EVENT: FUMI OMORI (JUNE 2 - 15 2023, ONLINE)
HOME SWEET HOME
machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 2’ 35”, Japan, 2023
Created by Fumi Omori
Home Sweet Home explores personal memories and their translation into physical architecture through Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With a history of frequent relocations, the artist captured their rooms in photographs, preserving emotional connections to past spaces. Animal Crossing, a beloved game providing an idyllic refuge during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowed the artist to craft personalized rooms reflecting their personality. This project questions the impact of translating real-life spaces into the virtual realm. Employing photogrammetry, the artist reconstructs their past homes in the game, blurring boundaries with imaginative architecture. The interplay between virtual and physical layers offers a fresh perspective, showcasing a unique visual hacking method. Automating realities on the virtual plane reveals the intricate relationship between our fragile understanding of reality and memories. Digital reverie becomes an avenue for escapism, confronting the present, future, nostalgia, and denial.
Fumi Omori navigates the crossroads of the cultural diaspora with her transcendent visual language. Currently nearing the culmination of her master’s degree in photography at the esteemed École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland, Omori’s diverse experiences serve as a potent source of inspiration. Born and raised in Japan, the artist spent over a decade living in prominent American coastal cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco) before gravitating towards the medium of photography. Her previous stints as a perceptive graphic designer and discerning art director have indubitably permeated her artistic vision.
EVENT: BENOIT PAILLÉ (OCTOBER 29 - NOVEMBER 11 2021, ONLINE)
HYPER TIMELAPSE GTAV (CROSSROAD OF REALITIES)
Benoit Paillé
machinima, sound, color, 2’ 20”, 2014 (Canada)
vral.org
A time-lapse is a creative filming and video editing technique consisting in the active manipulation of the frame rate, that is, the number of images, or frames, that appear in a second of video. In most videos, the frame rate and playback speed coincide. In a time-lapse video, however, the frame rate is stretched out far more: when played back at average speed, time appears to be sped up. In 2014, Benoit Paillé created a seminal video time lapse of Grand Theft Auto V, as part of his investigation of photographic practices in video games, Crossroads of Realities. The result is a breathtaking taxi ride accompanied by an intense jazzy score.
Benoit Paillé is a self-taught French-Canadian photographer who lives and works in Québec, Canada. After studying biology for three years in a CÉGEP (a publicly funded college providing technical, academic, vocational or a mix of programs in Québec), he turned to the visual arts and decided to explore photography. According to his bio, Paillé sees himself as “a hyper realist painter” whose photographs document “an altered state of mind”. His work has been exhibited in Canada, Japan, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Moscow, and Ukraine. Among other things, he photographed speculative fiction writer William Gibson for the New Yorker magazine.
WATCH NOW
EVENT: MARCO DE MUTIIS (MAY 27 2016 6 PM)
PRESENTATION: MARCO DE MUTIIS
TITOLO: VIDEO GAMES AND PHOTOGRAPHY: A BRIEF HISTORY
DATE & TIME: FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2016, 6 - 7.30 PM
LOCATION: SALA DEI 146, IULM 6, MILAN
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
LANGUAGE: ITALIAN & ENGLISH
RSVP RECOMMENDED (PLEASE SPECIFY "MARCO DE MUTIIS" IN THE SUBJECT LINE - LIMITED SEATING)
EVENT 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.
TRAILER
Video games and photography, a brief history
CONVERSATION
Open discussion with artist Roc Herms, artist/author/scholar Matteo Bittanti and Marco De Mutiis, Digital Curator at Fotomuseum, on new forms of photographic play
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 he is working 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.com
