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.

EVENT: OLEKSANDR HOISAN (MAY 23—JUNE 5 2025)

The Analogy of Space

digital video, color, sound, 12’, 2022, Ukraine

created by Oleksandr Hoisan

The Analogy of Space (2022) is a 12-minute machinima made with/in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004), utilizing the CamHunt plugin to enable articulate, fluid cinematography more reminiscent of steadicam or dolly work than in-game animations. Originating as a student project at the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts, in Ukraine, this  work marks Oleksandr Hoisan’s inaugural foray into machinima, positioning itself at the intersection of procedural aesthetics and ethnographic drift. Composed as a non-linear sequence of ambient vignettes, the film methodically tracks the repetitive, robotic behaviors of NPCs across the algorithmically generated topographies of San Fierro, Los Santos, Las Venturas, and the interstitial rural zones of San Andreas. It forgoes voiceover, soundtrack, or narrative causality, instead operating within the sonic ecology of the gameworld itself, a compositional strategy that reframes the sandbox environment as a site of ambient documentary practice. The outcome can be described as ambient phenomenology: a durational encounter with systemic inertia, where violence, routine, and glitch are not dramatic events but structural conditions. Through protracted tracking shots and continual camera motion – an approach the filmmaker calls in-game space animadoc  –The Analogy of Space accentuates the uncanny banality of simulated life, which unfolds not through intention, but through looped code and ambient indifference. The machinima resists closure; its motion is not teleological but contingent, offering temporary kinesthetic relief from street-level opacity. In Hoisan’s hands, the camera becomes both observer and drifter, traversing a dynamic world that resists intelligibility. 

Oleksandr Hoisan is a Ukrainian filmmaker and visual artist whose work engages with digital environments, contemporary cinema, and machinima. He holds both a bachelor’s (2022) and master’s degree (2024) in film and television directing from the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. His early student films have been selected for over 100 national and international film festivals, including Oberhausen, FIDMarseille, Sarajevo Film Festival, BRNO16, and Molodist, earning multiple awards. A member of Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema, the Ukrainian Guild of Directors, and the National Filmmakers Association of Ukraine, Hoisan is also the founder and program director of the Ivano-Frankivsk International Short Film Festival 4:3. His recent work explores non-narrative forms, virtual cities, and the documentary potential of video games.

EVENT: FIRAS SHEHADEH (MAY 9—22 2025, ONLINE)

The Way of the Future

Single-channel UHD video (color), 2-channel sound, 8’ 02”, 2025, Palestine

created by Firas Shehadeh

Set against the hauntingly desolate backdrop of The Last of Us video game, The Way of the Future follows a lone figure traversing a decayed territory after a long war, where echoes of resistance and displacement reverberate through the hollow ruins. The sound design, deeply rooted in the auditory textures of the attacked country — prayers and drones — brings a dislocated yet familiar reality. As the protagonist moves through these fragmented spaces, their journey becomes an allegory for the ongoing struggle: a fight not only for physical territory but for the survival of identity, memory, and visibility. Blurring the lines between the physical and media landscapes, the film explores a future where the cause transcends borders and occupies the global consciousness, a spectral nation fighting to reclaim existence in a political world order that continuously erases them.

Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist and researcher exploring issues of identity, meaning, and aesthetics in the digital age. 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. 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.

EVENT: DOUGLAS DIXON-BARKER (APRIL 25—MAY 8 2025, ONLINE)

untitled (archive)

16mm, color, 3’, 2024, United Kingdom

created by Douglas Dixon-Barker

vral.org

 

untitled (archive) is a machinima sui generis that transposes the residual memory of a videogame into the granular materiality of 16mm film. Framed as “an imperfect archive”, the work embraces degradation not as failure but as structure, treating loss as a generative condition. In collapsing the multitelic potential of the digital into the fixed duration of celluloid, Douglas Dixon-Barker offers a quietly radical proposition: that the act of translation itself might constitute a viable archival gesture, even — especially? — when it fails to preserve the full breadth of experience.

Douglas Dixon-Barker is an artist and filmmaker currently living between Leeds and Barcelona. Drawing on the history of avant-garde and structuralist filmmaking, their work reframes genre and digital environments through unstable formats, hybrid temporalities, and the material conditions of visual systems. Their filmography includes In Your Arms (2020), Ultimate Crush (2019), untitled (camera roll) (2017), Summer (2014) (2016), For Life (2015), and 「 A M V 」 (2014–2015). They also directed In a Hopeless Place (2013) and contributed to s01e03 (2020). Dixon-Barker is affiliated with Kinet, a virtual studio dedicated to avant-garde cinema.

EVENT: HOU LAM TSUI (FEBRUARY 14—27 2025)

Rabu Rabu

digital video, colour, sound, 18’ 18”, 2024, Hong Kong

created by Hou Lam Tsui

Rabu Rabu (meaning lovey-dovey in Japanese) reimagines and subverts the conventions of Japanese dating simulation games, known for their focus on interactions with attractive young female characters. Instead, it presents a fictional scenario where the traditional trajectory of falling in love and winning over the protagonist is no longer an option. Drawing on Eva Illouz’s The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations, which describes ‘unloving’ as a narrative without a clear structure, Rabu Rabu reflects on agency both within and beyond the screen. By intertwining digital and physical AFK (Away From Keyboard) worlds, the work examines life in a heteronormative society shaped by late capitalism and dissolves the boundaries between game and video.

Hou Lam Tsui (b. 1997) is an artist who works across moving image, sculpture, installation, and text. Her practice centres around personal experience, affect, gender politics, and peripheral storytelling. Tsui rethinks how femininity and queerness are imagined within cultures, critically exploring how media and consumer desires shape emotions, our notion of love, femininity, and identities by drawing inspiration from pop culture, advertisement, anime, literature and beyond.  Her work has been previously exhibited and screened at ACMI (Australia), Art Basel Films (Hong Kong), Beijing International Short Film Festival (China), Guangdong Times Museum (China), Para Site (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), among others. Selected recent exhibitions include Follow the Feeling(Guangdong Times Museum, 2024), One is not born a woman (Square Street Gallery, 2023), Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery (Para Site; Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, 2022). She is a recipient of the WMA Graduate Award (2024), the Liu Shiming Art Foundation Scholarship (2024), and Para Site’s 2046 Fermentation + Fellowships (2022). Tsui lives and works in Hong Kong. She received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from the University of Leeds in 2018 and later obtained an MFA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024.