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.

EVENT: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL 2020 GOES FULLY DIGITAL

We are happy to announce that the 2020 edition of the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL - which was postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic - will indeed take place. And sooner than later.

From Monday 25 till Saturday May 30 2020, the entire program will be fully available on the Festival website. This year, the work of 25 artists from 13 countries will be presented in 6 sections: GAME VIDEO ESSAY A, GAME VIDEO ESSAY B, THE WEIRD, THE EERIE, AND THE UNREAL plus three special programs (IN FOCUS).

The MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is part of the revamped Milano Digital Week 2020.

Click here to read the full program.

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Siamo felici di annunciare che l’edizione 2020 del MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL precedentemente posticipata per via della perdurante pandemia COVID-19, si svolgerà anche quest’anno.

Da lunedì 25 a sabato 30 maggio, l’intero programma sarà infatti interamente disponibile sul sito del festival. Il programma dell’edizione 2020 include opere realizzate da 25 artisti provenienti da 13 nazioni suddivise in 6 sezioni: GAME VIDEO ESSAY A, GAME VIDEO ESSAY B, THE WEIRD, THE EERIE, AND THE UNREAL e tre approfondimenti (IN FOCUS).

Il MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL è un evento ufficiale della Milano Digital Week.

Clicca qui per leggere il programma completo.

EVENT: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL (MARCH 16, 2018)

MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL

The aesthetics and politics of video game cinema: IULM University hosts the first edition of the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL.

MILAN - On Friday March 16,  2018 from 6.00 p.m. in the Sala dei 146 (IULM OPEN SPACE) IULM University will host the first edition of the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL, an official event of the Milano Digital Week 2018.

A follow-up to the 2016 exhibition GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY organized by IULM University, this retrospective features a selection of machinima produced by international artists. Situated at the intersection between video games, experimental cinema and video art, machinima is an audiovisual genre that defies easy categorizations. Artists appropriate and modify pre-existing video games to create visually idiosyncratic experiences.

The first edition of the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL features Tayla Blewitt-Gray (Australia), Alan Butler (Ireland), Jacky Connolly (United States), Thomas Hawranke (Germany), Jonathan Vinel (France), and Eduardo Tassi (Italy) among others. A surprise screening will be announced the day of the festival. By hijacking Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, and other titles, these filmmakers created digital shorts focusing on such themes as sexuality, politics, alienation, creativity, and violence.

Curated by Matteo Bittanti, the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL is presented by Laura Carrera and Gemma Fantacci, students of the Master of Arts in Game Design of IULM.

Sponsored by the City of Milan, Department of Digital Transformation and Public Services, the Milan Digital Week (March 15-18, 2018) celebrates the driving forces that are reshaping work, leisure, and learning. By highlighting the interplay behind production and consumption made possible by digital technology, MDW aims at connecting citizens, companies, institutions, universities, and research centers.  

MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL

March 16th 2018

From 6.00 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

IULM Open Space (IULM 6)

Via Carlo Bo 7

20143, Milano

Free and open to the public, upon registration

milanmachinimafestival.org

EVENT: TRAVELOGUE (SEPT 7 - 11 2016, MANTUA, ITALY)

We are delighted to announce an upcoming art exhibition in Mantua, Italy:

TRAVELOGUE

Curated by Matteo Bittanti

September 7- 11 2016

Cantine di Vincenzo I Gonzaga

Piazzetta Santa Barbara, 46100 Mantua MN

Open every day from 8.15  AM until 19.15 p.m.

Admission: 3 euros

An official event of Festivaletteratura 2016

Official website: travelogue.space

Trailer

Mantua, August 14 2016 - TRAVELOGUE is a survey of audiovisual artworks made with or inspired by video games. Using machinima and interactive installations, fifteen artists examine the virtual automobile as medium, message, technological commodity, status symbol, interface, and prosthetics. Created through a process of appropriation and remix, these works lie at the intersection of fiction and documentation, performance and simulation, video art and experimental cinema.

TRAVELOGUE takes the viewer for a ride through landscapes that are simultaneously familiar and uncanny, featuring dematerialized vehicles in autopilot mode; glitches, ghosts and algorithms; weapons of mass distraction and feedback loops; sudden acceleration, absolute speed, and endless stasis. Until the inevitable crash.

The exhibition is staged in the Cellars of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, a part of the Gonzaga Palace. Featuring an impressive structure with exposed brick walls and beamed vaulted and barrel ceilings, the space features several rooms covering an area of about eight hundred square meters located in a XV Century building.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Max Almy & Teri Yarbrow

Dave Ball

Bob Bicknell-Knight

Clint Enns

COLL.EO

Matthew Hillock

Kristin Lucas

Victor Morales

Leonardo Sang

Palle Torsson

Jean-Baptiste Wejman

+ Surprise artist

COLLATERAL EVENTS

CRASH: GAME AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Isabelle Arvers e Valentina Tanni in conversation. + SURPRISE SCREENING

Sunday September 11 at 11:30 AM

Cantine di Vincenzo, Piazza Santa Barbara, 46100, Mantua Italy

Admission: 6 euros

What is the difference between video games and game videos? What are the affinities and divergences between video games and video art? What role do electronic simulations play within the current visualscape? Isabelle Arvers and Valentina Tanni discuss the influence of game aesthetics on contemporary art. The conversation is moderated by Matteo Bittanti.