INTERVIEW: CLAIRE L. EVANS

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, AMERICAN ARTIST CLAIRE L. EVANS DISCUSSES THE FUTURE OF VIDEO GAMES, THE FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN GAMES AND REALITY, AND THE FRAMING POWER OF SCREENS. 

Claire L. Evans is an American singer, writer, and artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is the lead singer of the pop duo YACHT. In addition, Evans is a science journalist, with a popular science and culture blog,Universe, hosted by National Geographic's Scienceblogs network. Her essay for Universe, "Moon Art: Fallen Astronaut" was anthologized in The Best Science Writing Online 2012. She is also the co-author of New Art/Science Affinities, a book about contemporary artists working at the intersection of science and technology, and the author of a collection of essays called High Frontiers, published by Publication Studio, a small press in Portland, Oregon. In August 2013, she became the editor-in-chief of OMNI Reboot, a new online version of the science magazine OMNI. Evans is the Futures Editor at Motherboard. Her book, The Future is Unmanned, a feminist history of the internet, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House. 

Claire L. Evans's MODERN WARFARE is on display in the RECORD level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

Claire Evans: I’m fascinated by the open ended nature of the sandbox game environment, how much it allows you to drift, to produce a dérive. I like to explore games, searching for the edges of the maps, the places where obstacles and “masking systems” (an industry term) politely turn the player away from the edges of a rendered environment. Sometimes I look for those same obstacles in the real world: what does the layout of a city permit its citizens to see? What is hidden through masking systems? Where does the map end? Only by pushing against the highly tactical, invisible force of a game narrative can the player discover its shape; only by seeking fences do we find our boundaries.

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Claire Evans: I try not to create explicit binaries between reality and simulation. The way I see it, artwork that hopes to make any kind of real impact needs to exist in both IRL and digital space; if it exists only in the “real” world, without documentation or some form of second life online, it might as well not exist, so limited is its potential reach. As the kids in America say, “pics or it didn’t happen.” But making work that is only online, or lives only inside of a game environment, is also lacking something important. One must always acknowledge the player, the kinesthetic or bodily experience, the physical hardware, the file. It’s best to create something that overlaps between several states of being. That’s how we all live now.

Claire L. Evans, Digital Decay: Meditation/Disintegration, 2011

"Animation of individual video frames saved in progressively lower file formats hundreds and hundreds of times. Where is the line at which compression ceases to preserve information entirely? The digital image washes away on the tide of its own preservation. The beach ball is the third eye."

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?

Claire Evans: I’m far more interested in the physics of games than I am in gaming aesthetics. The weight of digital objects, how players and objects move through space, the built world of a generated reality, all made proprietary and disseminated through the landscape of game development—that’s fascinating territory. We are entering into a period of procedural generation: video game content generated algorithmically rather than manually. This means an essentially infinite universe of worlds can be explored by the player, all randomly generated from billions of possible configurations. The more sophisticated gaming mechanics become, the more we approach a one-to-one relationship with the complexity of actual reality. After procedural generation, I argue that we will see “Generative Reality.” The cause and effect of a game imbued with Generative Reality is as nuanced and manifold as anything that happens in the real world. It goes without saying that “Generative Reality” requires infinite bandwidth, a computer the size of a planet. It’s essentially a mystical conceit, but I consider it the endgame of gaming. We are already beginning to see it. The artist David O’Reilly has a game for PlayStation coming out soon, Everything, in which the player can control every visible object in the game world. Soon this will be our expectation for reality itself.

GVA: Why did you choose the first-person shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to create your work?

Claire Evans: Modern Warfare is the documentation of an action taken within the infamous airport level of 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. During this level, the player must assume the character of a deep cover CIA agent leading a group of gunmen to massacre passengers at Moscow’s Zakhaev International Airport. The level’s objective – to murder civilians – sparked a great deal of comment at the time of the game’s release; the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik would go on to cite the game as a form of “situational training’” for the 2011 Norway Attacks. In my action, the player instead systematically destroys every screen in the level: from the player POV, we see dozens of computers, displays, televisions, and monitors around the airport shatter under relentless gunfire. It’s an impossible object, kind of an ouroboros: the gamer, the “guy,” who is both the player and an avatar controlled by the player, attempts to annihilate the dead mirrors all around him, but he can’t escape the medium, only discover its boundaries, which define what he is.

