BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHTS'S 30 DAYS/30WORKS

Bob Bicknell-Knight is a London based artist working in moving image, installation, sculpture, and other digital media. His main interests are surveillance, the internet, and the consumer culture in capitalist societies. He explores these themes using different tools and technologies.  

Dead End and An Undignified Failure (both 2016) are part of Bicknell-Knight's 30days/30works project assignment, which consists in creating a brand new piece of work every day during an entire month and submitting an image of the piece every day. Bicknell-Knight is currently pursuing a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College Of Arts in the United Kingdom. On his blog, the artist chronicles the creative and pragmatic challenges of undertaking such marathon. 

Dead End (Day 2) is a creative collage/montage which juxtaposes the image of a gamer (the artist himself) to gameplay sequences taken from popular online first-person shooters. The brief was "is your work descriptive, or performative?"

In a blog post, Bicknell-Knight explains his process and also mentions some influences:

"The second piece that I created was a 40 minute film that features a webcam video of myself, watching a compilation of all the endings from the Call of Duty video game franchise. The video of myself was filmed in the dark during the early hours of the morning, whilst watching a tv show, the light from the screen is flickering against my face with various amounts of light so that at points my face is lit up whilst at others the screen is completely black. I chose to have some fun with the layout of the different clips, creating a newsstand-esque aesthetic for the different slices of gameplay. The twisting of the different screens draws your attention towards the fact that it is a screen, that it’s a performance, a virtual space posing as a real one, something that I’m interested by. It also makes it more evident that I’m having this dialogue with the different video games, rather than simply being put in front of the gameplay. This aesthetic is borrowing from Neïl Beloufa’s video piece People's passion, lifestyle, beautiful wine, gigantic glass towers, all surrounded by water where he twists the screen, and plays with your senses. The cold, blank face of my video, seemingly playing these games considers how our first world society is (in the media’s eyes) slowly becoming desensitized to violence through the use of these FPS video games. Obviously this is not true and various studies have explored this, but I thought that it would be interesting to create something that explores this. The work reminds me a lot of Harun Farocki’s Serious Games, where soldiers are filmed playing an army game. I’m happy with the piece, but the lack of time to create the work made it so that I had to export the video in a very low quality, which is always a shame." (Bob Bicknell-Knight)

Neil Beloufa, People's passion, lifestyle beautiful wine, gigantic glass towers, all surrounded by water, 2011, Digital video, excerpt (original: 10' loop)

Harun Farocki, Serious Games I-IV, 2009-2010, Digital video, excerpt, 1 minute

To create An Undignified Failure (Day 20), Bicknell-Knight appropriated some gameplay footage of a woman being thrown out of the window of a building via a glitch. He then overlaid the sound taken from another video game, Super Mario. As he writes, "The video then rewinds incredibly slowly, coming to a head just before the woman is bounced out of the room. The sound is slowed so much that it sounds like the woman is screaming insistently."

As these works clearly illustrate, some of the most interesting machinima projects are being created in art schools around the world, discusses on blogs, and circulated on popular video sharing sites. 

bobbicknellknight

MACHINIMA: BIBLIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES #3

GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY RECOMMENDS:

MACHINIMA! TEORIE. PRATICHE. DIALOGHI, A COMPELLING COLLECTION OF ESSAYS PUBLISHED IN 2013 BY EDIZIONI UNICOPLI IN ITALY FEATURING CONTRIBUTIONS BY HENRY LOWOOD, MIZUKO ITO, HUGH HANCOCK, KARI KRAUS, EDDO STERN, MARQUE CORNBLATT, AND MANY MORE.

The book was edited by MATTEO BITTANTI and HENRY LOWOOD. Matteo Bittanti is the director of GAME/PLAY. DESIGN, DIRECTION & PRODUCTION Master's at IULM University where he also teaches a course in Media Studies. Lowood is Curator for History of Science and Technology and for Film and Media collections at Stanford University. Lowood launched the HOW THEY GOT GAME initiative at Stanford in 2000. 

BOOK DESCRIPTION

"Machinima! Teorie. Pratiche. Dialoghi illumina uno dei fenomeni di ibridazione mediale più interessanti degli ultimi vent'anni. Contrazione di machine e animation, il machinima si colloca all'intersezione tra videogioco e cinema, animazione elettronica e performance in tempo reale nei mondi virtuali. Opera derivata ma inaspettata, il machinima ha introdotto una nuova estetica, ma soprattutto, un nuovo modo di giocare con l'immagine. La sua storia è contraddistinta da innovazioni e imprevisti, alterazioni e alterchi, hacking e modding. Il volume si articola in tre sezioni. Le prima, Teorie, inquadra il fenomeno sul piano concettuale, storico e legislativo, illuminando testi e contesti produttivi, distributivi, giuridici e commerciali. La seconda, Pratiche, presenta i contributi di artisti e registi, producer e performer che hanno definito la natura del medium. Infine, Dialoghi propone conversazioni su temi che spaziano dall'arte al mercato, dal disimpegno ludico all'attivismo politico. Il carattere interdisciplinare e l'eterogeneità degli approcci rendono "Machinima!" uno strumento ideale per comprendere le trasformazioni dei media e dell'arte contemporanea nell'era digitale."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The book is part of the ongoing LUDOLOGICA book series edited by MATTEO BITTANTI and GIANNI CANOVA.

