A closer look

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH’S BLOOD PAINTINGS

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, 2024, still

VRAL is currently showcasing Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings series as a single channel machinima. Today we take a closer look at her process to highlight key themes and contextualize her aesthetic choices.

At first glimpse, the lurid black and red canvases of Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings betray little of the cold, mechanical violence from whence they emerged. Yet the intra-triptych of videos, prints and photographs accompanying each finished piece document one of the most conceptually daring artistic processes within game art in recent memory, bridging virtual chaos and physical creation.

The genesis occurs not with “traditional” brushes, but with a stolen sedan careening down the endless freeways of Grand Theft Auto V’s sprawling fictional city, Los Santos. Smith ritualistically mows down random pedestrian after pedestrian, indifferent to the piled corpses littering her wake, or rather, using them as a source material. Through an online machinima feed, these virtual “vehicular blood harvests” stream to screens in her corporeal studio. Eyes locked on the carnage, the vampiric artist enacts swift gestural translations of each fresh victim into pigment. Ram, observe, render, repeat: a piece takes shape with each new mark responding to lives callously extinguished in a doom loop of hit-and-hit-and-hit-and-drag.

When the gameplay session concludes, having claimed several bystanders sacrificially for the sake of her work, Smith reviews the tapes from alternate camera angles. She zooms in on singular moments of compressed brutality, photoshopping images together with her physical canvas snapshots. These digital/physical hybrids form the third component in presenting each unique Blood Painting. Beside them, innocuous “art selfies” feature the artist clutching her macabre works with almost maternal pride rather than horror at their genesis.

These self congratulatory portraits seem jarringly incongruous beside the disturbing machinima footage of pedestrian carnage used to inspire…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith

Blood Paintings

digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024, Australia

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT ALEKSANDAR RADAN’S THIS WATER GIVES BACK NO IMAGES

VRAL is currently exhibiting Aleksandar Radan’s This water giver back no Images. To better contextualize this exhibition, we will be discussing some highlights from Radan’s eclectic oeuvre. Today we take a closer look at this remarkable video installation.

Produced in 2017, Aleksandar Radan’s This water giver back no Images is a 6-minute video work exploring the boundary between reality and simulation in digital worlds, created by manipulating landscapes and characters from Grand Theft Auto V. This work is strictly connected to the poem “No Images” (1922) by William Waring Cuney and Nina Simone’s song “Images” (1964), which address the inability of marginalized groups to see positive reflections of themselves mirrored back from society.

Radan incorporated an excerpt of Simone’s live 1964 recording of “Images” in his video. As her vocals play, the GTA-derived visuals distort – palm trees warp, avatars phase in and out of being. The looping images center on a mysterious, uncanny, pale gray avatar seated numbly in a room, lying outside by palm trees, and watching Simone sing on a television nested incongruously among levitating flora...

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Aleksandar Radan

This water gives back no Images

3-channel video installation, 6:12 min, loop, 2017, Germany; hereby presented as a single-channel digital video

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT LARS PREISSER’S HOME/NOME

VRAL is currently showcasing Lars Preisser’s HOME/NOME. Today we take a deep dive into this fascinating installation by discussing its unintended relation to Fumi Omori's equally mesmerizing Home Sweet Home.

Both featured in Season 4 of VRAL, Fumi Omori’s Home Sweet Home and Lars Preisser’s HOME/NOME are two installations that leverage video games to explore themes of domesticity, memory, and the concept of “home”. Despite their shared conceptual interests, the projects differ significantly in their artistic approaches and techniques.

A key distinction lies in the artists’ choice and use of the video game medium. Both appropriate and decontextualize Nintendo's product, but their approach and outcome are considerably different. Omori employs Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), a contemporary social simulation game, as the primary artistic material. By contrast, Preisser resurrects the vintage Super Nintendo title Mario Paint (1992). Omori’s adoption of Animal Crossing reflects her personal connection to the game as a source of escapism during the Covid-19 pandemic. The resulting machinima takes advantage of the game’s customizable architecture and interior design features. Preisser’s selection of Mario Paint stems from his childhood memories of using the game in the original apartment depicted in HOME/NOME. The retro aesthetic becomes a temporal bridge to the past.

