VRAL is currently showcasing Filip Kostic’s 2019 game video Filip Kostic VS Filip Kostic in a brand new format. To contextualize this specific artwork as well as the artist’s oeuvre, we will be discussing a series of artworks influenced, inspired and/or developed with video games and game tools, such as the Unreal Engine. We begin with Fortnite: 007 Merciful Angel, an artistic remake of Epic Game’s popular battle royale video game.
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Filip Kostic’s Fortnite: 007 Merciful Angel is a reimagining of Fortnite, engineered using the Unreal Engine 5. This project was originally commissioned by curator Aaron Moulton for his groundbreaking exhibition The Influencing Machine, first showcased at Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest, Romania in 2019, and later revisited at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland in 2022. Fortnite: 007 Merciful Angel was subsequently presented in the context of the Manic American Humanist Show at Public Works Administration in New York between March 10-26 2023, alongside the works of other core members of the internet collective Do Not Research.
In The Influencing Machine, Moulton explored the nuanced relationship between institutions and media in societies transitioning from socialist to capitalist systems. Within the domain of visual arts, the curator explored the evolution from socialist realism to creative freedom, albeit constrained by the stipulations set forth in open-call exhibition guidelines. Recontextualizing the art of the 1990s within the modern-day milieu, both the exhibition and its related publication provide an intellectual platform for critical discourse on the global art ecosystem, interrogating key thematic areas, such as the integral role of activism in the artistic sphere, the influence of ideology on creative production, and the potency of institutional critique.
Curated by Abbey Pusz, the exhibition Manic American Humanist Show was situated in the aftermath of a decade marked by internet-enabled political experimentation, making it, historically speaking, a sort of follow up to The Influencing Machine. It also presented a US-centric view as opposed to the more European focus of Moulton’s show. Specifically, Manic American Humanist Show explored how the digital age – from the Occupy movement in 2011 to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – has contributed in giving rise to a new kind of American citizen with increasingly specialized and highly tribalistic political leanings. The exhibition humorously engaged with this phenomenon through the lens of Post-Internet art, analyzing how contemporary alienation manifests in the fringe political spaces online before it reaches the mainstream…
Matteo Bittanti
Work cited
Filip Kostic
Fortnite 007: Merciful Angel, interactive game, 2022-in progress, Serbia/United States
All videos (Fortnite: 007 Merciful Angel: Opening Sequence and 007 Merciful Angel: Scarlet Witch Monologue, both 2022) and screenshots courtesy of the Artist
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