GVA: Is the destruction of screens in a video games meant as a radical, iconoclastic gesture comparable, for instance, to the exhortations of burning down museums by the Futurists?

Claire Evans: I’m not sure. The difficult thing to define is where technology lives. We may feel constrained, limited, quantified and fundamentally alienated by social platforms like Facebook or technology corporations like Google, but if we are to “destroy” those spaces, where do we begin? Offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the intellectual capital lives? Or do we throw stones at a server farm somewhere in a hydropower-rich rural area, where the information is stored? At this point, any option feels like stomping on a mushroom, merely a symbolic victory. The intelligent network from which it sprouts, beneath the Earth, can survive anything; it lives forever because it’s life itself.

ead more interviews here

claireevans

PERFORMANCE SHOTS: MARCO MENDENI (JUNE 30, 2016)

A few shots from r lightTweakSunlight, a NEW performance by MARCO MENDENI THAT took place at IULM on June 30 2016.

Marco Mendeni's performance r_light_Sunlight continues the artist's investigation into the world of simulations that began in 2005 with r lightTweakSunlight01. Specifically designed for GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY, the performance investigates the gray area between abstraction and representation. By manipulating and modifying a game engine, images are created and altered in real-time and by improperly tweaking algorithms affecting the images' appearance, a flux of sounds and visuals are generated. This performance is a meditation on the ongoing shift toward a new simulation regime, a total simulation. The duration of the performance in approximately 30 minutes. 

THE ARTIST

Marco Mendeni (b. 1979, Brescia, Italy) explores new realities and situations engendered by technology. Specifically, he uses video games as an expressive medium to investigate the relation between the real and the digital, simulation and dissimulation. Mendeni’s work is informed by such binaries as virtuality vs. materiality, presence vs. absence, tradition vs. innovation. Videogame worlds, in their virtual reality, lose their artificial character as playable simulations to become a space for exploration and experimentation. Mendeni approaches video games as unsubstantial constructions and turns them into material objects. This apparent paradox creates new meanings and situations. Mendeni lives and works in Berlin.

INTERVIEW: LAWRENCE LEK

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, LAWRENCE LEK DISCUSSES THE POLITICS OF THE ART WORLD, HIS BONUS LEVEL SERIES, AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE UNREAL ENGINE.

Lawrence Lek (b. Frankfurt, 1982) explores the uncanny experience of simulated presence through hardware, software, installation, and performance. His interactive virtual environments have been presented in countries including Australia, Hungary and China and his work has been hosted by the V&A, SPACE, Barbican, Art Licks, the Delfina Foundation, and he is currently a resident artist at The White Building in Hackney Wick. This virtual simulation of the Royal Academy, based on surveyors’ drawings as well as found text from Russian Tatler (translated into Mandarin and subtitled in English), invites the participant to a multilingual conjuring of the building’s potential future as repurposed by high-end estate agents. Lek lives and works in London.

Lawrence Lek's Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) (2015) is currently on display in the RECORD level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Can you briefly describe your education?

Lawrence Lek: I studied architecture at Cambridge University, the Architectural Association in London, and Cooper Union in New York. I was lucky to have teachers who emphasized the wider theoretical and cultural aspects of the art form, rather than its formal or practical aspects.

Lawrence Lek, Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition), Real-time simulation & HD video loop. 

*I made this in May as a critique and comedy, sad to say it's become reality.* -- With the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston has degenerated into a post-apocalyptic utopia. Come and explore this drowned world of the near future: filled with forgotten nightclubs, neon-lit music venues, Election booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. Building upon Lek’s original commission for Open Source 2015, this site-specific simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As players roam around, a voiceover extracted from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour speaks to them about the nature of memory. It is a gradual, but relentless, sense of forgetting that comes with any form of urban transformation." (Lawrence Lek)

GVA: Can you name some influences - not necessarily artistic ones - that played a key role in your evolution as an artist?