MACHINIMA! TEORIE. PRATICHE. DIALOGHI is available on Amazon.

EVENT: SCREENING PROGRAM

THIS May, IULM University will present a showcase of game-based video screenings as part of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY. Ranging from arthouse to alternative and often unclassifiable productions, most of these videos have never been shown before in Italy.

The program include a screening of avant-garde filmmaker Philip Solomon's Grand Theft Auto works: In Memoriam (May 4) and EMPIRE (May 11), both Italian premieres. Solomon's lyrical and profoundly observational films transcend genre and explore narratives in nontraditional forms, pushing the boundaries of machinima. On May 18, we will screen Harun Farocki's monumental work Parallel I-IV and on May 25 I will present NEW DIRECTIONS, an eclectic series of works centered around the theme of SLOWNESS. The goal of these screenings is to re envision the relationship between video games and video art, simulation and representation. The selected videos introduce new kinds of visual expression based on contemplation rather than frantic action.

The full program is available here. Each event will feature a critical introduction.

All screenings are free and open to the public. RSVP recommended.

MACHINIMA: BIBLIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES #2

GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY RECOMMENDS

UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA. ESSAYS IN FILMMAKING IN VIRTUAL WORLDS, A COMPELLING COLLECTION OF ESSAYS PUBLISHED IN 2013 BY BLOOMSBURY FEATURING CONTRIBUTIONS BY MICHAEL NITSCHE, CHRIS BURKE (FOCI + LOCI), JOSEPH DELAPPE, SHELDON BROWN, SARAH HIGLEY, AND MANY MORE.

Here's the book description:

In this groundbreaking collection, Dr. Jenna Ng brings together academics and award-winning artists and machinima makers to explore the fascinating combination of cinema, animation and games in machinima (the use of computer game engines to produce animated films in cost- and time-efficient ways). Book-ended by a preface by Henry Lowood (curator for history of science and technology collections at Stanford University) and an interview with Isabelle Arvers (machinima artist, trainer, critic, and curator), the collection features wide-ranging discussions addressing machinima not only from diverse theoretical perspectives, but also in its many dimensions as game art, First Nations media art, documentary, and pedagogical tool. Making use of interactive multimedia to enhance the text, each chapter features a QR code which leads to a mobile website cross-referencing with its print text, integrating digital and print content while also taking into account the portability of digital devices in resonance with machinima's mobile digital forms. Exploring the many dimensions of machinima production and reception,Understanding Machinima extends machinima's critical scholarship and debate, underscoring the exciting potential of this emerging media form.

UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA is edited by JENNA NG, an Anniversary Research Lecturer in Film and Interactive Media at York University, in England.

UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA features by an excellent companion website with excerpts, interviews, and extra, not to mention a great video essay:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

UNDERSTANDING MACHINIMA is available on Amazon.

MACHINIMA. BIBLIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES #1

GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY RECOMMENDS:

THE MACHINIMA READER, AN EDITED COLLECTION OF ESSAYS PUBLISHED IN 2011 BY MIT PRESS, FEATURING CONTRIBUTIONS BY LEV MANOVICH, KATIE SALEN, ERIC CHAMPION, DAN PINCHBECK, MATTEO BITTANTI AND MANY MORE.

Here's a description:

"Over the last decade, machinima--the use of computer game engines to create movies--has emerged as a vibrant area in digital culture. Machinima as a filmmaking tool grew from the bottom up, driven by enthusiasts who taught themselves to deploy technologies from computer games to create animated films quickly and cheaply. The Machinima Reader is the first critical overview of this rapidly developing field. The contributors include both academics and artist-practitioners. They explore machinima from multiple perspectives, ranging from technical aspects of machinima, from real-time production to machinima as a performative and cinematic medium, while paying close attention to the legal, cultural, and pedagogical contexts for machinima. The Machinima Reader extends critical debates originating within the machinima community to a wider audience and provides a foundation for scholarly work from a variety of disciplines.This is the first book to chart the emergence of machinima as a game-based cultural production that spans technologies and media, forming new communities of practice on its way to a history, an aesthetic, and a market."

This indispensable collection was edited by HENRY LOWOOD and MICHAEL NITSCHE. Lowood is Curator for History of Science and Technology and for Film and Media collections at Stanford University. Lowood launched the HOW THEY GOT GAME initiative at Stanford in 2000. Michael Nitsche is Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE MACHINIMA READER is available on Amazon.