EVENT: ALICE BUCKNELL (AUGUST 2—15 2024, ONLINE)

The Alluvials

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 38’ 05”, 2023, United States of America

created by Alice Bucknell

The Alluvials is a seven-chapter video work — and video game — that delves into the politics of drought and water scarcity in a near-future Los Angeles. The narrative unfolds through diverse more-than-human perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore named El Aliso, and the ghost of the city’s famed mountain lion, P-22. Combining history, futurism, and speculative fiction, The Alluvials examines the complex interplay between engineered ecology, disaster capitalism, and nonhuman systems shaping Los Angeles. The story is presented across various media, featuring custom-built game environments, modified versions of the fictional city Los Santos from Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V, 3D scans of LA captured by drone, AI-generated “hallucinations” merging historical images of the River with future development proposals, and visualizations of GIS and pollution data of the LA River. The project acknowledges Indigenous unique relationships to water, particularly those of the Tongva People of the Greater Los Angeles Basin, emphasizing that nature is an intelligent system and a technology in its own right.

Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Working with game engines and speculative fiction strategies, their work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and nonhuman and machine intelligence.In 2021, they founded New Mystics, a digital platform merging magic and technology. In 2022, they organized New Worlds, an experimental event series expanding on emergent worlding practices, held at Somerset House Studios in London. They have presented their work internationally, with recent exhibitions at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Gray Area in San Francisco, Basement Roma in Rome, Singapore Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Fiber Festival in the Netherlands, and Serpentine in London. Their writing appears often in publications including ArtReview, Flash Art, Frieze, e-flux Architecture, and the Harvard Design Magazine. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles and an Associate Lecturer in MA Narrative Environments at University of the Arts London. In 2023, they are a Supercollider SciArt Ambassador in Los Angeles, a resident of Somerset House Studios in London, and a resident at transmediale in Berlin. Bucknell studied Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.

EVENT: FERNANDO GOMES PEREIRA (JULY 19—AUGUST 1 2024, ONLINE)

Light Study

digital video (1280 x 720), color, sound, 28’ 32”, 2015, Brazil

created by Fernando Pereira Gomes

 

In Light Study, a male avatar from Grand Theft Auto V stands unwavering, gazing into the camera for nearly thirty minutes as weather and light conditions shift subtly yet continuously, painting the scene with an ever-changing palette. The camera remains mostly fixed, with slight movements adding to the contemplative stillness. Dominant wind sounds blend with ambient city noises, creating an immersive backdrop. The artist discovered this scene by accident when the game idled into screen-saver mode. He noticed the light changing on the avatar’s face from morning to night and back. Fascinated by this passage of time, he recorded the scene, furthering his exploration of digital realms and their parallels with our experience of life and time.

Fernando Pereira Gomes was born in São Paulo, Brasil in 1993, currently living and working in Paonia, Colorado. After spending his teenage years in Europe, Gomes moved to New York where he earned his BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts (SVA). In New York, he created a body of street photography depicting life in the city, seeking moments of stillness and poetry within the ever buzzing metropolis. In 2014, his groundbreaking in-game photography series Procedural Generation garnered international attention, both in print and online, culminating in a solo exhibition curated by Alexandra Ungern-Sternberg at Ateliê Alê in São Paulo, Brazil, titled Geração Processual. Additionally, selected images were featured in the group exhibition Transition at the Y Gallery in Minsk, Belarus, also in 2014. Gomes’s work has been presented at prominent venues such as the Noorderlicht Photofestival, Miami-Project, and Photo-LA.

 

EVENT: 2GIRLS1COMP (JULY 5—18 2024)

Dancing Plague

digital video (1920 x 800), color, sound, 6’ 29”, 2024, Switzerland/Italy

created by 2girls1comp

In Dancing Plague, a mod for Grand Theft Auto V, the game’s traditionally gendered choreography is subverted, forcing every male NPC to dance feverishly whenever the player holds the H key. This intervention spotlights the inherent gender biases within the game’s animation system, where dance moves are primarily designed for female performers, often objectified as sex workers. By redirecting these choreographies to male characters, the mod disrupts the rigid gender binaries coded into the game, creating a spectacle where masculinity is both liberated and challenged. Interestingly, the male NPCs’s hypersexualized dance is mostly ignored by the female characters. Such an outcome becomes a playful and potent critique of the game’s inherent gender politics. To enhance the mod’s immersive experience, Azu Tiwaline, a French Tunisian musician known for blending contemporary electronic music with sub-Saharan trance traditions, was commissioned to create the soundtrack. Her work underscores the mod’s themes of ritual, trance, and liberation, providing a sonic backdrop that deepens the critique of gendered biases in digital spaces.

