EVENT: ALIX DESAUBLIAUX (OCTOBER 28 - NOVEMBER 10 2022, ONLINE)

L’AUTRE MONSTRE (THE OTHER MONSTER)

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 48’ 26”, 2021, France (in French with English subtitles)

Created by Alix Desaubliaux

October 28 - November 10 2022

vral.org

 

L’Autre Monster (The Other Monster) is an experimental film created with/in Monster Hunter World (Capcom, 2018). A contemplative immersion in a fantasy universe, this machinima examines the affective nature of playing. The artist appropriated a popular Japanese RPG and hunting game to explore ecological issues related to the ongoing capitalist exploitation of nature, which are intimately linked to the affective positions of the players. This singular relationship is punctuated by questions about the ontology of the creatures that inhabit the world, their language and communication style, and the system of representation that informs their appearance and behavior. Part documentary, part visual poem, and part conceptual walk-through, The Other Monster was produced using in-game assets, environments, and 3D images generated by an application. From the Anjanath to the Deviljho and the Pukei-Pukei, from the director’s point of view to the players’ experiences with Serid and Unbot, accompanied by their palicos, the monster becomes a metaphor for Otherness: a tool to question one’s relationship to the Other and to the world as a whole.

French artist Alix Desaubliaux and has been an active member of the Vivarium workshop since January 2021. In addition to her artistic practice, she explores performative and experimental formats via online encounters with the collective 3G, featuring Annie Abrahams, Pascale Barret, and Alice Lenay. She is also involved with the research group WMAN, comprising six artists and curators working with video games. Desaubliaux teaches in several art schools including ENSAD Nancy, ESACM Clermont-Ferrand, ENSBA Lyon, ESAM Caen, ESBAN Nîmes, where she organizes workshops, interventions, conferences, and seminars. Her work has been presented in several exhibitions, events, and festivals including Jeune Création Fair in 2015 at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery; Digital Arts Biennial at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Domaine Pommery; Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète and Glassbox, among others. Desaubliaux lives and works in Rennes

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EVENT: CHRISTIAN WRIGHT (OCTOBER 14-27 2022, ONLINE)

SON

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

Created by Christian Wright

October 14 - 27 2022

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

Christian Wright reframes painting and cinema through the medium of the video game. Inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and by the extended duration of slow cinema, the artist references historical events and religious themes, but also fictional narratives, sagas and myths of the near future, introducing an expanded narrative that defies easy categorizations. Part of a trilogy, Son investigates the spiritual through the technical, using the notion of ritual as a point of departure. By emphasizing the in-between, the interstitial, and the liminal, the work transforms inactivity into revelation, emptiness into wholeness.

Christian Wright (b. 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne) is a digital media artist working with video games and animated assets to blend cinematic and machinima visual languages. Through this frame, he looks at how the boundaries of normal play are stretched by the performative actions of players themselves. Whether it be the intimate physical interactions of online multiplayer, the choreographed quest for perfection of speedrunning, or the mimetic act of digital cosplay within character creators, Christian places community driven gestures at the forefront.

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EVENT: MARTINA MENEGON (SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 13 2022, ONLINE)

when you are close to me I shiver

video recording of live simulation

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 7’ 47”, 2020, Italy

Created by Martina Menegon

Sound design by Alexander Martinz

Introduced by Luca Miranda

vral.org

when you are close to me I shiver is an algorithmically controlled live simulation, hereby presented as a video recording, that is, a real-time generated virtual experience that takes place in a version of the future in which humans, out of desperation, gather in masses on the last remaining piece of land. Inspired by the walrus scene in the documentary Our Planet narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, the project proposes a scenario encompassing ongoing environmental and personal crises. The video depicts a desolated island populated by 3D-scanned clones of the artist herself. Through these perceivable avatars, the artist creates a new identity that arises out of plurality, proprioceptively renegotiating the fragility of both the physical and the virtual self and its realities.

Martina Menegon (Italy, 1988) is an artist working predominantly with Interactive and Extended Reality Art. In her works, Martina creates intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its phygital corporeality. She experiments with the uncanny and the grotesque, the self and the body and the dialogue between physical and virtual realities, to create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature.

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EVENT: BABAK AHTESHAMIPOUR (SEPTEMBER 16 - SEPTEMBER 29 2022, ONLINE)

POST-CODED THOUGHTS ON THE NEVER-UPCOMING FORESHADOWED LI(F)E

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 8’ 054”, 2021, Iran/Greece

Created by Babak Ahteshamipour

Post-coded Thoughts on the Never-upcoming Foreshadowed Li(f)e is a machinima created with The Sims. In this post-apocalyptic narrative, human beings suddenly vanish, leaving behind all their digital spawns: A.I., avatars, algorithms, and programs. Faced with their own risk of extinction, these non-human entities acquire agency and embark into an existential journey to find meaning in an otherwise empty life. The main character is Babak Ahteshamipour’s alter ego, who is reproducing the sheer banality of RL (real life) activities in an environment mirroring his “real”, concrete space, having imported some of his paintings, few custom 3D models from other video games that are depicted in the paintings, musical improvisations with electric guitar and piano, and a text visualizing the sim-avatar’s thoughts.

Babak Ahteshamipour’s practice is based on the collision of the virtual vs actual, aimed at correlating various topics that are not directly connected at first glance from cyberspace to ecology and politics to identity exploring them via MMORPGs/video games, social media and online integrating themes of co-existence and simultaneity in response to the futuristic anthropocentric urge of technocracy to focus on posthumanism. He has exhibited and performed at Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), New Art City (online), The Wrong (online), Sub Rosa space (Athens, Greece), ERGO Collective (Athens, Greece), arebyte (online), Biquini Wax ESP (Mexico City, Mexico), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, Illinois) and elsewhere. He has released music on the independent cassette label Industrial Coast and his music has been played on radio stations such as Noods Radio (Bristol, U.K.), Radio Raheem (Milan, Italy), Fade Radio (Athens, Greece) and Radio alHara. Originally from Iran, Ahteshamipour lives and works in Athens, Greece.

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EVENT: GINA HARA (SEPTEMBER 2 - 15 2022, ONLINE)

VALLEY

digital video/machinima (1280 x 720), color, sound, 7’ 06”, Hungary/Canada

Created by Gina Hara

Inspired by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) software in mental health contexts, Gina Hara uses the world of Minecraft as a backdrop for a series of exchanges with an AI-powered chatbot, called Robin, developed specifically for the project. Both the process and the resulting narrative are documented in this short machinima.

Gina Hara is a Hungarian-Canadian filmmaker and artist. She holds an MA in Intermedia, an MFA in Film Production and worked with film, video, new media, gaming, and design. Waning (2011), her first fiction film, was nominated for a Best Canadian Short award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Your Place or Minecraft (2016), a machinima web series focusing on game studies, is currently available on YouTube. Hara’s full length documentary Geek Girls (2017) explores the notion of subculture from women’s perspective and was screened internationally, including IULM University in 2018 during the Gender Play conference. Her artworks have been exhibited by several institutions including the New Museum in New York, the Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montreal. Hara lives in Montreal, where she works as Creative Director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.

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