Their divergent game texts contribute to major technical differences between the artworks. Home Sweet Home consists of digital video incorporating photogrammetry and impossible architecture constructed within Animal Crossing’s virtual world. The immersive 3D environment allows Omori to translate real memories into imaginative spaces unbound by physical constraints. On the other hand, HOME/NOME relies on lo-fi pixel art animation created through Mario Paint’s limited 2D drawing tools. Preisser opts for a…

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Lars Preisser, HOME/NOME, video installation, SNES game consoles, animation, video, Hi8, miniDV, Bang & Olufsen 90s TV sets, hereby presented as digital video, color, sound, 4’ 16, 2021-2022, Germany

Fumi Omori, Home Sweet Home, machinima/digital video, color, sound, 2’ 35”, 2023, Japan

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VIDEO: A CLOSER LOOK AT HUGO ARCIER’S GHOST CITY

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Currently on display at VRAL is Ghost City, Hugo Arcier’s groundbreaking 2016 video installation, which, until now, has never been exhibited online. The artwork clearly deserves a closer look, especially in its original iteration.

Digital Realism

A red-haired woman wearing a pitch black dress appears vaguely uneasy as she clasps her lavish handbag, perhaps wondering if the voracious camera consuming Los Santos before her eyes might breach the fourth wall and snatch her prized possession. She is taking in Hugo Arcier’s Ghost City at the 2016 Beirut Biennale, where the installation’s documenting the accelerated erosion — or rather full disappearance — of a virtual cityscape evokes a touch of apprehension in the viewer.

Inspired by a critical reading of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Ghost City is a creative reinterpretation of Los Santos, a virtual replica of Los Angeles, within the alternative reality of San Andreas, that is, Grand Theft Auto V’s setting. Originally conceived as an immersive installation, the work blurs the boundaries between reality and virtuality. With a masterful blend of architectural and graphic elements, the viewer is immersed in a hauntingly desolate, monochrome landscape, completely devoid of human presence. As the camera incessantly explores this evocative environment, the city’s structures fade away as if consumed by an invisible force. Through the juxtaposition of architectural details, the deliberate removal of living presence and the render-like aesthetics, Ghost City prompts viewers to contemplate the interplay of memory, virtuality, and the epistemological foundations that shape our perception of the world.

As an installation, Ghost City comprises two large parallel screens projecting the vision of the vanishing world, and a third screen that acts as a kind of poetic voice-over that can be read and listened to before or after, functioning therefore either as a prelude or an epilogue. Arcier compares such a narrator to a digital ghost, a placeholder for the virtual identities we leave behind through our online activities…

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT NATALIE MAXIMOVA’S THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

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Natalie Maximova’s mesmerizing machinima The Edge of the World unfolds as an exploration of boundaries within the landscapes of Cyberpunk 2077 that is both a virtual dérive and epistemological inquiry. In this video essay, Matteo Bittanti explores its unexpected connections to a seminal movie of the 1990s. 

In Peter Weir’s seminal The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey masterfully embodies the eponymous character, Truman Burbank, orchestrating his escape from the confines of Seahaven Island—a virtual prison existing in a state of dual unreality. Not only does this idyllic town fail to manifest in the tangible realm of the United States — its supposed setting within the film’s intra and extra-diegetic reality — but it also lacks a proper existence within its own filmic world. In fact, Seahaven Island emerges as an elaborate fabrication, an expansive film set where its inhabitants willingly assume the roles of actors. Truman alone, akin to many protagonists of Philip K. Dick’s stories, remains oblivious to this deceitful charade.

As the reluctant victim of this perverse concoction gradually awakens to his spectacular “golden cage” imprisonment, he plots his liberation through a makeshift tunnel concealed within a basement. Astonishingly, in the globally broadcast reality show that commands an audience of millions, we witness Truman defying his captors by embarking on a daring escape aboard a humble sailboat, departing from Seahaven Island’s shores. Yet, the puppeteering TV producers — modern day demiurges — unleash a tempestuous storm in a desperate bid to sabotage Truman’s voyage. Although the protagonist teeters on the precipice of drowning, his unyielding spirit propels him forward, sailing until his vessel collides with the imposing barrier of the dome. 

His boat hit the wall. 

In the past two decades, “The boat has hit the wall” has transcended mere linguistic expression and evolved into a shared vernacular, encapsulating a particular scenario wherein the confines of systemic or structural obstacles render their eventual overcoming seemingly insurmountable. An intriguing example can be encountered  in a “peculiar” 2013 interview of Kanye West by Zane Lowe on BBC Radio One. 