2girls1comp is a modding duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis (Italy, 1983) and Alexandra Pfammatter (Switzerland, 1993). Their work changes the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which they are immersed: from reclaiming global digital infrastructures to commenting on free labor within the capitalist ideologies of the gaming industry, to showcasing the way play can influence its subjects through its mechanics. Their projects are distributed within the gaming and modding community, as well as cultural and artistic contexts.

EVENT: EKIEM BARBIER, GUILHEM CAUSSE, QUENTIN L’HELGOUALC’H (JUNE 21—JULY 4 2024)

Marlowe Drive

digital video, sound, color, 34’, 2017, France

Created by Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin L’helgoualc’h

In Marlowe Drive, an avatar named Adam Kesher embarks on an unconventional journey through Los Santos, a meticulously rendered virtual replica of Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto V. Adam is crafting a pioneering game video essay, not merely documenting the game and its players, but filming entirely within the game’s landscapes. This ethnographic endeavor blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between players and their digital personas, while exploring the sociocultural dynamics of the simulation. Adam’s quest for a metaphorical bridge linking real-world experiences with virtual realities introduces him to characters and locations within the game that mirror broader societal themes such as ambition, identity, and self-expression. Marlowe Drive invites viewers to reassess the interconnections between gaming and cinema, between tangible realities and our collective imaginations.

Ekiem Barbier is a versatile composer and filmmaker who completed his education in drawing and video at the Montpellier Fine Arts School, graduating in 2017. His creative portfolio includes short fiction and animation films, and he has contributed to various collective exhibitions. Barbier’s directorial works include ANENT (2017) and Marlowe Drive (2017). His most recent project, Knit’s Island (2023), was a collaborative effort with Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’helgoualc’h, and premiered at Visions du Réel and since then screened worldwide, to great critical acclaim. 

Quentin L’helgoualc’h is an artist whose work spans the realms of cinema, drawing, digital imagery, and sculpture, exploring the interplay among these mediums. His artistic inquiries reflect on the societal role of the artist, interlaced with personal fantasies and challenges posed by new technologies. L’helgoualc’h co-directed Marlowe Drive (2017) and  Knit’s Island (2023), with Ekiem Barbier and Guilhem Causse.

Guilhem Causse explores the intricate relationship between image and sound. Influenced by science fiction, photography, and concrete music, Causse crafts immersive environments characterized by void and resonance, populated with enigmatic forms. He co-directed Marlowe Drive (2017), and Knit’s Island (2023), with Ekiem Barbier and GQuentin L’helgoualc’h.

EVENT: JORDY VEENSTRA (JUNE 7—20 2024, ONLINE)

Regression 5

digital video 4096 x 1716 (4k Scope), color, sound (Stereo, -16LUFS; Stereo), 23’ 14”, 2024, The Netherlands

Created by Jordy Veenstra

 

Regression 5 marks a significant evolution in Jordy Veenstra’s acclaimed machinima series, following the groundbreaking technical upgrades introduced in Regression 4. This installment presents a 23-minute experimental “fly-on-the-wall” visual study of the Grand Theft Auto V map through the perspective of a volatile taxi driver. The film’s unique approach mirrors the submarine exploration seen in Regression 4, but shifts to the dynamic, ever-changing surroundings and weather experienced from a taxi cab. By following the taxi driver over several days, the film explores various locales, streets and corners across San Andreas.

Jordy Veenstra is a video editor, experimental filmmaker, machinima artist, and front end developer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In his practice, Veenstra connects video games, experimental narratives and technology through the medium of machinima and his practice of distortion framework, consisting of rules and values that revolve around the distortion of otherwise clear video-game generated images and audio, with the intent of moving away from perceiving the film as a product from a videogame and more as a product of cinema”by using various values found in traditional cinema such as cinematic resolutions and aspect ratios, 24 frames per second, color grading, motion blur and grain. Veenstra’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2020 and 2022 editions of the Milan Machinima Festival.