EVENT: EDWIN LO (DECEMBER 6—19 2024, ONLINE)

End Time and The Trajectories of Ancestors

digital video, color, sound, 34’ 26”, 2022, Hong Kong.

created by Edwin Lo

A machinima video essay that intertwines fragments of Native American history with digital landscapes using Far Cry 5 (2018), End Time and The Trajectories of Ancestors explores themes of religious survivalism, cultural memory, and land representation within digital spaces. By overlaying Far Cry 5 ’s depiction of the state of Montana with archival records and testimonies, the project interrogates how video games engage with colonization, land appropriation, and cultural violence, while reclaiming virtual spaces to amplify marginalized voices.

Edwin Lo is an artist and researcher whose practice spans video, image, installation, sound, and video games. His work recontextualizes video games as dynamic spaces for artistic exploration, rather than treating them as static texts. Lo’s approach integrates sound, machinima, and thematic investigations into technology, faith, and the human condition, resulting in a layered, multifaceted engagement with digital media. He holds a Master of Arts from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and his work has been exhibited internationally. Recent exhibitions include presentations by the Goethe-Institut and Para/site in Hong Kong, Palais de Tokyo, Tokyo Arts and Space, the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Loop Barcelona, Image Forum, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Meinblau Projektraum in Berlin. Lo currently lives and works in Hong Kong.

EVENT: CHRIS KERICH (OCTOBER 27—NOVEMBER 9 2023, ONLINE)

Three Impossible Worlds

digital video, color, sound, 2022, 11’ 14”, United States

Created by Chris Kerich

A speculative digital art project that probes the underlying logic and limitations of procedural world generation Three Impossible Worlds was developed with/in the popular video game Minecraft. The artist began by conceptualizing a series of thought experiments: worlds deemed “impossible” within Minecraft’s existing generative framework. By subverting the game’s expected parameters, Three Impossible Worlds surfaces latent politics and ingrained assumptions coded into procedural systems.

Chris Kerich is a programmer and artist living and working in Lethbridge, Alberta. Kerich is interested in systems, constrained art, information, critical science studies, and video games. Chris is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge. He received his doctorate from the program in Film and Digital Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he has received a Master of Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 and a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. Kerich’s creative endeavors have garnered international recognition and have been featured in retrospectives and events like the Milan Machinima Festival (2021, 2019, Milan, Italy) and Vector Festival (2018, Toronto, Canada).

EVENT: ALIX DESAUBLIAUX (OCTOBER 28 - NOVEMBER 10 2022, ONLINE)

L’AUTRE MONSTRE (THE OTHER MONSTER)

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 48’ 26”, 2021, France (in French with English subtitles)

Created by Alix Desaubliaux

October 28 - November 10 2022

vral.org

 

L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster) is an experimental film created with/in Monster Hunter World (Capcom, 2018). A contemplative immersion in a fantasy universe, this machinima examines the affective nature of playing. The artist appropriated a popular Japanese RPG and hunting game to explore ecological issues related to the ongoing capitalist exploitation of nature, which are intimately linked to the affective positions of the players. This singular relationship is punctuated by questions about the ontology of the creatures that inhabit the world, their language and communication style, and the system of representation that informs their appearance and behavior. Part documentary, part visual poem, and part conceptual walk-through, The Other Monster was produced using in-game assets, environments, and 3D images generated by an application. From the Anjanath to the Deviljho and the Pukei-Pukei, from the director’s point of view to the players’ experiences with Serid and Unbot, accompanied by their palicos, the monster becomes a metaphor for Otherness: a tool to question one’s relationship to the Other and to the world as a whole.