With its distinct resonance, this phrase has indelibly imprinted itself upon the collective psyche, assuming a nuanced significance that sets it apart from the more prevalent idiomatic trope of “hitting a brick wall.” This mantra permeates the vernacular, albeit perhaps not as persistently as the notable slogans of another influential late 1990s Hollywood production, The Matrix, such as “a glitch in the matrix” (which inspired a captivating 2021 documentary by Rodney Ascher), the tantalizing “red pill vs blue pill” quandary, the paradoxical “there is no spoon”, not to mention the evocative “going down the rabbit hole” which can be traced back to Lewis Carroll’s timeless opus, Alice in Wonderland.

In the opening scene of Maximova’s The Edge of the World, an accelerated vehicle careens through the desert, mercilessly trampling cacti in its path—a stark departure from Truman’s maritime escapades. And yet, the end result is the same. The wall has been hit. In this case, “the car has hit the wall”. This powerful image reverberates with symbolic resonance, evoking, among other things, the failure of the Trumpian fantasy of an impregnable, fortified, six-feet tall wall.

Truth be told, we’re not on Seahaven Island anymore, Maximova’s alter ego emerges unscathed from the wreckage, poised to confront the seemingly impenetrable barrier. Climbing the rocky terrain, she discovers an opening — a portal to the unknown. As she gazes back at the sprawling metropolis of Night City, a sense of trepidation mingled with anticipation fills the air. And then, with a leap of faith, she plunges into the depths of the metaphorical “rabbit hole,” an allegorical passage to the realm where the conventional rules governing reality disintegrate. 

What unfolds next is a dizzying descent — or rather, ascent — into an otherworldly space, where fragments of structures appear and vanish, creating an erratic, unpredictable choreography. The landscape, bereft of textures and logic, defies comprehension. In a disorienting shift of perspective, we become voyeurs in this strange realm beyond the visible, witnessing its broken beauty from multiple angles. Around the two-minute mark, the enigmatic protagonist finally materializes as the perspective switches from the first to…

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Matteo Bittanti

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VIDEO: JAKE COURI'S CHEAPSHOT (2020)

In CHEAPSHOT, Jake Couri masterfully blends the digital and the physical, creating a surreal digital landscape in which the main character, the viewer’s alter ego, performs EFT.

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Throughout this week, we’ll be exploring Jake Couri’s work, whose remarkable video A Precarious Night at Plumb Point is currently on display on VRAL.

We’ll begin with CHEAPSHOT (2020), which we briefly mentioned in our interview. 

In CHEAPSHOT, Couri employs digital art techniques to present a fluid and ever-shifting world that blurs the distinction between reality and the virtual realm. Utilizing computer graphics through Unreal Engine, the artist conjures a sense of hyperreality, echoing Jean Baudrillard's apt definition. This effect is further amplified by the use of aural cues, as sound designer Aaron Emmanuel's aural dissonance creates a feeling of disquiet and instability. The sudden alternation of gentle sounds with unexpected and jarring noise mirrors the emotional upheavals caused by the barrage of information, constant notifications, and overwhelming stimuli that come with living in a perpetually connected, “always on” digital world.

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT JORDY VEENSTRA'S AR3NA

SPACES AND (NON) PLACES

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Quake III Arena is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and released in 1999. The game became popular for its fast-paced multiplayer action and its modding community, which produced a variety of custom levels, game modes, and other modifications. One may argue that one of the most successful types of mod was machinima, which is generally described as the use of real-time 3D engines to create animated films.

Machinima made with Quake III Arena allowed players to create their own characters and use in-game tools to record and edit gameplay footage into video. These “movies” could be used to tell stories, create music videos, or recreate scenes from popular movies and TV shows. The ability to create and share machinima was an important part of the Quake III Arena community, and many players became skilled at using the game’s versatile tools to create high-quality videos. They competed with each other outside of the game, in a sense. Machinima can be understood as an example of the kind of unexpected, unplanned gameplay known as emergent gameplay, in Katie Salen’s definition or “High-performance play” to borrow Henry Lowood’s definition. For a more in-depth analysis of machinima’s roots, I recommend the Stanford historian’s insightful essay “Video capture: Machinima, documentation, and the history of virtual worlds”, included in essential The Machinima Reader (MIT Press, 2011).