Lawrence Lek: Jack London, Francesco Borromini, James Joyce, Final Fantasy (Nintendo Game Boy versions), Andrei Tarkovsky.

GVA: When and why did you begin using video games in your practice?

Lawrence Lek: It's a continuation of working in a site-specific way. In the first few years of my art practice, I had been building (physical) installations that related to the space they were installed within. For these, I usually created digital models to help me fabricate and assemble the installations. Of course in architecture you always make models, but it only serves to communicate the intention of your work or to convince somebody about your idea. I started thinking – what if the model was actually the main work rather than just a working tool? So with video games I could create the entire environment, selecting which aspects of reality I wanted to model, and which ones I could invent.

Lawrence Lek, Bonus Levels: Chapter 2, Delirious New Wick, 2014.

"Bonus Levels is a series of utopian video game worlds. The project collages together fragments of London into a continuously evolving virtual city. Here, the boundaries between private and public zones disappear, creating an environment of open access and free exploration. Chapter 2 reimagines the zone surrounding London’s 2012 Olympic Park as a primal utopia of floating islands, abandoned stadiums and post-industrial monuments. Based on the physical maps of the area, the level brings together three histories of the area into a single virtual landscape: primordial forests, commercial regeneration strategies, and artist-run colonies. As regeneration strategies and commercial property developments spread over East London, the player is invited to witness the conflict between the area’s past and its future. Teleporter Pavilions beam the player into inaccessible areas of London – up into the voids of Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit tower and into the Velodrome flying over the sky. " (Lawrence Lek)

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

Lawrence Lek: I am particularly interested in the first-person perspective and how the player/viewer very quickly becomes embodied in the character. Of course in commercial games there are usually goals or objectives even in the most open-world scenarios. But in my work, I like to remove these intentions so that the viewer only experiences a face-to-face encounter with the environment itself. Afterwards, they might become more aware about the differences between their agency in the art work versus the real world.

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Lawrence Lek: The suspension of disbelief happens quickly when you watch a film or play a game or engage in a performance. For example, after only a minute of watching the screen-captured video, you stop being conscious of the fact that it's only coloured polygons on the screen. You're inside the world. In each work, I've already embedded hundreds of symbols and messages through the set design of the level and its sound, lighting and interactivity. But in the end, it's very much up to the viewer or player how they want to perceive the work. Some people might see it as an escapist fantasy, others as an alternate reality that exists between fact and fiction, others as a socio-political commentary. All of them are right.

Lawrence Lek, Bonus Levels - Chapter 1: Art Licks Weekend, 2013.

GVA: Would you agree that machinima has democratized the art making process? Has it lowered the entry barrier for creators of video art, as some critics argue?

Lawrence Lek: By providing a readymade platform for creating digital animations, of course machinima makes it easier to create a certain kind of video art. However the problem with any emerging process in digital art is that the vast majority of artworks lie within a narrow spectrum of expression. When you're learning a new tool or program, you have to rely on default presets. The challenge is to make the democratized tool a personal medium.

GVA: In your artwork Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) how and why do you use video game aesthetics?

Lawrence Lek: I wanted to use video game aesthetics to combine fantasy and critique. In Unreal Estate, I was invited to make a new work for an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. I thought to create something site-specific that also referred to the cultural implications of an elite art institution. In the simplest terms, it would be a fantasy if that was your home. But to be in a position where you could afford to buy the Royal Academy, you would have to be part of a financial elite, capable of buying expensive art but also paranoid about security and getting kidnapped.

GVA: Can you describe your creative process in developing Unreal Estate?

