36,000 feet
Digital video, color, sound, 7’36”, 2021, Switzerland
Created by Matthieu Cherubini
February 4 - 17 2022
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
36,000 feet is a video game set aboard a commercial plane flying over Afghanistan. As a passenger returning to his country from a holiday abroad, the player can watch blockbuster movies such as American Sniper on his in-flight entertainment display or chat with other passengers. The topics of their conversations range from terrorism to the “end of France”, whether Obama is Osama and how the West is currently living under a “terrible dictatorship”. 36,000 feet was developed with Unreal Engine 4, MetaHumans and Blender. This single channel video showcases some salient conversations and is meant as a standalone piece.
Matthieu Cherubini is a Swiss designer. After studying software engineering and media art/design, between 2012-2015, Cherubini joined a Doctorate program in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art. His research examines the implications of artificial moral agents on mundane events and everyday lives, both today and in the near future. His projects have been exhibited at several international venues, including the Centre Pompidou (France), ZKM (Germany), the V&A Museum (United Kingdom), the Vitra Design Museum (Germany), the Mori Art Museum (Japan), the House of Electronic Arts (Switzerland), and the Nam June Paik Art Center (South Korea). Cherubini is currently working and living in Beijing, China.
Wolfpath.exe
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 4’ 04”, 2017, Turkey
Created by Kadir Kayserilioğlu
January 21 - February 3 2022
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
vral.org
Updating a traditional origin myth through video game aesthetics, Wolfpath.exe is a meta-commentary on contemporary Turkey from the perspective of a young artist engaging with technology, popular culture, politics, and folklore. By directly confronting the technical and ideological constraints of Far Cry 5, a popular video game developed by French giant Ubisoft and a “paradigmatic example of the politics of videogames in the face of an ongoing ‘anti-progressive/anti-feminist backlash’ in the United States” — as Sören Schoppmeier convincingly argues in his essay “Playing to Make America Great Again: Far Cry 5 and the Politics of Videogames in the Age of Trumpism” — Wolfpath.exe forces the viewer to rethink the impact of game culture on the collective imaginary.
Born in 1987 in Istanbul, Kadir Kayserilioğlu received a B.A. in Graphic Design and an M.A. in Fine Arts from Yeditepe. He is currently pursuing a Doctorate program at Marmara University, while making and exhibiting art in Turkey and elsewhere. His practice is grounded in the idea that play operates across a wide range of forms including video games and collaborative, performance-based video and imagery. His works often rely on a combination of instructions and protocols on one hand, and collective improvisational processes and chance operations on the other. This often results in works that challenge conventional notions of authorship and authority, imbued with a dark humoristic style, showing irreverence towards traditional hierarchies between forms of high and popular culture, assembling high production value with home made and DIY esthetics. His areas of investigation include the nature of social reality, gender, identity politics, populist tactics, posthumanism and micro-stories. He often engages in strategies of the absurd, repurposing mythological narratives as well as science fiction and horror tropes towards a critical take on contemporary political dynamics.
A hand in the game
Digital video, color, sound, 35’ 08”, 2017, Sweden
Created by Hillevi Cecilia Högström, 2017
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.
Why don't the cops fight each other?
digital video, color, sound, 9’ 41”, 2021, United States of America, 2021
Created by Grayson Earle
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.
LIPSTRIKE
live recording of online performance
digital video (1280 x 720), sound, color, 10’, 2021 [2016], France
Created by Chloé Desmoineaux
Originally created in 2016, Lipstrike is an online performance in Counter-Strike that uses an unusual device as a weapon: a lipstick. Each time the artist applies cosmetics on her lips, her gun unleashes a torrent of bullets. She broadcast her performances on Twitch, receiving thousands of snarky comments by angry gamers, which were eventually collected and published in a limited edition booklet. Five years later, the artist updated the original iteration for VRAL. One question remains: has anything changed since #Gamergate?
Interested in tactical media, hacking culture, and cyberfeminism, Chloé Desmoineaux creates media experiments through performances, installations and hijacked video games. She is especially concerned about the place given to women as well as dissident and “minority” people in the video game industry and she tries to create spaces of visibility and reflection to discuss these issues. She is a member of the Freesson collective which focuses on supporting creative practices, electronic music and organizing events and workshops around digital art and culture. Co-organizer of the Art Games Demos (2017-2919) initiative with Isabelle Arvers, Desmoineaux has curated several exhibitions about the culture, aesthetics and ideology of gaming in the past decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She led several workshops on alternative controllers, glitch, interactive animations, and video games. Desmoineaux lives and works in Marseille.
