philosophical constructs, situating digital interfaces as both a reflective medium and an active agent in shaping the relationship between creator and audience. He posits that if reality can be understood as modeling gaming principles, then digital forms such as animation and interactive artworks possess the capacity to reconfigure reality itself. Maksimov’s academic foundation includes studies at Moscow State Construction University and the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. His works have been featured in prestigious exhibitions and festivals, including the Moscow Modern Art Biennale, the Locarno Film Festival, Manifesta 10, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and DA Z Festival in Zurich.

Download the game here for Windows/Android platforms

LINK: Mikhail Maksimov

EVENT: THE VISIBLE CITY/THE CITY AT PLAY (APRIL 12 - AUGUST 28 2024, MADRID, SPAIN)

The Visible City/The City at Play

 

12.04 - 25.08.2024

Tuesdays-Mondays, 10:00 - 20:00

CentroCentro

Plaza de Cibeles, 1. 28014. Madrid

press release

CentroCentro  is an intercultural meeting space, a large public square for citizens and a setting for participation, action, leisure and learning in Madrid. Located in the emblematic Cibeles Palace, the former Communications Palace, and current headquarters of the Madrid City Council, its objective is to activate critical thinking in the face of the challenges of the present and the future. It is to this space that our exhibition  The Visible City / The City at Play will arrive from April 12 to August 25, 2024 (Floor 4). The opening will be on April 11 at 7 p.m., with the presentation of the exhibition and a small catering.

Synopsis

The city is built in many ways. Through material manipulation but also through languages and constructions of symbolic worlds that operate and shape it. Different artefacts and technologies amplify this effect. Our entire relationship with reality is technologically mediated and if there is one technology - and one language - that has become the spearhead of this interaction, it is clearly the video game.

It is possible today to understand the video game as a laboratory for the construction of citizenship, and as a communication language capable of establishing a distance dialogue between the actors who inhabit urban, material and virtual spaces. The interactive nature of digital games and the representation of the city in them encourages the development of a collective intelligence that, in a living way, recursively imagines and writes the present and future of urban spaces.

With this exhibition we propose a look at the video game from its potential to reflect and transform the city, proposing a journey through different interventions, projects and experiments that show how the urban is represented and constructed through this medium.

Video games form a unique relationship between city designs, architecture and urban planning, allowing new ways of understanding the creation of inhabited spaces, physical or virtual. Game environments, and their technologies, can teach us about architecture and the role it plays in society. Virtual worlds allow us to explore and travel through imagined spaces as well as interact and explore existing places from our homes, allowing new ways of relating spatially.

In the two poles of utopian or dystopian future imaginaries, video games are, on the one hand, a tool for the subtle manipulation of our behaviour through playful or gamified dynamics that increasingly mediate the ways of living, travelling and interacting with the city. and its inhabitants and, on the other, spaces from which to experience joint decision-making about our cities so that they are more sustainable, ecological and inclusive.

Through a set of national and international projects that use different compositional and aesthetic techniques, from photography to sculpture through installation and video games, this exhibition proposes an open route articulated in different transversal sections. Presenting different artistic works and recreational interventions, it aims to share with visitors a critical perspective that broadens the vision of the video game beyond a mere object of consumption and pointing to the transformative function of the ludus as a space for collective creation and reflection around the city.

The exhibition has been enriched by the work of artists and thinkers such as Aida Navarro, Mathias Klenner, Sofía Balbontín y Joan Lavandeira, Santiago Bustamante, Fundación Cotec, María Ignacia Ibarra, Gianluca Saporito, Dinosaur Polo Club, Leo Sang, Elise Aubisse, Pablo Garrido Martinez, Outconsumer - Roc Massague, Augustina Isidori, Jose Sanchez, Carlos Padial, Keiichi Matsuda, Mónica Rikić, Dimopoulos, K., Gerber, A., & Götz, U., Navarro Redón, A., Shaw, J., Tan, E., José Tono Martínez, Zemos98, Gira Zapatista and Gall Negre.

The exhibition features the wonderful museography design of  Meritxell Ahicart, who has managed to intervene in the center room to recreate a unique experience, the graphic design of Colectivo Buenu and the architectonic design of Paz Artiagoitia and Maximiliano Aguayo.

About ArsGames

Arsgames is an organization based in Barcelona with more than 15 years of experience in artistic creation and social innovation through the use of video games and digital technology. Its co-directors are responsible for the most successful video game exhibitions in the history of Spain: Videojuegos: Los dos lados de la pantalla, curated by Eurídice Cabañes and produced by Fundación Telefónica, which has reached 250,000 visitors in less than three years of activity, and Homo Ludens: videojuegos para entender el presente, curated by Luca Carrubba for Fundación La Caixa, which exceeded 150,000 visitors.

LINK: The Visible City / The City at Play

EVENT: HEECHEON KIM: DOUBLE POSER (DECEMBER 1 - JANUARY 7 2024, LONDON)

Heecheon Kim: Double Poser
1 Dec 2023 –⁠ 7 Jan 2024
HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery
Hayward Gallery, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX

press release

Kim’s work conflates virtual and physical realms, embracing yet questioning our obsession and trust in advanced technologies.

In his video works, Kim manipulates both filmed and found footage to challenge our habitual manner of processing visual and sensory information. They consider how our bodies, memories, emotions, identities, physical experiences and the banality of daily life are constructed and represented in digital space.

Using technologies such as GPS, augmented reality, virtual reality and face-swap applications, the artist creates ambiguous and, at times, decidedly nonsensical narratives.

This exhibition includes a new moving image commission created using a ‘game engine’, which is a software platform for developing video games. It takes inspiration from the brutalist architecture of the Hayward Gallery and brings together elements of computer-generated imagery, video game aesthetics and skateboarding culture.

You can also see Kim’s 2019 video work Deep in the Forking Tanks at this exhibition.

Heecheon Kim lives and works in Seoul. He was awarded the 2023 Hermès Foundation Missulsang Art Prize.

Developed in collaboration with Seoul’s Art Sonje Center, this exhibition is part of Korean Season 2023. Korean Season 2023 is hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (Korea) and organised by KOFICE (Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange) and KCCUK (Korean Cultural Centre UK).

Heecheon Kim (b. 1989) graduated from the architecture department of the Korea National University of Arts. He has held solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum (2018, San Francisco) and Doosan Art Center (2017, Seoul) and taken part in numerous group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2019, Seoul), İstanbul Museum of Modern Art (2017, İstanbul), ZKM (2019, Karlsruhe), and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (2019, Manila).

LINK: Heecheon Kim: Double Poser

LINK: Heecheon Kim

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.

WATCH NOW

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

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