PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT
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PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️
The Milan Machinima Festival is proud to present Nanut Thanapornrapee’s This History is Auto-Generated: A Tale of Two Thailands which reinterprets Thailand’s political history with the aid of GPT-3, an AI text generator. A Tale of Two Thailand setting in an alternative future where Thailand is divided into two states: an anarchist state and a military shogunate.
Nanut Thanapornrapee is a visual artist who uses essay images and a participatory approach to explore the meta-narrative and history of people and technology. He graduated in Journalism and Mass Communication (with a major in photography and filmmaking) at Thammasat University. In 2021 he participated with Baan Norg Collaborative Art and Culture to create HAWIWI: I Wish I Wrote a History which experiments on meta-narrative by writing a history of Ratchabur, a city in Western Thailand, via card game and participatory with locals including high schooler and elementary students. In 2021 he received the Prince Claus Seed Award and participated in a mobile lab program at Documenta 15.
Gemma Fantacci discussed This History is Auto-Generated: A Tale of Two Thailands with the artist:
Gemma Fantacci: In the words of Paul Marino, machinima refers to “the real-time production of animated films within a 3D virtual environment using video games.” However, recent year’s developments show how machinima has evolved into different formats, blending with other artistic languages, and thus taking a hybrid form. For some, it remains a technique, while for others it has become a medium in its own right, one in which gameplay and game space lose all connection to the original video game to be refunctionalized within counter narratives that reflect on instances related to today’s political and social situations, or on the problematic issues of video game culture. When did you find out about machinima for the first time and how did you begin to incorporate video game elements into your work?
Nanut Thanapornrapee: In the research phase of This History is Auto-Generated, I have read Alfie Bown’s The Playstation Dreamworld (2017), which discusses the tendency of video games to represent the capitalist ideology but also how video games could become an anti-capitalist tool as well. Therefore I started to research and contemplate video games from different perspectives, aside from entertainment, and especially game streaming content which is growing popular in Thailand. Many streamers create their own style of storytelling which is not limited to the context of the games they are playing, but implements their narratives as well. That is when I started to use machinima as one of my practices in this project. The juxtaposition of several video games’ contexts creates bizarre experiences and alternative ways to interpret and represent narratives and history, which I find more enjoyable in terms of making and viewing.
Gemma Fantacci
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