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT KAMILIA KARD'S TOXIC GARDEN - DANCE DANCE DANCE

The making of Toxic Garden - DANCE DANCE DANCE, Courtesy of Kamilia Kard, via TikTok

THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?

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Kamilia Kard’s latest project is both a point of departure and arrival. It is consistent with the artist’s ongoing study of parasociality and online relationships but, at the same time, it marks a new chapter in her exploration of the convergence between IRL practices and simulations through game-based technologies. Behind a facade of playful activities, this work is really about the toxicity of social media. 

The project was inspired by Cao Fai’s performances within Second Life, a proto-metaverse that was introduced in the early Zeroes. While still active, Linden Lab’s virtual world has been superseded by other platforms, including video games such as Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. Nonetheless, Fei’s pioneering work showed how people’s behavior online tend to become more aggressive and disinhibited due to the anonymity afforded by their avatars, a virtual mask. Fei noted that this anti-social behavior tends to increase when the avatar is not a realistic mimesis of the player. In other words, the more fictional the avatar, the most aggressive the user’s behavior becomes. Although anecdotal, Fei’s conclusions prompted Kard to examine Roblox, an online open-ended building game introduced in 2006. 

Kard began experimenting with Roblox during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many countries, including (especially) Italy, under a regime of strict lockdowns. Popular among the young - children and teenagers - Roblox is often used as a virtual playground for socialization purposes. In her research, Kard followed a group of teenagers who were struggling to fit in and play according to the established conventions and the required etiquette. They had trouble finding the “right” outfit and costume, the “right” maps, the “right” cliques, and the “right” slang. In other words, according to Kard, an artist/ethnographer in virtual worlds, rather than  introducing new, alternative ways of interacting compared to the “real world”, Roblox simply replicated the awkwardness and uncertainty of IRL relationships.

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT CHRISTIAN WRIGHT'S SON

Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Homo Sapiens, 2016

FROM RITUAL TO MACHINIMA: THE HUMAN SERIOUSNESS OF PLAY

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The work we’re currently exhibiting on VRAL is part of a monumental project developed by Christian Wright in 2016, consisting of a trilogy of machinima titled Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The thread connecting these works is the idea of ritualistic play, that is, the repetitive actions performed by the player, which Wright connects to the idea of the supernatural as represented in digital gaming and in game communities. In these works, religious themes and mundane concerns are intertwined. Likewise, the sacred and the profane are juxtaposed audaciously. Unlike many of his peers, Wright tends to use multiple games at once to create his machinima: in Son, for instance, NieR: Automata and Grand Theft Auto V are cleverly juxtaposed. He records footage from a variety of titles and then edits the most interesting bits to produce a cogent narrative. 

What impresses about Wright is an uncommon ability to mix the vernacular and the avant-garde. For instance, Son was inspired both by Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime landscapes, whose imagery is all but manifest in many of the frames, but also by the work of Austrian filmmaker Nikolau Geyrhalter, whose outstanding series of documentaries includes Earth (2019), Pripyat (1999) and Homo Sapiens (2016). The latter, which Wright mentions as a key inspiration, depicts a disquieting scenario whereby the world made by people is slowly won back by nature. At once a science fiction narrative and a documentary, Homo Sapiens is speaking both of the contingent moment and of a post-apocalyptic future. Likewise, Son depicts an array of realistic and fantastic environments, creating some kind of cognitive dissonance in the mind of the spectator...

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT MARTINA MENEGON'S WHEN YOU ARE CLOSE TO ME I SHIVER

Martina Menegon, when I am close to you I shiver, installation shot by Georg Mayer, MAK, Museum of Applied Arts, Wien, 2020

MASS SUICIDE IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE EMERGENCY

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Currently exhibited on VRAL as a machinima, Martina Menegon’s when you are close to me I shiver was originally conceived as a live simulation. Presented as an installation featuring tablets, large screens, and an immersive soundscape designed by Alexander Martzin, when you are close to me I shiver is a multimedia experience bringing together the artist’s key concerns: the body as a site of conflict, self-representation as a political act, and climate change. Menegon imagines a future where humankind is close to extinction, a realistic outcome considering half a century of complete dismissal of climate change by the worlds’ governments. In this live simulation, the world is completely submerged by water, like in a Ballardian nightmarescape.

