EVENT: MILANO GAME FESTIVAL

Curated by Pietro Righi Riva - 1/2 of indie studio Santa Ragione and Program Coordinator of new Master GAME/PLAY, the first edition of the Milano Game Festival will take place at IULM University in Milan, Italy every night from the 8th to the 12th of September 2016.

"Five evenings of play that will take place along the lines of a film festival, including the participations of international guests and premieres – the Milan Game Festival is dedicated to the curious, to film and media art fans, and to those looking for an intelligent and original entertainment experience.  The Milan Game Festival offers an entirely new format for enjoying videos games: a real play hall with many seats, similar to a movie theater, in which to dedicate the right amount of time to enjoying immersive interactive experience. All participants play the same game at the same time, and will share a common experience to discuss and remember.  Part of the XXI Triennale, Milano Game Festival exemplifies "Design After Design" in digital art and in interactive storytelling. The festival is a celebration of a new kind of authorial design – cultured and radically independent – in one of the most technology ­driven industries: video games."

Featuring ABZÛ, Gorogoa, Possum Springs, Future Unfolding, and The Town of Light.

Additionally, every night, before playing the game from the main selection, participants will be able to try a selection of experimental games produced by internationally renowned authors.

LINK: MILANO GAME FESTIVAL (official website)

VIDEO: MARCO DE MUTIIS: VIDEO GAMES & PHOTOGRAPHY: A BRIEF HISTORY

FULL VIDEO OF MARCO DE MUTIIS LECTURE ON MAY 27 2016 NOW AVAILABLE

DESCRIPTION: Photo and camera modes have started to appear in more and more video games, allowing players to capture an instant of the game world. Often mimicking some aspect of the camera interface and the act of photographing, games have been attempting to simulate photography, sometimes incorporating it into the mechanics of gameplay. So quite often we find ourselves in front of a screen, looking through a virtual viewfinder, interacting with simulated aperture settings and controlling the amount of depth of field of our in-game image. Playing games we also encounter fictional clients and digital photography teachers rating our safari pictures, telling us how to frame an image, to get closer, or giving us a disappointing C+ because our subject is not facing the camera. In short: there seem to be all sorts of strange simulations, remediations, and mutations of photography appearing within games, questioning what it means to photograph and to play and how the two are interconnected. “VIDEO GAMES AND PHOTOGRAPHY: A BRIEF HISTORY” is an attempt to illustrate the complex relationship and diverse interplay between photography and video games.

THE SPEAKER Marco De Mutiis is an artist and curator with a focus on language, perception and communication. His works deal with the human necessity of expression through the act of coding and decoding system of signs, and the urgency to translate thoughts and feelings into symbols. Exploring that balancing act between an irrational and subconscious need to communicate and the impossibility of pure unmediated expression, he often attempts to unravel the polarisation between signal and noise, sign and meaning. His works have been shown in festivals and museums internationally. As a curator his research lies in the exploration of new forms of photographic practices beyond the camera, mutations and remediations of photography, and new approaches to the way images are created and distributed. Currently, Marco works as digital curator for Fotomuseum Winterthur and research associate at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Switzerland). De Mutiis lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

marcodemutiis

VIDEO: VICTOR MORALES' NEW FIGURATIVE SERIES

A new series of videos from Venezuelan-born, NY-based artist Victor Morales are uncanny, mesmerizing, and morbidly fascinating. 

Here's the incredible FigureFiguring, a dance scene sui generis which degenerates in a plastic-elastic copulation that defies the laws of physics. 

Below is Figures and Branches, starring an avatar of Donald Trump.

It all started with FigurativeMoves, featuring a melting, shapeshifting Trump.

Morales' work consists of "an exploration of video game engines as simulation environments, where death and physics are transformed into dramatic and comedic real time performance". 

Morales' work Maria (2016) is currently on display in the GLITCH level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

Here's a recent interview with the artist.

INTERVIEW: ASHLEY BLACKMAN

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, ASHLEY BLACKMAN - THE YOUNGEST ARTIST FEATURED IN GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY - DISCUSSES HIS FASCINATION FOR FALLOUT 4, IN-GAME PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE WEATHER-AS-A-CREATIVE-CATALYST IN ENGLAND.

Ashley Blackman’s Clouds (2016) was featured in the NEW DIRECTIONS screening, a collateral event of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY on May 25, 2016.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education and upbringing?

I’m currently studying Fine Art at Falmouth University and previously I studied a Foundation Degree at Bristol School of Art Queens Road where I also studied Fine Art.

Ashley Blackman, Future /.Bodies. 112 v.1, 2016

GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your artistic practice?

