EVENT: JONAS BLUME (JULY 4—17 2025)
Rhythm Zero Los Santos
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 112’ , 2019, Germany
created by Jonas Blume
What happens when an artist surrenders all agency in a game space designed for violence? In Rhythm Zero Los Santos (2019), Jonas Blume stages a durational performance inside Grand Theft Auto Online, transforming the volatile, multiplayer landscape of San Andreas into a theatre of procedural harm. The work draws on Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the artist remained passive as gallery visitors were invited to use seventy-two objects on her body, including a loaded gun. It also echoes Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), where vulnerability was staged through stillness and surrender. In both cases, the artist ceded control to the audience. In Blume’s version, bodily vulnerability is displaced onto a digital avatar, and the ethical stakes shift accordingly: the spectators are anonymous, the weapons are virtual, but the aggression remains disturbingly real. Across 112 uninterrupted minutes, Blume’s avatar — nearly nude, tattooed, inert — stands passively in various locales of Los Santos. Other players, unaware they are participants in an artwork, encounter him and react. Some attack, some posture, some ignore.
Jonas Blume is a multimedia artist working across video, sculpture, and immersive installation. His work interrogates how digital systems shape identity, agency, and perception. He holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Museum für Gestaltung, and NRW-Forum. He currently lives and works between Berlin and Marseille.
EVENT: LUCA MIRANDA, RICCARDO RETEZ (JUNE 20—JULY 3 2025)
A Poet in the (Parallel) World
digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 7′ 45”, 2023, Italy.
created by Luca Miranda, Riccardo Retez
VRAL
June 20-July 3 2025
A Poet in the (Parallel) World reimagines the relationship between poetry, photography, and virtual environments. Part of an ongoing series examining remakes and adaptations within video game spaces, this machinima reconstructs fragments from Denise Levertov’s writings and Robert Adams’ photographic series A Parallel World (2020), translating them into a visual-poetic language shaped by the logic of the game engine. The avatar, navigating the hostile, post-apocalyptic landscape of Days Gone, becomes both witness and medium, channeling the poet’s voice and the photographer’s gaze while traversing a world governed by violence and algorithmic control. Set in a fictional Oregon two years after a fictional pandemic, the terrain echoes Adams’ contemplative images of dunes, windswept trees, and the Pacific coast, refracted through a dystopian lens. Levertov’s 1973 collection The Poet in the World serves as a conceptual anchor, framing the machinima’s central question: What does beauty mean when glimpsed within a world designed to simulate catastrophe and survival? Through in-game photography and synthetic narration, Miranda and Retez constructs a parallelism between what is seen and what is spoken, between the virtual and the poetic, proposing a subtle inquiry into perception, memory, and aesthetic resistance.
Luca Miranda is an Italian artist, writer, and independent researcher whose work explores the intersections between reality and simulation, with a particular focus on the aesthetic and political capacities of video games. Through machinima, game photography, and hybrid audiovisual forms, he investigates the avatar, procedural environments, and the ideological grammars embedded in game systems. His practice engages with concepts such as immersion, interpassivity, and the tensions between authorship and automation. Miranda holds degrees from the University of Bologna and IULM University. In 2018, he co-founded Eremo, a Milan-based collective working across video games, sound art, and performance. From 2020 to 2024, he was part of the curatorial team at the Milan Machinima Festival. His first book, published in 2021, examines the aesthetics and design of walking simulators. His work has been presented at venues including the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Metronom Gallery, IAFF Animator, Spazio InSitu, and Le Cube Garges.
Riccardo Retez is a multimedia designer, researcher, and adjunct professor with a focus on media sociology. His work explores the intersections of video games, digital art, and communication, with particular attention to the role of spectatorship and the dynamics of contemporary digital ecosystems. He holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Media Studies from IULM University in Milan and teaches at several institutions across Italy, including the University of Padua, the SAE Institute in Milan, and LABA in Florence. Retez contributes regularly to international academic journals and edited volumes, and curates events dedicated to contemporary visual culture. His research investigates how media practices shape perception and engagement in technologically mediated environments. He is the author of Machinima Vernacolare (Concrete Press, 2020) and the editor of The Real Aftermath: How COVID-19 Changed the Way Science Fiction is Conceived, Read, and Interpreted (Vernon Press, 2023).
EVENT: POYUAN JUAN (JUNE 6—19 2025)
Intrusion
digital video (3840 x 2160), color, sound, 15’ 42” seconds, 2021, Taiwan
created by Poyuan Juan
Intrusion draws upon the server migration incident that occurred between 2007 and 2011, when a large number of Chinese World of Warcraft players relocated to Taiwan servers following regulatory conflicts and censorship in mainland China. The video work reimagines this episode through the visual logic of the game itself: character models, rendered en masse, are subjected to simulated clustering algorithms and move in erratic, involuntary spasms, gesturing toward the violence of digital displacement and network congestion. Using stripped-down aesthetics — geometric primitives, textureless surfaces, and graphical glitches — the piece constructs a barren, destabilized environment suggestive of a digital ruin: a deserted server, abandoned infrastructure, a space left behind in cyberspace. At its core, Intrusion is a reflection on digital geography and geopolitical frictions. The migration to the Taiwan servers, prompted by stalled updates and censorship in China, resulted in login delays, overcrowding, and a degradation of the in-game experience. It also brought political tensions to the fore, with simplified Chinese characters dominating chat channels, gold-farming operations disrupting gameplay, and cross-strait hostilities surfacing in virtual space. By re-staging this moment, Intrusion contemplates the porous boundary between virtual architecture and real-world conflict, and how digital platforms unwittingly become zones of political entanglement.
Poyuan Juan is a Taipei-based artist whose work investigates the cultural afterlives of digital platforms, with a focus on online games, virtual environments, and the aesthetics of technological obsolescence. His solo exhibitions include presentations at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Digital Art Center, and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. His work has also been featured internationally at the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Videotage (Hong Kong), videoclub (UK), the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, and the Milan Machinima Festival, where his War Game Map and Sino-French War was shown in 2022. Juan’s practice operates at the intersection of digital archaeology and new media art, tracing the residues of networked interaction and interrogating the material conditions of virtual experience. Drawing on his background in visual arts and his immersion in post-internet culture, he integrates machinima, game engines, and 3D imaging tools to create time-based works that explore cyberqueer narratives, online communities, and the collapsing boundary between simulation and memory. His work asks what remains when virtual worlds decay, and how histories unfold within algorithmic architectures.