The survivors converge on a small island to die. Naked and vulnerable, they simply wait for the inevitable end. Such a scenario is both uncanny and familiar: after all, it was inspired by a powerful scene in David Attenborough’s Our Planet (2019) depicting more than 100,000 moribund walruses as they gather onto a small stretch of coast in Northern Russia in 2017 (“20 kilometers of a never ending walrus gathering”, as scientist Anatoly Cochnev described it). Some of the most graphic scenes show walruses falling from cliffs, evoking the image of a “falling man” jumping to his death as New York’s Twin Towers were about to crumble. The walrus gather on this place because of the melting ice in the Arctic: having nowhere to go, they choose death…

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Matteo Bittanti

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT BABAK AHTESHAMIPOUR’S POST-CODED THOUGHTS...

Babak Ahteshamipour, Paleontology of Non-existence, installation shot at Sub Rosa space, Athens, Greece, 2021

WHAT COMES AFTER ARMAGEDDON?

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Currently exhibited on VRAL, Babak Ahteshamipour’s Post-coded Thoughts on the Never-Upcoming Foreshadowed Li(f)e's originality reflects the author’s own trajectory, which includes a degree in music theory, harmony and violin studies and a Master of Science in Mineral Resources Engineering. Born in Iran in 1994, Ahteshamipour’s work with video game based video art is relatively recent, although “it boldly shaped [his] identity throughout early life and since cyberspace is part of [his] broader artistic research”, as he told Fantacci. Post-coded Thoughts’s was produced while the world was experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, with its litany of deaths, lockdowns, and disinformation. Released in 2021, it signaled a shift, or rather a new phase in Ahteshamipour’s practice.

In a sense, the work is an assemblage of motifs, but also artifacts, hereby rendered as virtual objects. Consider for instance the painterly works featured in paleontology of non-existence (2021) an installation that appropriates and recontextualizes characters from various video games and uses tweet-like slogans such as “It seems, after all, we couldn't escape the game engines”. Post-coded was part of this complex scenario in which various planes of reality - the tangible, the simulation, the augmented - engage in a conversation.

Albeit visually playful and imbued with a distinct kind of irony, the world that Paleontology of Non-existence alludes to is a dystopia. An unexplained “event” has abruptly and irreversibly erased all of mankind, so that Earth is now inhabited by AIs. Equally mysterious is the reason behind AI rapid evolution: left to their own devices, machines become sentient, wondering about the disappearance of their former creators. This new algorithmic age is marked by an existential crisis. Machines are trying to find meaning in a world that appears utterly fatalistic. The new normal, just like the old normal, is being stuck in a feedback loop: on the one hand, the simverse is a replica of the pre-existing world. On the other hand, the avatar - a stand-in of the artist himself - is clearly looking for answers that the simulation - just like a market based society - cannot provide. The puppet has become the puppeteer but the wires have not been cut: free will is not an option. Free will can only be simulated. Ditto for artistic creation: the puppet plays music, shifting from his guitar to his piano, stares at his paintings for inspiration, and shares his thoughts and moods.

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Matteo Bittanti

All images courtesy of the artist

Babak Ahteshamipour, Paleontology of Non-existence, installation shot at Sub Rosa space, Athens, Greece, 2021

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT GINA HARA'S VALLEY

YES, THE FUTURE DOES SOUND LIKE A CHATBOT

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Exclusively featured on VRAL until September 15 2022, Gina Hara’s latest project Valley was originally developed during a three month artist residency at Ada X (October-December 2021) under a different title. Originally founded in 1996 as Studio XX, Ada X (2020-) is a bilingual feminist artist-run center located in Montréal, Canada committed to exploration, creation, and critical reflection in media arts and digital culture. Its main goals are making accessible, demystifying, equipping, questioning, and creating art and culture to contribute to the development of a digital democracy. Ada X hosts residencies, workshops, discussions, exhibitions, performances, and educational activities. Hara’s residency was supported by Algora Lab, an interdisciplinary academic laboratory that fosters a deliberative ethics of AI and digital innovation and analyzes the societal and political aspects of the emerging algorithmic society. Gina Hara is an artist-filmmaker with a background in new media and video art. Her work focuses on marginalized narratives from feminist and immigrant perspectives, specifically in the context of social media and games culture. Entitled AI the End, the original video - which you can watch here - was officially unveiled on Thursday December 9, 2021.