It’s not much of a sophisticated or serious answer but I have only just recently, in the last few months begun using video games as a major part of my practice, I was in a sort of rut at some point not knowing where my work was going and I decided to sit down and think about what I enjoy in general to my personal life and one of those things was video games. there wasn’t any particular artists that influenced the work it was more me thinking “What if I take my artistic processes of making work and do that in the video game”. Luckily for me I have a game called Fallout 4, a huge open-world role-playing game that I could explore and create work.

GVA: Why did you specifically choose video games to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

As bad as it sounds I think it was down to my laziness at the time and the rubbish English weather not wanting me to go outside. It got to a point where I was getting bored of playing the game and I put the controller down and the camera started circling around my character and the more I looked at the image the more hypnotic it got. The game had created its own film; with its main character at the centre of this desolate yet tranquil setting of a coastal metropolis surrounded by a dead countryside, and it got me thinking that the work was there already made, and I just had to capture what was happening.

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for their users. How do you relate to complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

I don’t necessarily address any form of tension but I do try to create work that the viewer would perceive as "real". For example I’ve started a SnapChat series where I use video game imagery in the context of humorous social media conversation where I copy captions from my friends ‘snapchats’ and recreate the image in-game with the caption.

I also have an ongoing photography series where I go around the video game taking photos of expansive landscapes and cityscapes and professionally printing the image and with this presentation the viewer could assume the photo was taken somewhere in the real world, so I guess I do address a form of tension through the viewers's reaction to the work.

Ashley Blackman, Swings, 2016

GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this Artform?

I view the copyright issue as appropriation: It’s a complicated issue, one that can be argued from both sides. However within my work I view the video game as another art space to explore my practice, in certain situations it is appropriate to gain permission from the developers depending on the type of work and if it’s being sold. Richard Prince is a good example of how extreme things can get with appropriation if massive amounts of money are involved, but with his Instagram series the people who posted the images lose ownership because it’s on a platform where that image can be taken by anyone. Video games on the other hand always will be the developer’s game, the game was meant to be played not appropriated.

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process, as some critics have suggested? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?

I do agree that machinima has democratized the art making process in its lowest form by that I mean you just have to buy the game to create work. However to create machinima it requires another level of creative drive; you have to have a conceptual idea and then you need to understand how you can create that within the boundaries of video games. But in its simplest form, yes, machinima has democratized the art making process.

Ashley Blackman, press any button to start, 2016

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first when developing a new project: the concept or the medium?

The post-apocalyptic world in Fallout 4 holds an aesthetic landscape that’s still recognizable to the audience as real life. By not incorporating the main factors of the game within my films, such as the main story line, I’m masking the true identity of the game. By creating the work I’m giving the audience more to relate to from a non-virtual standpoint; recreating real life themes in a hyper realistic setting.

GVA: What do you find fascinating about Fallout 4? What prompted you to start filming in virtual environments?

My first encounter with the virtual space was when I started creating work looking into online activity and how much time I spend on ‘the net’ and not necessarily for work purposes but more for procrastination. A lot of my work was looking at the overload of information we intake online for example: I would have one video crammed full with multiple videos all playing aloud with web pages popping up randomly all at once to give you an understanding of how much we interact with the internet on a daily basis. The reason I started using Fallout 4 was probably because I was bored of looking for work to do in the real world, as bizarre as that sounds and probably because I enjoy playing video games a lot.  Fallout 4 can give you an expansive world that can idealize aspects from real life but also gives you the controlled randomness of the NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) you interact with and the ability to film whatever you want to express or show without there being any restrictions.

Ashley Blackman, crows, 2016

GVA: Can you describe the creative process behind the production of your recent videos?

For most of my videos the process mirrors that of my work before I started using video games. My work was in the style of Richard Wentworth’s photography, looking at aesthetics and coincidences within objects and the area they are located in. to make the work it was down to my preference of what worked well as a whole composition and having to walk around a lot observing everyday life but trying to see things from an artistic viewpoint. So taking all of the factors that go into creating that work into the virtual space seemed simple enough, and it worked because like I’ve stated before; the video game is just another space to explore.

Read more interviews here

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INTERVIEW: CHRIS HOWLETT

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, AUSTRALIAN ARTIST CHRIS HOWLETT DESCRIBES HIS FASCINATION FOR SLAVOJ ZIZEK, SIMCITY AS A SIMULATOR OF SOCIAL CONTROL, AND HIS EARLY YEARS IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA.

