AI

MMF MMXXIV: STEFAN PANHANS AND ANDREA WINKLER

We are excited to feature Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) at the 2024 edition of the Milan Machinima Festival.

Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler’s »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) merges 3D scanning, CGI, avatars, and motion capture with dialogue reflecting AI-driven communication, all set in a vibrantly constructed virtual world. This absurdist mini-drama, divided into three segments, employs real-time graphics to navigate through surreal landscapes - from a BMX course cluttered with office chairs to an otherworldly forest filled with giant pills. The narrative follows two characters wandering fantastical settings, their dialogue laden with misinterpretations and emotional depth, driven by digital patterns and AI mimesis. These avatars, combining 3D models with the actors’ facial scans, move through a series of visually striking, absurd environments that blur the lines between the digital and the physical. Produced during a fellowship at the Academy of Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, the film critically examines the intricacies of communication with artificial intelligences that saturate modern life. It intentionally highlights the digital-analog conflict and the charming flaws of integrating these realms, rejecting seamless integration for a portrayal filled with comedic and eerie inaccuracies. Through this, »If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is« (Machinima version) not only entertains but also probes the complexities of our increasingly digital existence.

Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler explore contemporary media and its effects on the mind and body through video, photography, installation, and text. Panhans (born in Hattingen, Germany) undertakes a mental archaeology of hyper mediatization and digitalization, examining their influence on the mind and power relations in society. His work also engages with racism, celebrity worship, stereotypes, and diversity. He studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. Winkler (born in Fällanden, Zurich, Switzerland) examines similar themes through sculpture, video, and installation. She studied at Slade School of Fine Art in London under John Hilliard and Bruce McLean, after completing a degree in Visual Communication at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg under Wolfgang Tillmans and Gisela Bullacher. Together, the duo create interdisciplinary works that critically investigate contemporary media culture and human-technology interactions through experimental aesthetics. Their collaborations take the form of video, performance, and installation. Their 2016 video, À Rebours. Mod#1.I, was recently featured on VRAL.

Read more about the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

EVENT: YEAR OF THE ROBOT: THREE MACHINIMA SHORTS (OCTOBER 3 2023, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA)

As part of Melbourne International Games Week Film Series, ACMI’s curator Joni Maxwell presents three takes at AI’s effect on society, through the lens of machinima.

For the first time in Australian cinemas, a cutting-edge retrospective —curated by Jini Maxwell at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne — is set to challenge how we perceive video games in the context of sociopolitical landscapes. This showcase features three short films that employ screen-captured footage from popular video games Grand Theft Auto V and Battlefield to investigate the collusion between virtual and real-world politics.

The Year of the Robot is part of the Melbourne International Games Week Film Series, a three day cinematic and machinimatic tour de force situated at the intersections between video games and wider cultural phenomena. The series begins Sunday, October 1, featuring a dialogue between Summerfall Studios co-founders David Gaider, Elie Young, and Liam Esler, moderated by Jini Maxwell. The session celebrates the launch of their debut project, Stray Gods, a musical odyssey inspired by an array of multimedia influences ranging from television and cinema to stage musicals.

Continuing the program on Monday, October 2, is a screening of Andrew Bujalski’s cult movie Computer Chess (2013), a retro excursion into the techno-utopianism of the 1980s. Focused on an annual chess convention, the film captures the competitive spirit of software developers racing to create the ultimate chess algorithm. Notably, Computer Chess was filmed using a vintage tube video camera and employed non-professional actors with specialized knowledge in computer science.

Concluding the series on October 3 is the Year of the Robot screening, which includes three poignant short films that dissect how video games shape or are shaped by sociopolitical realities. Grayson Earle’s Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? (2021) scrutinizes the coding of police behaviors in Grand Theft Auto V. Mathias Wolff’s It’s Just Math (2021) delves into predictive policing and its implications on Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour in Los Angeles. The program culminates with Total Refusal’s How to Disappear (2021), which contemplates the politics of combat desertion, using Battlefield (2002) as a case study.


Year of the Robot: Three machinima shorts

A machinima retrospective curated by Jini Maxwell

Part of The Melbourne International Games Week Film Series

October 3 2023

ACMI Museum

Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia


Featured Program

Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?

Still from Why Don't the Cops Fight Each Other? (2021), Grayson Earle

Director: Grayson Earle

Year: 2021

Country: USA

Duration: 9’ 4”

Language: English

Format: Digital Cinema Package (DCP)

Grayson Earle’s groundbreaking work, Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? (2021), explores the manifestation of the controversial "blue wall of silence" in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V (2013). Over the span of nearly ten minutes, Earle conducts a desktop performance, capturing his meticulous efforts to deconstruct and modify the game's coding. Through this lens, Earle unveils how ingrained social structures influence police conduct within the virtual world, mirroring complex sociopolitical dynamics.