Lawrence Lek: It’s essentially a reconstructed version of the Royal Academy, but modelled as if a Chinese billionaire (or Tony Montana in Scarface) had redecorated it. When constructing the environment, I'm always thinking how it will look cinematically. For example, you have to make an impression at the beginning – in the first wide shot of the courtyard, there's a Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Jeff Koons sculpture. And to end, why not look at your mansion from above, in a helicopter?Also key to the composition is the voiceover by Joni Zhu and soundtrack by Oliver Coates. I actually edited the sound together as a guiding track when I captured the video. The voice was guiding me – I knew I had to be in the gallery, or living room, or basement by a certain time.

GVA: How is Unreal Estate related to the Bonus Levels series?

Lawrence Lek: Unreal Estate is chapter 9 of Bonus Levels, an ongoing series of virtual worlds that create either utopian or dystopian commentaries of reality. Previously, I had worked with public squares, post-industrial areas, and independent project spaces and galleries. So the Royal Academy was the most established institution I had worked with up to that point, and so I wanted to use the opportunity to explore the complex relationships that exist in an institutional context.

Lawrence Lek, Sky Line (Virtual Tour, Parallel Narrative Version), 2014.

"Two travelers search for meaning while traveling on a utopian railway that connects independent galleries across London. The video is created from a virtual world commissioned for Art Licks Weekend 2014. Sky Line is the most recent chapter of Bonus Levels, an ongoing project interrogating the construction of utopian narratives through videos and virtual worlds. Lek draws from the compositional techniques of cinema, using software to explore altered states of presence, memory and materiality that are unique to digital space. " (Lawrence Lek)

GVA: How do you reconcile the fact that a game-based artwork aspiring to be recognized by the Art World is simultaneously criticizing the inner workings of such environment, i.e. the Art World itself?

Lawrence Lek: I see projects like Unreal Estate being more like a mirror than an object. The conventional left-leaning viewpoint is that the established or commercial Art World is a bad thing because of its complicity in elitism. However, looking at the Art World as a subject reveals larger aspects about culture, economics and history. Through the Royal Academy, you can think about wealth, desire, but also fear and oppression. At the same time there's a certain brutal honesty to it: I would love to live at the Royal Academy.

Read more interviews here

lawrencelek

 

EVENT: MARCO MENDENI'S r_light_Sunlight (JUNE 30, 2016, 5 PM)

TITLE: r lightTweakSunlight01

ARTIST: MARCO MENDENI

DATE & TIME: JUNE 30, 2016 AT 5 PM

LOCATION: SALA DEI 146, OPEN SPACE IULM 6

FREE ENTRY AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

DESCRIPTION

Marco Mendeni's performance r_light_Sunlight continues the artist's investigation into the world of simulations that began in 2005 with r lightTweakSunlight01. Specifically designed for GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY, the performance investigates the gray area between abstraction and representation. By manipulating and modifying a game engine, images are created and altered in real-time and by improperly tweaking algorithms that affect the images' appearance, a flux of sounds and visuals are generated. This performance is a meditation on the ongoing shift toward a new simulation regime, a total simulation. The duration of the performance in approximately 30 minutes. 

THE ARTIST

Marco Mendeni (b. 1979, Brescia, Italy) explores new realities and situations engendered by technology. Specifically, he uses video games as an expressive medium to investigate the relation between the real and the digital, simulation and dissimulation. Mendeni’s work is informed by such binaries as virtuality vs. materiality, presence vs. absence, tradition vs. innovation. Videogame worlds, in their virtual reality, lose their artificial character as playable simulations to become a space for exploration and experimentation. Mendeni approaches video games as unsubstantial constructions and turns them into material objects. This apparent paradox creates new meanings and situations. Mendeni lives and works in Berlin.