Chris Howlett (b. 1974, Kokopo, Papua, New Guinea) graduated with a MFA from the Californian Institute of the Arts in 2000. His works have been exhibited internationally in festivals including GAMERZ in Marseille, 16 France, Inter-Society of Electronic Arts in Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, Videoholica International Video Art Festival in Bulgari, Los Angeles Freewaves Festival of Film, Video and New Media and exhibited work at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, California. His solo and collaborative works have also been exhibited locally at the Gallery of Modern Art, Institute of Modern Art, the QUT Art Museum, The Arc Biennial for Art & Design and interstate at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Hobart Art Gallery, Cairns Contemporary Art Space and Blindside Artist Run Space in Melbourne. His public art commissions include “KICK OFF” which was a curated screen-based program at the new Metricon Stadium Homeground of the Gold Coast Suns and Australia’s largest public art canvas the QUT billboard project. In 2012, he was part of the DJ Culture: Contemporary Australian Video Art, screening in the Cinémathèque at Gallery of Modern Art and in 2013 underwent a residency in Armenia at Tumo – center for creative technologies where he completed a series of Alternate Reality Games called ARGARMENIA. He currently lives and works in Brisbane, Queensland.

Chris Howlett's Metropolis I-III is currently on display in the ASSEMBLAGE level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?

My university education began in the early nineties in the Applied Sciences in Australia at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) in Brisbane, but I quickly realized that the educational structure of the sciences was not suited to my personality or my desire to think creatively. I deliberately failed all of my exams in the first semester and was essentially kicked out of university to reassess what my future would be. The following year in 1992, I reapplied to QUT to undergo a Bachelor of Visual Arts and never looked back.

After completing my Honours year in 1996 I took off a year and went travelling throughout Europe. While I was overseas, I learnt that I was awarded a Samstag scholarship to undergo an Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) at The California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) from 1998 – 2000. When I completed my time at CalArts I wanted to take at least ten years outside of any educational institution to work on my art practice. Now I have come full circle by returning to begin a PhD (Doctor in Philosophy) back at QUT where I initially began my art degree.

GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?

Many of my direct and immediate influences come from the contemporary art world, but there are many different writers who come from diverse fields such as cultural theory, art history, art criticism and curatorial practice who I would all conflate with my understanding of artistic influence, since they are read and experienced in conjunction with my artistic decision making. But if I have to choose a non-artistic influence it would come from a deeply personal and experiential space.

Some of my formative years of growing up were in Papua New Guinea on an island called Kavieng. Here my family literally lived next to the beach and a coral reef which was on the grounds of a local high school where my father was the Headmaster.

Growing up in this idyllic environment and non-european culture as a nine year old allowed me to experience and generate many different forms of self-ascribed knowledge. Some of these include what it meant to explore, to play, to be alone, to discover, to understand what a sense of freedom could look and feel like in nature, the dangers that also come along with it and to understand that how you think, look and behave can have an influence on those around you, who behave and understand the world quite differently from your own perception of it.  

One of the dominant, and often romantic clichés that is used to describe artists is that they are “outsiders”. Although I don’t agree with this entirely, there is always an element of truth that is embedded in the cliché. As an artist, those early formative years abroad helped me to look objectively at my surroundings, to value play and openness, to be curious and to question what my purpose was in being there. I still think today that these processes influence my artistic decision making and the subject-matter I research.

GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?

After completing my MFA in 2000 a number of my friends from CalArts began a project space called C-level in downtown Chinatown which was a co-operative lab that shared technology and resources. It also developed and ran projects which had a bent towards new media, that could take the form of performances, screenings, lectures, debates or even tournaments and video games was just one of the mediums they collaboratively employed.

Although I was not directly involved in the space when it was initially set up, apart from cleaning out the space in the beginning, being around those involved, living with some of them and participating in their events had an impact on my thinking around material choice and medium.   

I began using video games in my practice in the early noughties (2000s) after I returned to Australia from Los Angeles. Later on, video games just became another material to use and in the noughties it seemed that the prices of games and personal computers in Australia became cheaper to purchase. By this stage my technical expertise had developed to such an extent that I could actually use software and modding tools to create screen works from digital games.

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

For me, I think it always comes back to the agency attributed to attaching alternate histories and personal narratives over the top of the prescribed structure of the game narrative and physics. I’m also drawn to online communities that form around specific games and the modding tools that arise out of the forums and discussion boards, and how interstitial spaces open up where players develop software programs to mod(ify) aspects of the game physics or game play. This in turn is distributed freely to other players who publically suggest further modifications to the original code which gradually gets updated and evolves into something new and unexpected. This is a very interesting form of collaboration where user generated software and expertise start to direct and take control of the desires of the gamers in order to force unforeseen environmental outcomes for the actual game.

