GAMESCENES

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: IN-GAME PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP WITH ROC HERMS (SEPTEMBER 11 2022, ONLINE)

Workshop: In-game photography with Roc Herms

10:30am - 4 pm Sunday 11 September 2022 BST

Organized by The Photographer's Gallery in London

Learn how to take great photographs inside video games in this online workshop with exhibiting artist Roc Herms

What is in-game photography? How can photography document the interactions that happen in online games and digital realms?

Description

Enjoy a one-day workshop with How to Win at Photography exhibiting artist Roc Herms. We’ll start with a theoretical introduction to in-game photography and quickly move on to a series of practical activities and exercises. Using Roblox to play with composition, colour and perspective, develop a new portfolio of images while also socialising with other players and engaging with more traditional concepts of photography. By the end of the session, participants will have co-produced a digital publication of the day's experiences.

This workshop is suitable for photographers, artists and others interested in photography's relationship to game worlds, as well as those interested in exploring new approaches to landscape and portrait photography.

This event is part of How to Win at Photography, an exhibition currently on display at The Photographer's Gallery.

Schedule

10.30 Introduction (on Zoom)
10.35 Presentation on in-game photography/on-line games/multiverses
11.30 Dive into Roblox: Playing different online games to learn the mechanics of in-game photography
12.30 Break
13.00 Roblox photoshoot activities and exercises
13.30 Roblox in-game photoshoot
15.00 Design of the publication (group exercise)
16.00 Workshop end

Details on how to access the workshop will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place.

Biography

In 1978 Gary Thurek and his assistant Carl Gartley sent the first mass email with advertising purposes, reaching 393 users at the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (called the ARPANET), unaware that they just sent the first example of what would later be known as SPAM. That same year, over 9000 kilometers away, Roc Herms was born in Spain. 28 years later he discovers photography as a tool to learn, and he manages to combine it with his interest in the Internet, video games and parallel realities: showing his passion for technology and the need to take a step further in photographic practice. Postcards From Home and “ ”, his two long term projects published in book form, try to shed some light on the life we live inside the computer. “Hacer Pantallazo” is an intimate diary made with screenshots, a capture process that he ends up understanding as the ultimate step on photography’s digitalisation. His work has been exhibited in “From Here On”, Centre d’Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona and “Photography 2.0”, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid both curated by Joan Fontcuberta, as well as in the Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands; Platine Festival, Germany; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Hammer Museum, USA; CCCB, Barcelona and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France.

LINK: In-game photography workshop

LINK: Roc Herms

EVENT: THE MYCOLOGICAL TWIST: QUADRAT SAMPLING E-ECOLOGIES (DECEMBER 16-18 2021, BERLIN AND ONLINE)

The Mycological Twist  @ HAU3

Tempelhofer Ufer 10, 10963 Berlin

December 15-18 2021

Livestream on 18.12.

 

The Mycological Twist would like to invite you on a quest at HAU3 and organises joint gaming sessions of “No Man’s Sky”. In this game a player can explore a seemingly infinite amount of planets, each with their own unique ecologies. Even after countless hours of play, new things can always be discovered.

“Quadrat Sampling E-Ecologies” will consist of two different sessions: In an “introducing workshop” the game and its environment are explored. This will be done through a series of field research tools that have been converted for a digital landscape. In the “gaming session” Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer invite experts to join them to provoke a different view on the game, and enable a critical reflection onto the narratives and visuals they encounter together with the players.

On the background to the production:

As personal computers are becoming more and more capable of running visually advanced video games, a myriad of worlds is opening up to audiences around the globe. This domain no longer belongs to the stereotypical, mostly male-youth gamer, but rather becomes a social space for rather diverse groups to meet and explore together. These spaces are becoming the next Social Media. While traditional social media connects us through a performativity of the everyday, navigating games engages us with intense sensations through the temporary emotional embodiment of the avatar. As a player you are both the creator and spectator of the narrative, and even better, you can actively enjoy these narratives with others.

Even though these multiplayer games are played by a large number of players, the progression of the gameplay follows similar patterns throughout; kill this, conquer that, become the best, capture it all. A linear quest that dictates the way these spaces operate as well as the audience it attracts. The tropes they endlessly reproduce mirror contemporary constructions of prejudice, power struggle and underlying ideologies. Each game has different problems that demand different explorations and questions to be asked.

The two artists Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer have already been part of the HAU festivals “Spy on Me #2 + #3” and were most recently represented at the 7th Athens Biennial.

“Quadrat Sampling E-Ecologies” also takes place in cooperation with the Fritz-Karsen-Schule from Berlin-Neukölln. HAU invites a class to play and discuss together at HAU3.
 

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video games to communicate the experiences of being a Black trans person. Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice focuses on recording the lives of Black trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell trans stories. Spurred on by a desire to record the “History of trans people both living and past” their work can often be seen as a trans archive.Thework has been shown at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, David Kordansky Gallery, Quad Gallery, Arebyte Gallery, Science Gallery, Barbican Centre and Tate Modern. During the 3hd 2020 festival by Creamcake, Danielle shared their film and interactive performance “We Are Here Because of Those That Are Not” on HAU4.

Xenia Chiaramonte is a jurist and a socio-legal scholar. In 2019, she published her monograph “Governare il conflitto: La criminalizzazione del movimento No TAV” [“Governing conflict: The Criminalization of the No TAV Movement”], which analyses the criminalization of one of the most longstanding and high-profile environmental movements in Western Europe. In her research, she developed a deep ethnographical approach blended with a theory-oriented vision.

Ahmed Isam Aldin is a visual artist, designer and blogger from Khartoum. He studied physics at the University of Khartoum and graphic design and photography in Cairo, Visual communication at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. His practice focuses on immigration and psychology, as well as the processes of revolutions, de-colonial design, and technology. He has participated in various exhibitions between Khartoum, Cairo, and Berlin, and is currently studying Media Art at UDK Berlin.

Barbara Marcel is a Brazilian artist and film-maker. Her works explore historical views of nature and how these relate to colonial imagery.

 

LINK: The Mycological Twist Quadrat Sampling E-Ecologies (Thanks to Sarah Reimann for the heads up)

EVENT: SCREEN\DOOR (DECEMBER 9 2021, ROCHESTER, NEW YORK)

HTTPGSAB_Desktop Runthrough by Peter Basma-Lord

 

Event: SCREEN\DOOR

When: Thursday December 9 at 7PM EST

Hosted by: Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, New York, USA)

LINK: SCREEN/DOOR

 

In-person at VSW and streaming online, curated by swampbabes

SCREEN/DOOR will feature several members and friends of the swampbabes community across the earth working in various genres and mediums, with a common interest in radical (video) game making, playing, and exhibiting. These works deal with the video screen as door, wall, and window, many with a conflicted sense of dread or longing. Includes games, video, and performance from Cody Filardi, gg noni, Mariken and fotocopiadora, Evan Bobrow, Peter Basma-Lord, nilson carroll, Taehee Whang, and others. This program will be in-person in the VSW microcinema and will also be livestreaming via Twitch.

 

swampbabes is a tiny, artist-run, no-profit organization in Rochester, New York devoted to fostering a games/art/queer local/regional community and inclusive space. swampbabes is interested in sharing experimental, non-commercial, renegade games-related art and projects and providing a platform for diverse voices and bodies outside of the already established structures and hierarchies.

LINK: SCREEN/DOOR