It’s Just Math

Screen capture from Mathias Wolff's It’s Just Math (2021). Courtesy of the artist

Director: Mathias Wolff

Year: 2021

Country: Germany

Duration: 29’ 52”

Language: English

Format: Digital Cinema Package (DCP)

Mathias Wolff's It’s Just Math (2021) takes viewers to the fictional city of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto V to present an experimental documentary focused on predictive policing. Wolff delves into the significant impact of these predictive technologies on the lives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) in Los Angeles. The film critically examines “Dirty Data” —data that is inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent — and discusses how its integration into predictive policing software perpetuates systemic biases against BIPOC communities.

How to Disappear

Still from How to Disappear (2021), Total Refusal. Courtesy of the artist

Director: Total Refusal

Year: 2021

Country: Austria

Duration: 21’ 6”

Language: English

Format: Digital Cinema Package (DCP)

In How to Disappear (2021), media collective Total Refusal adopts a pseudo-Marxist lens to scrutinize the political implications of combat desertion in both real and digital spheres. Positioned as an anti-war narrative, the film grapples with the ethics and potential avenues for peace within the adversarial environment of the multiplayer war game Battlefield (2002).

MEDIA COVERAGE: NEITHER ARTIFICIAL NOR INTELLIGENT: MACHINIMA IN THE AGE OF AI (ITALIAN)

What is the relationship between machinima and AI? A new article on Duels magazine provides an overview courtesy of T.L. Taylor, Marshall McLuhan, and Kate Crawford. Not to mention Ben Nicholson, Total Refusal, Andrea Gatopolous, Mathias Wolff, Sjors Rigters, and Kent Sheely.

Text in Italian

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH KENT SHEELY

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The Milan Machinima Festival is thrilled to announce the on-site screening of Kent Sheeely’s machinima Welcome Back. Sheely’s work offers a timely reflection on the highly anticipated return to “normalcy” following the global pandemic. Using Transport Fever (Urban Games, 2016) as his primary source material, Sheely masterfully appropriates and manipulates the game’s realistic infrastructure-building mechanics to create a thought-provoking exploration of the world that awaits us post-Covid.

At first glance, Transport Fever’s immersive gameplay mechanics appear to offer a straightforward and engaging experience, allowing players to construct and manage their own transportation networks across different eras. However, as Sheely suggests through his artful manipulation of the game’s content in order to trigger glitches and visual anomalies, the journey towards a state of “normalcy” may prove to be far more disconcerting and unsettling than we ever imagined.

Kent Sheely (b. 1984, United States) is a new media artist based in Los Angeles. His work draws both inspiration and foundation from the aesthetics and culture of video games, examining the relationships between real and imagined worlds. Much of his work centers around the translation and transmediation of symbols, concepts, and expectations from game space to the real world and vice versa, forming new bridges between simulation and lived reality.

Matteo Bittanti: As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to linger in our collective memory, it remains a paradoxical experience, insofar as it feels both fresh and remote. As an artist, how did you navigate this unprecedented moment in history? What were your personal encounters with this global crisis? Did it function as a harbinger of more catastrophic events to come, or was it “simply” a significant historical outlier? Moreover, how did you reconcile yourself with the concept of the “new normal,” and what coping mechanisms did you deploy to manage the tumultuous and ever-changing landscape of the pandemic? In essence, how did you perceive, process, and ultimately respond to this momentous period of crisis and upheaval that you represent with/in Welcome Back?

Kent Sheely: In March of 2020, I was working a full-time job in downtown Los Angeles, taking a bus to and from the office each day. When central management called to inform everyone we’d be working from home for a while (they thought it would only last a week!), it was just a fun change of pace for me and my coworkers at first; nobody knew how bad the spread of Covid already was, or that it would only get worse and impact our daily lives for years to come.

I quickly adjusted to doing the job from my home office, but after a few weeks of quarantine and constantly reading news about the escalating impact of the virus, cabin fever took hold and I actually got pretty depressed. Nobody knew when it would be over, or what the lasting effects would be, especially as weeks turned to months with no end in sight and no indication of how bad it would truly get. I tried to keep myself busy to curb the catastrophic thoughts and “what-ifs” that were constantly popping up. I spent a lot of time online with friends and found small projects for myself around the apartment, but I didn’t feel like making art for a really long time.

I eventually did find the motivation to start managing my feelings through my art practice, and the floodgates just opened up; there was a period where everything I made was in service of processing the tragedy and surreality of the new cursed world. Honestly I think that means of self-expression is what ended up helping me adjust the most.

Matteo Bittanti: As evidenced by Welcome Back, you have appropriated and manipulated Transport Fever to create a thought-provoking, visually stunning work of art. Could you share with us your personal connection to this particular simulation game and how it became a creative outlet for you? How did you negotiate the interplay between the mechanics of the game and your artistic vision, and ultimately leverage the affordances of the medium to give shape to your expression? Can you share your intent, methodology, and thought processes behind the production of this captivating machinima?