It’s a complicated situation because game developers and corporations also know that this is to be expected from particular online communities who form around certain games. This comes back to then thinking about the perceived subversiveness reserved for processes behind the production of machinima and the choices artists make in the final production of the work.

Chris Howlett, Human Vs. Human 2009, 1-channel, SD, PAL, Stereo. Edition of 5 + 2AP, Duration: 20:15mins

"Human Vs Human is a Machinima film which uses various autobiographical war veteran stories from online social networking sites, live recorded 3D game play from first person shooter games and and remixed pop songs from all male pop groups to create alternative narratives which subvert and intensify their original meaning. The video work inserts the real life personal narratives of soldiers into a virtual gaming world cut with pop music, in-game narratives and atmospheric sound tracks to create a disturbing, conflated look at the reality of warfare, its simulated double and the psychology of masculine violence and seduction." (Chris Howlett)

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

It’s hard to describe this in such a short passage of text since there are so many facets to the answer, but if I could focus on one idea it would be a partial quote by Žižek from his book called The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema where, I think, he is talking about Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds and he says, “...when our space within the symbolic order is disturbed our reality disintegrates”. The cross overs in how we understand our relationship to reality and its bed partner, simulation, have the potential to behave in a similar way.

I often think about this when I revisit my experiences playing the game called Heavy Rain where you alternate between different game characters of different age, class, gender and subjectivities to solve a crime in order to save a kidnapped boy from certain doom. Throughout the game as you search and make narrative choices based on your own moral and ethical positions the boy is gradually drowned in a stormwater drain by the rain as its falls heavier and heavier across the city.

One of the disturbing scenes that you get caught up in as a player is a simulated home invasion involving one of the female game characters when your are in her role. Her name is Madison Paige who suffers from insomnia. During one of the scenes that is staged in her apartment, you help her shower in her bathroom by pushing the controller buttons to dry herself off with her towel in a very intimate and revealing way (yet another form of home invasion). She walks to her bed and is about to fall asleep in her underwear and tank top when suddenly, she hears a sound from the kitchen. The fridge door is ajar; she closes it and someone is hiding behind her in the apartment.

The intruder is a masked man in black wearing a balaclava who proceeds to attack her, choke her, tackle her to the ground, tries to knife her, as both she and you struggles with the man and his knife a second masked man appears from nowhere and the panic starts to set in – you’re not going to survive this. This simulated rape/abduction/murder scene took me totally by surprise. All of the object pronouns such as me, you, I, her, or us that generally have a clear and defined meaning became unimportant in those moments of traumatic struggle in fighting for one’s life, both ingame and out.

It was an incredibly disturbing scene with a sophisticated pre-setup by the game developers who manipulated the players own voyeuristic impulses beforehand, firstly by interactively representing the intimate relationship that can be shared between a player and their avatar, whom they have a degree of agency over and secondly, using their own sense of shared vulnerability and identification with the character. It was a great lesson in reminding us that virtual or filmic space is not a simple mirror reflecting information about ourselves back to us but an extension of that same reality.

GVA: The creative opportunities afforded by machinima are greatly constrained by existing copyright law, which prohibits many possible uses, including commercial purposes. What’s your take on the paradoxical nature of this artform?

As an artist I don’t worry too much about this issue of copyright, I mean I still think about some of Duchamp’s assisted ready-mades of 1919, a work called L.H.O.O.Q. where he took a reproduction of the Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and drew a moustache and beard on her in pencil. Machinima is just doing the same thing. It’s now in a contemporary digital setting; nothing has dramatically changed in terms of the procedure, except in the dramatic increases in power and influence that corporations can wield over private and public space – they’ve just got stronger as we’ve grown weaker.

Chris Howlett, Michael Jackson 4 ways: Part I-IV 2009, 1-channel, HD, PAL, Stereo. Ed. of 5 + 2AP, Duration: 32:28mins

"Michael Jackson 4 Ways: Part I-IV is a machinima film designed to activate an immersive space from which to critically and creatively consider how reality and simulated environments both construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of subjectivity and identity. The video work explores these new phenomenons through Sims 3, which is a strategic life simulation video game where players construct and control their Sims in various social activities and form relationships in a manner similar to real life. Sims 3 does not have a defined final goal and its gameplay is open-ended. Michael Jackson was a person who cut across international racial and gender divisions with his music and lyrics, but whose personal life created intense contradictions between his private life and his role as a musician. As the copies of the Michael Jackson Sims play out their animated roles in Paris Hilton's house, the accompanying audio tracks expose the political and moral debates surrounding accusations of paedophilia. "Michael Jackson 4 Ways: Part I-IV" questions the slippery position the viewer inhabits, to make informed, truth based decisions over these personal and moral online statements. Where does one locate one's moral and ethical decisions based on the artists aesthetics?" (Chris Howlett)

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?

