EVENT: PASCAL GRECO (JULY 18—31 2025, ONLINE)

Urbain Altéré

digital video (3840 x 2160), colour, sound, 3’ 25”, 2024, Switzerland

created by Pascal Greco

In Urbain Altéré (2024), Pascal Greco expands his investigation into the aesthetic and conceptual potential of game environments by shifting from still in-game photography to machinima. Created entirely within Stray (BlueTwelve Studio, 2022), this video navigates a virtual cityscape that evokes a speculative Hong Kong, now abstracted through layers of simulation, ambient sound, and procedural texture. The work eschews narrative in favour of observational drift, capturing overlooked architectural surfaces such as air conditioners, stairwells, neon signage, crumbling facades with a sensibility drawn from both street photography and cinematic slow time. Greco’s camera lingers on the habitual and uneventful, reframing synthetic urban detritus as material for meditative study. Backed by an AI-generated soundtrack, Urbain Altéré is less a portrait of a place than an ambient excavation of atmosphere, surface, and disappearance. In traversing this hyperrealistic non-place, Greco probes the boundaries of authorship, memory, and image-making in a context where photography is no longer indexical, but remediated through simulation.

Pascal Greco is a Swiss-Italian filmmaker and photographer based in Geneva. A self-taught artist working across cinema, photography, and digital media, his work explores the interplay between architecture, landscape, and technological mediation. His practice spans urban typologies, natural environments, and increasingly, virtual spaces generated within video games. His projects have been exhibited internationally and featured in The Guardian, Vice, CNN, and Monocle. Key publications include Kyoshu (2007), No Cliché (2013), and Hong Kong Neon (2021), a visual study of a disappearing cityscape. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Greco turned to digital environments, producing Place(s) (2021) in Death Stranding, and Place(s) Space(s) (2024), a machinima exploring duration and presence. Recent works such as Kwai Shing West Estate and Urbain Altéré (both 2024) continue his investigation into memory, simulation, and digital authorship.

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.

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.

EVENT: NATALIE MAXIMOVA (JANUARY 31—FEBRUARY 13 2025)

Awaiting Oblivion

digital video, colour, sound, 20’ 23”, 2024, Russia

created by Natalie Maximova

World premiere

Awaiting Oblivion interrogates the collapse of simulated reality in The Last of Us Part II, uncovering spaces where the boundaries between representation and existence dissolve. As the digital world fractures into glitches and voids, it exposes the instability of meaning, unmasking the illusion of coherence, and confronting observers with absence that lies at the heart of perception. Maximova uses the embedded photo mode functions as a critical apparatus, transforming observation into an active engagement with the ungraspable. The poetic structure of her voice over amplifies the dissonance between digital precision and the fluid, ephemeral quality of ecological and philosophical questions, echoing the tensions between order and chaos in post-humanist discourse.

Natalie Maximova is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer based in London UK. She holds a Master’s degree from the ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne and has also studied at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. Maximova’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Now Play This festival, Sickhoes #6 imitate - manipulate – simulate at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Milan Machinima Festival (VRAL), the 6th and 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Balagan!!! in Kühlhaus Berlin and others. Her work has been featured in various publications including Spectator, Il Giornale dell’Arte, Camera Austria, Bird in Flight, Calvert Journal, and Vice among others. She has also contributed to Screen Images In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast, edited by Winfried Gerling, Sebastian Möring and Marco De Mutiis and published by Kulturverlag Kadmos in 2023.