Gina Hara’s ongoing interest in the proliferation of artificial intelligence assistants offering pseudo mental-health help online piqued during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was marked by social isolation and an unprecedented lack of IRL interactions. Specifically, Hara draws a parallel between video game playing and AI-assisted mental health. Such a comparison is remarkable because it provides a possible explanation for the rise of digital gaming as neoliberalism became the world’s dominant ideology: taken to its extreme yet logical consequences, we may suggest that there’s a direct connection between mental disorders and video games. The more psychologically unstable we become due to the conditions of the environments we live in, the more we play Minecraft and the likes. Which is to say: the more unstable, precarious, broken, and unpredictable the World becomes, the stronger the need to exert some kind of control and agency over another kind of world, a simulated world in which we are cast as a powerful demiurge. As the Neoliberalism project succeeded in excising democracy from politics, disenfranchising the masses and replacing it with the so-called “freedom to choose” which pair of sneakers you can buy on Amazon, video games introduced a form of pseudo participation through interactivity. TED Talk “gurus” and Silicon Valley’s “edgelords” call this phenomenon “democratization”, a word that  like “friend”, “community”, “like” has no real meaning outside of the Big Tech bubble, or rather, has purely transactional implications.

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Matteo Bittanti

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A CLOSER LOOK AT LETTA SHTOHRYN’S CRYPTOHEAVEN3

As McKenzie Wark aptly put it, it’s not that video games are becoming more and more life-like, but life itself is becoming more and more like a video game. That’s not a good thing, in case you were wondering.

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Cryptoheaven3 (2022) is the third iteration of an ongoing project developed by Letta Shtohryn with The Sims 4 (Maxis/Electronic Arts, 2014) about the digital afterlife of Gerald Cotten, the CEO of QuadrigaCX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange. When Cotten unexpectedly passed away in 2018, he held the passwords to every customer's digital wallet, thereby rendering their $190 million investment lost or missing. His mysterious disappearance sparked several conspiracy theories and marked the beginning of an online hunt for “the Truth” (incidentally, this story is narrated by Luke Sewell in his 2022 documentary Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King, currently available on Netflix).

Shtohryn began exploring this debacle shortly after Cotten’s passing with a series of multimedia projects. In the first installment, a 12-minute machinima entitled Crypto H(e)aven (2019), Gerry has altered both his identity and appearance. He is now living on a small, exotic island populated by digital nomads. Crypto H(e)aven was originally presented in the group show Object, Objetc, Objec alongside works by Liza Eurick and Katri Kempass at Spazju Kreattiv in Malta between May 3 - June 16 2019. The video was part of an installation featuring scaffolding (180 cm x 5 pieces), four UV printed synthetic curtains (180 x 180 cm), silver fabric, and chocolate (consumable) bitcoin. As Shtohryn wrote in the accompanying text, “Gerald Cotten’s remarkable ability to be both alive and dead in the mind of the redditors transforms him into a Schrödinger’s quantum phenomenon.” Her research was subsequently expanded during Shtohryn’s online residency at Isthisit in August 2019 (a short video summary can be watched here)…

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Matteo Bittanti

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A CLOSER LOOK AT KOSSOFF FLEES UKRAINE

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In his own words

I created a scan of one of Kossoff’s London paintings using photogrammetry and imported them into a video game development toolkit. The heavy impasto brushstrokes provided an eerily lifelike landscape of peaks and troughs. An algorithm was used to populate the scene with flora and fauna, mimicking a dense conifer forest along a coastal route. Volumetric clouds pass over an early morning winter sun, with a thick haze slicing through the trees.

Audio was overlaid from a recent live capture in Kyiv, with disturbing rumblings in the distance interrupting an unusually quiet cityscape. The subtitles are all taken from real accounts of fleeing refugees from the 2022 conflict in Ukraine. Their stitched together words tell a harrowing story of war, displacement and leaving behind lives, families and home. The slow pace of the trek around the digital landscape will provide familiarity to gamers, referencing the stillness of popular first person shooters like Call or Duty: Warzone and DayZ—games inspired by the Eastern conflicts and where the next fatal hazard is just around the corner.

I wanted to use the medium of a first person shooter to draw attention to the popularity of this genre by the military, both as a training simulation and also as a targeted recruitment method. The idea of kids online trash talking and getting kill streaks sits uncomfortably with the real life horrors relayed by the subtitled refugees.