I would not agree with the idea that machinima has democratised the processes of art making, because the question already assumes that all machinima is art. The problem is that not all machinima is video art because most of the producers of it are not concerned with contextualising it as video art or even care about the history of art which has everything to do with whether or not it's art or not, just like music videos are not video art because they belong to a sub-genre of music. Adding to the problem is that there are also curators, gallery dealers, collectors and artists who don’t consider machinima as video art even if you’ve invested your whole life in framing your practice in terms of contemporary art. I think I would describe its processes quite closely to how Rancière characterises politics and aesthetics as forms of dissensus. It forms a dissensual relationship to the processes of art creation and the institutionalisation of those processes which lead to one naming it as art. This is probably what continually makes it interesting and dynamic for me because it can cut across different hierarchies and sub-cultures, move between discourses and genres (both low and high) which seem incompatible, and yet it can also disrupt and re-orientate perceptual space because of the alternative narratives generated out of a highly controlled and corporatised space. I just feel that there is no consensual agreement as to the framing of it as a particular genre, therefore you can’t bring an idea like democracy into the mix.

Chris Howlett, Bushstalkers, 2012

"Bushstalkers" was a Two Player Interactive Game Mod which used the UT3 game engine to create a giant fantasy forest where two players could explore aimlessly without the capability to shoot their guns. Their only guide was a series of coloured spotlights which pooled up as the players walked into their vicinity, each triggering a personal story from war veterans returning from Iraq. Their stories contained personal, ideological, moral and ethical narratives which complicated the viewers conception of empiracle truth based observations set against the backdrop of a corporate, media driven landscape, and the way we inhabit a particular set of subjective positions. All of the stories were sourced and recorded from online social networks, blogs, websites and news channels. For more information please got to >> http://www.chrishowlett.com.au/flashbacks-metroarts/" (Chris Howlett)

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?

Generally, there is no consistent methodology to how certain bodies of work come together. Sometimes the actual software package, modding tool or specific process such as learning how to use AI blueprints to create crowds in Unreal Engine inspire me to think of dance or even musicals; how I might be able to use a large number of individual dancers in a crowd to combine with a series of quasi-politico-abstract video projections on gallery walls, and so on, and so on. In tandem with this is my sculptural practice which relies heavily on traditional studio methods of art production that responds directly to online space in how it can possibly take shape in real, physical space that also has a relationship to minimalist, classical or baroque sculpture. I just lose track now. I used to think that the concept would always drive the medium, but now its just feels like when you’re looking at spaghetti in a bowl and you can’t see where it begins or starts, it’s very similar to how AFL (Australia Football League) is played on screen.

GVA: Why did you choose SimCity Societies to create the Metropolis trilogy?

Simcity Societies was a social engineering and city-building simulation game which attracted me because I could see how easily I could use its immersive soundtracks, game physics and models to talk about a number of ideas I was thinking about at the time around how ideology and propaganda inhabits the body, why we take on particular belief systems and how does architectural space influence our psychological decision making which can have unforeseen and disastrous consequences for those around us. It also had quite a ridiculous process whereby once you placed a building onto the terrain the Simoleons would automatically scurry out of their dwellings and just start walking off into the infinite sunset, so you had to work out your fenced territory before you started to place your buildings. The whole process just ended up being an exercise in how to create a gated community regardless of the societal values that the game developers came up with such as productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge. The simulations in these types of games just give me great pleasure in thinking about the artificial in society, what’s real and what’s a fiction and where do we assign true value.

GVA: Is Metropolis a critique of the now-pervasive notion of smart city and of Silicon Valley’s obsession for finding technological solutions to urban and social issues?

I was not thinking of the architecture in the societies I built as representing an actual city or even a dumb city, if you can call them that, I was just trying to create an abstraction, like a modernist abstract painting which uses repetition, reduction and the grid as its guiding motif. This was a strategy to make the viewer think of their underlying structures as signs which ultimately break down (e.g. the experience of walking down the road from the Forum to the Colosseum in Rome) or those which doggedly persist into the future in their current state; to think of them as a metaphorical space or psychological zone where ideas about exclusion, alienation, conformity and entropy would trigger critical modes of thinking. In Australia I would not characterise us as being obsessed with technological solutions. It’s actually the reverse. We don’t need to be because we have unlimited resources and a small population; we can dig big holes, burn raw material, cut down trees and pollute the atmosphere which is then sold off to China which in turn repeats the game. We are in a state of de-evolution.

Read more interviews here

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