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: HARRISON WADE REISHMAN (JANUARY 17—30 2025, ONLINE)
Ida B. Wells: A Red Record
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 39’ 34”, 2020, United States of America
created by Harrison Wade Reishman
Ida B. Wells: A Red Record is a biographical machinima that examines the life and contributions of Ida B. Wells, a trailblazing African American journalist and activist. Conceived during the Covid-19 lockdown through the innovative use of the Red Dead Redemption 2 game engine, the film transforms Wells’ seminal investigative journalism into a sophisticated cinematic narrative. By leveraging the intricate virtual environments of the game and employing a nuanced narration, the film reconstructs Wells’ relentless documentation of lynching atrocities in the American South during the 1890s, drawing extensively from her landmark publication, The Red Record. The production combines historical accuracy with the creative latitude afforded by video game aesthetics, deploying almost thirty characters to re-enact pivotal moments of Wells’ life.
Hailing from Hurricane, West Virginia, Harrison Wade Reishman is an accomplished filmmaker and innovator in machinima whose work explores the confluence of traditional cinema and game-driven narratives. A graduate of the University of Virginia with dual degrees in Psychology and Marketing, Reishman combines narrative sophistication with technical expertise in his visual storytelling. His career trajectory includes roles as a UTA agent trainee and a television development executive at Entertainment One, where he contributed to acclaimed productions such as Hung (HBO) and Hell on Wheels (AMC). Transitioning to independent filmmaking, he received a Taliesin Nexus grant in 2018 to direct Crosswinds, and has since directed and produced a series of critically recognized short films. Currently based in Los Angeles, Reishman continues to push the boundaries of machinima as a transformative medium for storytelling.