Jason Rouse

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT AU-DELÀ DU DÉSERT FLOU, PLUS AUCUNE SAUVEGARDE N’EST POSSIBLE (PART TWO OF TWO)

What beliefs, ideologies, and values inform the most popular video game set in the Wild West? Elisa Sanchez, the author of Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde provides thought-provoking answers in a compelling essay in two parts.

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Watch Elisa Sanchez’ Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible

the first part of this essay is available here


Wild Wild West

In English, the word frontier does not only characterize the demarcation between two territories or two things, but designates a region or wilderness located on the edge or beyond a populated territory. This frontier is not a political or even a geographical delimitation. It is an area in motion, a space that moves with the population growth of white settlers. It is the West, with a capital W, always far, far away. It is a goal, a challenge, vast enough to absorb thousands of settlers and yet remain unconquered, eternally offering new adventures to those willing to risk their lives to experience them all. The frontier is a symbolic place, real and imaginary at the same time. It does not matter that its conquest was won at the expense of the land and its occupants.

In his 1893 article, the historian Frederick Turner discusses the importance of the frontier and westward expansion in the formation process of the American people: their identity and core ideas (e.g., democracy) are based on the idea of eradication. Specifically, the conquest of the West would consist of a double overcoming of borders, not only geographical, but also internal. The widespread popularization of his thesis on the frontier, which would make the one who overcomes it gain strength and individuality, has influenced a great number of narratives and folk stories, which describe the mythical Wild West by highlighting characters that are bearers of individualism and violence. Turner ignores gender and race, and says little about class. He sees the natives as an expression of the wilderness to be conquered at all costs. Like mountains, bears, and wolves, indigenous people consist of an obstacle to westward progress and self-realization.

The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action.

(Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Martino Publishing, [1920] 2014)

Turner, and many others with him, subscribe to the idea that conquest and killing are conducive of human progress. They are a necessary price to pay, regrettable perhaps, but non negotiable. Only genocide can make humanity evolve. But by making the frontier an exclusively male and white phenomenon - thus excluding women and racialized people -Turner postulates that the only point of view that matters is that of the white settlers. To tell a story is to organize reality by assigning a unity of time and place, to allow some voices and silence others. The myth of the frontier provides a plot, as well as a direction: straight for the sun that sets the sky ablaze with purple and scarlet. But if one stares for too long ay the sun, one becomes blind.

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army surrounded a camp of Miniconjous Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The soldiers searched the camp for weapons; caught in the grip of five hundred soldiers and four cannons, the Miniconjous had no choice but to comply. But during the search, a shot rang out and the army opened fire and machine-gunned the Miniconjous. Three hundred corpses were dumped a few days later in a mass grave; nearly half were women and children. While the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to portray the destruction of Wounded Knee as a battle, later investigations clearly established that it was a massacre; the Miniconjous Sioux were outnumbered, starved and unarmed. Yet some twenty soldiers who participated were awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest award given to a member of the U.S. armed forces. It was not until 2019 that these awards were rescinded.

I am Arthur Morgan, a strong, violent white man with a thick beard and two guns. I know this body is not mine, and yet. Where does Arthur Morgan, the avatar who rides tirelessly under beautiful sunsets, and Elisa Sanchez, who plays the game over and over again, begin? Arthur is not only the main character in the story I am being told; as a player, I am an active participant in the story and embody the character. His actions are my own, and while the roads we travel have been laid out by others, I choose to travel them…

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT AU-DELÀ DU DÉSERT FLOU, PLUS AUCUNE SAUVEGARDE N’EST POSSIBLE (PART ONE OF TWO)

What beliefs, ideologies, and values inform the most popular video game set in the Wild West? Elisa Sanchez, the author of Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde provides thought-provoking answers in a compelling essay in two parts.

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Watch Elisa Sanchez’ Au-delà du désert flou, plus aucune sauvegarde n’est possible


The unbearable nostalgia of the setting sun

It is through the conquest of the West that the American notion of the frontier was constructed, one of the most enduring myths of our recent history. The frontier is cast as a horizon to be reached, to be seized, to be conquered, where one can fully realize oneself and, at the same time, fulfill the promise of a much greater destiny, a promise that entails the victory of civilization over the wilderness. By making this universe palpable to the point of outrageousness for the sheer pleasure of players, Red Dead Redemption 2, reintroduces the narrative of the frontier and its conquest which had informed the Wild West film genre for decades. But it also fails to provide something different, to rewrite this myth from a point of view that does not coincide with that of the conqueror.

