VIDEO: FINDING FANON: CONTROL

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Finding Fanon: Control, HD video, 2016, still from video installation

A new installment of Larry Achiampong and David Blandy's series Finding Fanon was screened on April 27 at FACT in LIVERPOOL.

Titled FF Gaiden: Control, the video explores the inherent tensions of the UK penal system, a system that currently incarcerates a considerable number of former Armed Service personnel. FF Gaiden: Control examines the dual identity of ‘veteran and offender’ through a series of personal testimonies from the perspective of the veterans themselves and their family members. These accounts are played out through the world of video game Grand Theft Auto V, investigating this virtual space synonymous with violence to speak of their experiences of societal control.

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is a Liverpool-based cinema and art gallery, and is the UK's leading organisation for the commission, exhibition and support of new media art-forms.

Below is the full Q&A that took place after the screening, recently posted by FACT, which commissioned and supported the project:

Here is a video of the making-of Finding Fanon.

Achiampong and Blandy's Finding Fanon 2 is currently on display in the RECORD level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

And here's an interview with the artists:

VIDEO: ROOMMATE'S SECRET CLAW (2015)

Kent Lambert (b. 1976, Colorado Springs, Colorado) is a Chicago-based musician and media artist. He worked from 2001 to 2004 as the Video Data Bank’s Distribution Assistant and is currently a technological expert at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. His creative output primarily consists of vocal driven art-pop music and pop-inflected video art made from repurposed industrial and commercial media. His ever-mutating art-pop band Roommate has been performing stateside and abroad for over a decade.

Lambert's video RECKONING 3 is currently on display in the ASSEMBLAGE level of GAME VIDEO ART. 

SECRET CLAW, a video by ROOMMATE, can be considered a companion piece to RECKONING 3. The video montage was created by Kent Lambert. Music by Roommate. Song credits: Nick Broste - trombone, treatments. Sam Johnson - trumpet. Kent Lambert - vox, piano, synths, words. Elanor Leskiw - trombone, horn arrangements. Gillian Lisée - bass, vox. Lance Loiselle - sousaphone. Luther Rochester - Buchla Music Easel.

Lambert is currently working on RECKONING 4.

An exclusive interview with the artist, currently featured on the exhibition's floor, will be featured on gamevideoart.org this Monday.

MEDIA COVERAGE: IL SOLE 24 ORE

Italy's most prestigious Sunday magazine, Il Domenicale, has published a terrific review of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY. Critic Marco Sammicheli has clearly spent some time inside the Contemporary Exhibition Hall at IULM University...

You can read the full text here (in Italian)

Additional media coverage can be found here. 

INTERVEW: BRENT WATANABE

Brent Watanabe's San Andreas Deer Cam (2016) was screened in NEW DIRECTIONS on May 25 2016 in Milan, Italy, as part of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY. In this exclusive interview, Watanabe discusses the creative process behind his unique project.

Brent Watanabe, San Andreas Deer Cam, 2016. Still from installation. 

Brent Watanabe is an American artist living and working in Seattle, Washington State. After graduating in Drawing and Painting at the University of Washington, Watanabe has produced a series of projects using systems-based environments operating like networked video game engines and populated by code-generated characters and objects, each with their own logic, intelligence, scoring, and goals. These characters and environments interact with/rely on each other, incorporating elements from their immediate environment, which have included police scanner radio feeds, local wildlife, passing traffic, and the weather.

Watch additional interviews here. 

VIDEO: LARRY ACHIAMPONG & DAVID BLANDY: THE MAKING OF FINDING FANON

FF Gaiden: Alternative is a new video work created through a collaboration between artists David Blandy and Larry Achiampong and Tyneside Cinema’s Youth Group, The Factory.

Together they have used the virtual space of Grand Theft Auto V to explore ideas around the writings of Frantz Fanon, whilst also asking what it means to be entering the adult world at this precise moment in time. The work has been specially commissioned by Tyneside Cinema, and is supported by Arts Council England. It is on display until June 16.

Achiampong and Blandy's Finding Fanon 2 is currently on display in the RECORD level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

Read more about FF Gaiden: Alternative here.

Watch an interview with the artsists here