French artist Alix Desaubliaux and has been an active member of the Vivarium workshop since January 2021. In addition to her artistic practice, she explores performative and experimental formats via online encounters with the collective 3G, featuring Annie Abrahams, Pascale Barret, and Alice Lenay. She is also involved with the research group WMAN, comprising six artists and curators working with video games. Desaubliaux teaches in several art schools including ENSAD Nancy, ESACM Clermont-Ferrand, ENSBA Lyon, ESAM Caen, ESBAN Nîmes, where she organizes workshops, interventions, conferences, and seminars. Her work has been presented in several exhibitions, events, and festivals including Jeune Création Fair in 2015 at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery; Digital Arts Biennial at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Domaine Pommery; Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète and Glassbox, among others. Desaubliaux lives and works in Rennes

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EVENT: HILLEVI CECILIA HÖGSTRÖM (JANUARY 7 - 20 2022, ONLINE)

A hand in the game

Digital video, color, sound, 35’ 08”, 2017, Sweden

Created by Hillevi Cecilia Högström, 2017

vral.org

A hand in the game is a video essay documenting the artist’s experience with SimPark (1996), a simulation published by Californian game company Maxis in which players cultivate and manage a successful park. Developed by Roxana Wolosenko and Claire Curtin, SimPark was explicitly targeted toward children: its objective was to educate the young about ecology and biodiversity. SimPark was accompanied by a 77-page manual which included tips on how to incorporate the game in the curriculum. Twenty years later, the artist intentionally tried to “mismanage the park enough to terminate all living things” in order to bring forth the simulation’s underlying ideology, which is grounded in capitalistic values and neoliberal imperatives. Specifically, Högström played four iterations — titled Termination 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 respectively — by altering the main variables, from the ratio between tropical, desert, and cold regions to the degree of animal agency, not to mention the effects of climate change upon the flora and fauna. The more she played, the more she realized that SimPark is deeply flawed: a supposedly pedagogical aid becomes a tool of disinformation.

Hillevi Cecilia Högström was born in 1994 in Jönköping, Sweden. She is currently completing her M.A. in Fine Arts at Malmö Art Academy. Previously, she received a B.A. in Fine Arts at the Iceland University of the Arts. Her work is concerned with the Anthropocene, which she defines as “the point in time where humans became an actual geological force capable of reforming the surface of the planet”, and its effects on the world. Her recent exhibitions include A Hand in the Game (solo, 2017), Bachelor Exhibition, Kubburin, Reykjavík, Iceland, and Full Vision (2020), Jönköpings länssmuseum, Jönköping, Sweden, Af stað!, Norræna Húsið, Reykjavík, Sweden (2019), and the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018), Main Project, Moscow, Russia. Her video works were featured at several international festivals, including EXiS (2021), Seoul, South Korea, and Impakt Algorithmic Superstructures (2018), Utrecht, Netherlands. Högström works and lives in Malmö, Sweden. 

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EVENT: GRAYSON EARLE (DECEMBER 10 - 23 2021, ONLINE)

Why don't the cops fight each other?

digital video, color, sound, 9’ 41”, 2021, United States of America, 2021

Created by Grayson Earle

Made with support from Media Art Exploration and Akademie Schloss Solitude

 

Why don’t the cops fight each other? is a desktop documentary that chronicles the attempt by the artist to modify the behavior of virtual police officers within Grand Theft Auto V. This work also engages the modding scene that emerged around Grand Theft Auto, a community of people creating tools to modify the game’s environment, characters, and mechanics. While these mods allow for an almost infinite manipulation and transformation of the game features, one attribute seems completely immutable: the police officers in the game will never fight each other. Through an exhaustive forensic analysis of the game’s source code and interactions with mod developers, the artist illustrates the extent to which the cultural imaginary concerning the real world police is projected into the game space.

Born in California, Grayson Earle is a new media artist and educator. After graduating from the Hunter College Integrated Media Arts MFA program, he worked as a Visiting Professor at Oberlin College and the New York City College of Technology, and a part-time lecturer at Parsons and Eugene Lang at the New School. A member of The Illuminator Art Collective, Earle is the co-creator of Bail Bloc (2017), a computer program that bails people out of jail and Ai Wei Whoops! (2014), an online game that allows the player to smash Ai Weiwei’s urns. In 2020, he hacked the Hans Haacke career retrospective exhibition at the New Museum to criticize the Museum's efforts to union bust its employees. His artworks have been exhibited internationally. He is currently residing in Stuttgart, Germany, as a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude.

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