In 1899, the mythical Wild West is living its last days. As a result of one of the most dramatic genocides of the history of mankind, native peoples have been chased off the plains to make way for white settlers; the forests were cut down for their wood, the hills gutted for their coal. In these apocalyptic times that accompany the end of the cowboy as a hero, I assume the role of Arthur Morgan, a member of an outcast crew led by Dutch Van Der Linde. I have a thick beard and two guns. I attack trains, rob banks, and pick flowers. I have died a thousand times and come back to life a thousand times more. I roam the territory where my story is set, crossing mountains and swamps, plains and deserts, always on the move, always searching.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an action-adventure game, developed and published in 2018 by Rockstar Games. According to the game's official website, RDR 2 tells "an epic story set in the heart of the unforgiving wilderness of the United States," in a vast and immersive world. Every inch of this world has been meticulously thought out, every detail scrupulously studied to make it feel alive and authentic. RDR 2 required thousands of employees, eight years of development, 700 voice actors, 2,000 pages of script and 500,000 lines of dialogue.

It's an absurdly ambitious game that broke new records at launch. It’s an incredible achievement that required enormous effort and sacrifice. Rockstar Games’ studios have embraced an extreme work culture ethos, crunch squared: “voluntary” overtime and pressure to work more than they should. During the end credits, thousands of names scroll by, showing all the people who worked on the game. Well, almost all of them: these credits, a guarantee of visibility and recognition, are also a means of pressure. To see your name in the credits, you were required to keep you head down in the trenches until the end of the project. Few professions are characterized as a “passion job”, a qualification that would justify spending time and energy to be poorly, or not at all, remunerated.

The professions of video game developer and artist-author are among them.

Hic sunt dracones

At the beginning of the game, the map of my universe is covered by an opaque white fog, which will dissipate as I progress. This mist, so fragile and yet terribly thick, hides any relief, any city, any road. In medieval cartography, the expression hic sunt dracones (here are the dragons) was used to designate unknown or dangerous territories: where cartographers have not yet gone, monsters covered with scales remain…

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ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT MY PAWS ARE SOFT, MY BONES ARE HEAVY

What does it mean to make art in the age of algorithms? This is the question posed by Felix Klee with My paws are soft, my bones are heavy, a machinima he assembled by combining its various components developed by machines, i.e., a screenplay “written by artificial intelligence language model”, a synthetic voice over (read: a text-to-speech converter), and footage captured with/in a “modded video game”, specifically Grand Theft Auto V.

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Originally screened at the 37th Interfilm Berlin Short Film Festival in 2021, My paws are soft, my bones are heavy uses an open-source artificial intelligence released by OpenAI in February 2019 called GTP-2. Described as “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text”, GTP-2 creates “synthetic text samples in response to the model being primed with an arbitrary input”.

A meditation on the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence within society and its impact on creativity and ingenuity, My paws are soft, my bones are heavy is the follow up to Klee’s previous experiment with GTP-2. In 2020, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, the German artist produced (or "assembled") The glassy quiet, which similarly features an artificial intelligence reflecting “on the current crisis state of quietness and uncertainty” only to conclude that “reality seems off”.

Clocking at exactly one minute, The glassy quiet is both uncanny and eerily poignant, like many projects developed with AI language models. As the virtual camera zooms in on the main character standing before giant radar installations, his face breaks apart, glitch-like. Next, we see the interior of a kitchen. This time, the camera is not fixed, but nervously moving, until its gazes fixes a pigeon standing outside, near a pool. As it gets closer to the animal, the image seems to break apart, and we realize that the bird has two heads. The scene changes again. We discern a silhouette of a man running in the distance. The background is luminous, almost blinding but blurry. The synthetic voice over concludes “I’m not just dead to everyone else, but dead to myself”.

The viewing experience - reminiscent of a hallucination - produces a sense of cognitive dissonance. It also insinuates that if one were to look closely at things, the very texture of reality would quickly break apart. Everyday life is just one glitch away from total implosion. The three segments seem unrelated and yet their combination creates… something meaningful, though such meaning remains elusive. The same it’s true for My paws are soft, my bones are heavy, whose final segment depicting a mountain lion diving into the ocean in search for peace and tranquility debuted in 2020 in the ongoing series “The One Minutes” under the title For as long as it takes to get through the darkness.

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