Marco Mendeni's r_lightTweakSunlight01 is currently on display in the GLITCH level of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

Read an interview with Marco Mendeni

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TITOLO: r lightTweakSunlight01

ARTISTA: MARCO MENDENI

DATA & ORA: 30 GIUGNO 2016, ORE 17:00

LUOGO: SALA DEI 146, OPEN SPACE IULM 6

INGRESSO LIBERO E APERTO AL PUBBLICO

DESCRIZIONE

La performance è stata pensata appositamente per il progetto GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY ed esplora e approfondisce partendo dal progetto iniziato nel 2015 con r lightTweakSunlight01, il confine tra astrazione e rappresentazione. L’idea è quella di trasmettere attraverso intrecci invisibili e manipolazioni del motore grafico, immagini composite elaborate/modificate in real-time. Attraverso l’uso improprio di algoritmi che modificano le immagini, i suoni e le sequenze di visioni contemplative generate da un software, il lavoro vuole stimolare lo spettatore ad una riflessione sulla migrazione in atto verso le simulazioni o meglio la simulazione del “tutto”. La durata della performance è di 30 minuti. 

L'ARTISTA

Nato a Brescia nel 1979, Marco Mendeni esplora creativamente le realtà generate dalla tecnologia. Nello specifico, Mendeni utilizza i videogiochi come medium espressivo per investigare la relazione tra il reale e il digitale, simulazione e dissimulazione. La sua pratica è incentrata sull'articolazione di coppie binarie come virtualità vs. materialità, presenza vs. assenza, tradizione vs. innovazione. I mondi videoludici - fatti di realtà virtuale - perdono il carattere artificiale di simulazioni giocabili per diventare spazi di sperimentazione. Mendeni trasforma costrutti intangibili e scevri di sostanza - i videogiochi - in oggetti concreti. Questa pratica apparentemente paradossale genera nuovi significati e situazioni. Mendeni vive e lavora a Berlino.

L'opera di Marco Mendeni r_lightTweakSunlight01 è visibile nel livello GLITCH di GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY.

Leggete un'intervista a Marco Mendeni

EVENT: CATALOGUE PRESENTATION (THURSDAY, JUNE 30 2016, 3.30 PM)

WHAT: CATALOGUE PRESENTATION

WHEN: THURSDAY JUNE 30, 2016, 3:30 PM

WHERE: SALA DEI 146, OPEN SPACE IULM 6

FREE ADMISSION & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

DESCRIPTION

Published by Silvana Editoriale, the official catalogue of GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY will be introduced by a panel comprising Andrea Cancellato, (Triennale CEO), Prof. Mario Negri (Rector), Prof. Gianni Canova (Pro Rector), and Matteo Bittanti (co-curator). The book was edited by Matteo Bittanti and Vincenzo Trione and features contributions by Claudio De Albertis, Mario Negri, Vincenzo Trione, Vanni Codeluppi, Anna Luigia De Simone, Stefano Bartezzaghi, Isabelle Arvers, Henry Lowood, and Matteo Bittanti. In addition, the catalogue includes quotes from the artists' interviews produced by the Master's Degree students in Arts, Cultural Heritage, and Markets at IULM. 

The presentation will be followed by a performance by artist Marco Mendeni (Sala dei 146, IULM 6) entitled  r lightTweakSunlight01.

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COSA: PRESENTAZIONE CATALOGO

QUANDO: GIOVEDì 30 GIUGNO, ORE 15.30

DOVE: SALA DEI 146, OPEN SPACE IULM 6

INGRESSO LIBERO E APERTO AL PUBBLICO

DESCRIZIONE

Pubblicato da Silvana Editoriale, il catalogo ufficiale di GAME VIDEO/ART. A SURVEY sarà introdotto da un panel formato da Andrea Cancellato (Direttore Generale, Triennale Milano), il Rettore Mario Negri, il Prof. Gianni Canova e Matteo Bittanti. Curato da Matteo Bittanti e Vincenzo Trione, il volume include contributi di Claudio De Albertis, Mario Negri, Vincenzo Trione, Vanni Codeluppi, Anna Luigia De Simone, Stefano Bartezzaghi, Isabelle Arvers, Henry Lowood, Matteo Bittanti, nonché citazioni tratte dalle interviste agli artisti realizzate dagli studenti della Laurea Magistrale in Arte, Patrimoni e Mercati della IULM.

La presentazione sarà seguita da una performance dell'artista Marco Mendeni intitolata r lightTweakSunlight01 della durata di circa 30 minuti, sempre in Sala dei 146.