Kent Sheely: I was really into management simulators when I was younger, with games like SimCity 2000, Shortline Railroad and Rollercoaster Tycoon being a few early favorites. On a nostalgic lark a few years ago I picked up Transport Fever and spent quite a few evenings setting up and maintaining infrastructure between cities via road, rail, air and sea. I didn’t make my first artwork with the game until I moved to…

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Matteo Bittanti

Work cited

Kent Sheely

Welcome back

digital video, sound, 4’ 35”, 2022, United States of America

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MMF MMXXIII UPDATE: A CHAT WITH NANUT THANAPORNRAPEE

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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.

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Gemma Fantacci

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VIDEO: JAKE COURI'S FIND YOUR RITUAL (2019)

How can technology ground itself if it's just floating in an ocean of bits?

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

In Find Your Ritual (2019), Couri skillfully employs elements of self-help and wellness exercises to explore the relationship between the digital and the physical. The artist is concerned with the gradual, perhaps inexorable, shift towards a digital existence: in his work, Couri is equally interested in the phenomenon of human beings acquiring machine-like features as machines become more human-like. Both projects are ultimately doomed, but the hybrid nature of this convergence is nonetheless interesting. In this work, the androgynous digital avatar performing all kinds of contortions serves as a metaphor for the blurring of boundaries between the human and the machine, suggesting - both ironically and earnestly - that even artificial realities need a moment of relaxation. They, too, must find their ritual.

The video's setting - a room afloat in an ocean of simulated water - is a nod to the notion of the digital as an immersive experience. The viewer is transported into a virtual environment that is both familiar and uncanny. Couri's use of this setting further underscores the idea that our digital lives are becoming increasingly entwined with our physical lives. Attempting to reach some kind of balance, the avatar - the alter ego of the viewer - ultimately fails to achieve a sense of permanent control, mirroring our own inability to cope in a world that, in the second decade of the Twenty-first century,  has turned into full dystopia…

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Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: STEVEN COTTINGHAM (NOVEMBER 18 - DECEMBER 1 2022, ONLINE)

Chain-link

single-channel HD video (1920 x 1080, MPEG-4 AAC, H.264) comprising machinima, 3D animation, and found footage with sound, 90’ 1”, 2022, Canada

Created by Steven Cottingham

WORLD PREMIERE

Bruce Sterling famously stated that the future is “old men, in cities, afraid of the sky”. In Steven Cottingham’s cyberpunk masterpiece filmed with/in an unrecognizable Grand Theft Auto V, Chain-link, the future is even more nightmarish: pervasive surveillance, carceral capitalism, and techno-feudalism.

Steven Cottingham is an artist based in Vancouver. His work concerns the politics of visualization. Recent exhibitions include Natalia Hug Galerie (Cologne, 2022), Artists Space (New York, 2022), The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, 2021), and Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, 2021). From 2018 to 2021, Cottingham co-edited the art theory periodical QOQQOON, and in 2021–2022 he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Chain–link (2022) is his first feature film.

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ARTICLE: GET LOST IN THE WOODS

Babak Ahteshamipoiur, Occupy Determined Neural Systems District and Take Action to get Rid of Them, Acrylics and oil pastels on canvas, 2021

GHOSTING IS REAL

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Developed in collaboration with Nathan Harper, The Lost Woods is both a medium and a message. A 3D virtual gallery space accessible online, it is an exhibition context and an archive featuring 30+ artifacts exploring the notion of virtual identity and artificial intelligence. The artists describe the experience in video game terms:

You appear in a dark forest shrouded in green fog. Ancient trees tower up into the murky skies. Before you lies a massive tree stump with jagged edges. Next to it on the left is a tunnel. The forest is inhabited by strange beings and floating brightly colored texts.

The works on display in The Lost Woods are both "new" and remediated, to borrow Bolter and Grusin's term. Ahteshamipoiur's paintings such as The Fires that Burn are Never the Ones that were Meant to Burn (2021) and Occupy Sad Neural Systems District and Cry to get Rid of Them (2021) have been digitized and incorporated within this fluid, navigable space, replete with video game tropes, characters and props. In some cases, metaphors are crystalline, if not literal - such is the case of ghosting, thanks to Super Mario 64's various ectoplasms - in other cases, they are more nuanced. Characters from previous works, such as the Grim Reaper from The Sims — and the video currently shown on VRAL — make an appearance as well. 

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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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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’ 54”, 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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VIDEO: GINA HARA IN CONVERSATION WITH MARIE LEBLANC FLANAGAN

CONTEXT IS KING

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We are happy to share with our Patreon subscribers — courtesy of Ada X — a video recording of the presentation of AI The End, which Gina Hara produced during her residency in late 2021. The conversation was moderated by Marie LeBlanc Flanagan and took place on Zoom on December 9th, 2021. In the video, Hara provides crucial information about her creative process, the underlying logic of AI and Minecraft, and the development of AI the end, Valley’s precursor. The entire conversation is approximately 45 minute long.

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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EVENT: GINA HARA (SEPTEMBER 2 - SEPTEMBER 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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